Perhaps their morality play helped ease the tensions. Perhaps their post brought laughter and healing. Either way, Eric had not been engrossed in any of this drama. Eric’s light, which had shone so brilliantly in the camp, grew dimmer by the hour. The strain of missing his family began to show in Eric’s demeanor as he grew weaker. Eric’s deepening depression did not escape Annie’s acute eyes or ears. One afternoon he said to her, “My biggest worry, Annie, is that I didn’t give Flo enough of my time.”
Annie assured him that Florence, the daughter of a missionary, understood their time apart better than most women might. “And remember, the reason you were separated was your work for God.”
Initially, doctors diagnosed Eric’s condition as a “nervous breakdown,” brought about by his intense workload coupled with his deepening need to see his family again. This news distressed Eric greatly.
“There is one thing that bothers me,” he told a China Inland Mission missionary couple who lived on the top floor of the hospital. “I should have been able to cast all this on the Lord and not buckled down under it.”[107]
Those closest to Eric knew something was more seriously wrong with him than a weakened body brought about by camp-life stressors. Eric had grown quieter—revealing less of his typical wit and regular repartee—and his speech became slower.
Both youth and adults visited Eric whenever he felt up to the visits. One day, in the earliest days of February, eighteen-year-old Stephen Metcalf, who had shown signs of being a good runner, stopped by.
“Steve,” Eric said, looking toward the young man’s feet, “I see your shoes are worn out. It’s winter now and . . .” Eric pressed his running shoes, held together by string and strips of linen, into Stephen’s hands.
He gave Stephen a nod and, with a pat on the hand, released his shoes to the much younger runner.
“It wasn’t until much later,” Stephen said in remembering Eric, “that I realized that those shoes had meant something to him and that he had gone to a lot of work to patch them up for me.”[108]
Better than the gift of a pair of ratty running shoes, however, were the lessons Eric had taught Stephen and the young people who lived alongside him in Weihsien. “Love your enemies,” he’d told them. “Pray for the Japanese guards . . . pray for them who persecute you.”
Stephen Metcalf would later become a lifelong missionary to Japan and would never forget the gift of Eric Liddell’s running shoes or his lessons of “the baton of forgiveness.”[109]
On Sunday, February 11, 1945, Eric suffered a mild stroke. He fought to rally back to health, even to the point of walking with aid up and down the hospital corridors. Annie Buchan fought for her patient to get undisturbed rest, but his loved ones always managed to sneak in to see him . . . or he snuck out. He even managed to climb four flights of stairs to the little room where the CIM missionary couple lived to enjoy afternoon tea with them.
Annie and the doctors began to speculate that their initial diagnosis of a nervous breakdown had been incorrect and that Eric was suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. They knew there was little they could do about it, even without the privations of the internment camp.
Still, Eric held out optimism, especially for the youth who came to see him.
One of the young girls, Joyce Stranks, often popped in to visit, to wish him well, and to continue to learn what “Uncle Eric” had to teach. Those sessions—with Joyce and the other young people—took a great amount of energy, but Eric couldn’t resist. Nurse Annie, however, always knew when to shoo the youth away.
On Sunday, February 18, the Salvation Army Band, which included Norman Cliff and Peter Bazire, who played trumpet, gathered on the hospital grounds as they did each Sunday and Wednesday afternoon to play for the sick inside the infirmary. After playing a few favorite hymns, a note came to the band leader from Nurse Annie.
“Eric Liddell is dying,” it read. “He would like it if you played ‘Finlandia’ / ‘Be Still, My Soul.’” The ragtag band somberly collected themselves, and the melancholy melody soon floated through the windows of the hospital.
In the morning hours of Wednesday, February 21, Eric climbed the stairs again to visit with the missionaries who lived there.
After returning a plate they had used to send some treat to Eric the day before, he smiled and then told the couple he felt much better. Later in the day, he managed to write a short note to Florence with the desire to get it to the post that day.
Somehow, he managed.
While walking back to the hospital, Eric ran into the wife of a missionary he had worked with in Tientsin.
“Have you heard from Flo?” she asked him, thrilled to see that he appeared his old self.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I got one of her letters recently.” And then, though his words were slower than usual, he told the missionary’s wife the news Florence had sent his way.
The woman, concerned that Eric had been out too long, encouraged him to return to the hospital so he could rest.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I must just get my walking legs again.”
It was now three thirty in the afternoon; the missionary’s wife walked with him to the hospital door so he would arrive in time for tea.
Later, Joyce Stranks came in to visit with “Uncle Eric.” One of Eric’s favorite topics for the youth was surrender to Christ, which he shared again with Joyce. The teenager listened intently as he spoke until, lost in thought of this complete and absolute surrender to Christ, Eric began to have a seizure. Joyce ran out of the room, calling for Nurse Annie, who reprimanded the teen for tiring her patient, and then drew the curtains around his bed.
As Annie tended to Eric, he managed to breathe out his last words. “Annie,” he said,
