An old neighbor's comforting...or comfort

I went to church yesterday. Actually, I didn't "go to church"; I entered a church in order to attend a memorial service for a neighbor of years ago and pay my respects to his children.
    Rudy and his wife, who had already died, six months earlier, had lived next door to us, from about a year after we arrived in Chapel Hill until they moved to a townhouse in Durham a dozen or fifteen years later. During the blizzard of January 1996, Rudy and I had in common that we both slipped on the ice and had head injuries, his a subdural hematoma, mine a ruptured pineal tumor. My accident led to brain surgery, which probably saved me from dying from a fall later, after the tumor had grown to lethal dimensions.
    I arrived about ten minutes after the service began because of a late bus. Inside the vestibule, I could hear the amplified voice of the eulogist coming through a public address speaker. I didn't think he was exaggerating anything about Rudy, whose enthusiasm and cheerfulness in life had been abundant.
    After I had stowed my umbrella and taken off my backpack, coat, cap, and gloves, I went into the nave and sat down near the back. There were about a hundred people before me. The eulogist, I took it, was the reverend pastor of the church. He had a fine voice, and I liked the fact that he quoted from a couple of poets and a popular local writer of humorous novels, even though the particular quotations weren't striking or memorable. A well-read man, though.
    I gathered that members of Rudy's family had already made comments, probably not more than one or two short ones, for I hadn't arrived that late. But I was sorry to have missed them.
    Then the pastor recounted something one of Rudy's daughters had told him. He said that she had been with her father near the end and had reported their final conversation:

She told me that at one point Rudy said he saw something. And she asked him what it was he saw. "I see Jesus," he said. And she asked him if he saw Mother too. He said he did. And she asked him whether he saw a light. And he said he did. She told him then, "'Dad, it's okay if you want to go now.' He closed his eyes then," she said, "and Rudy went."

Then the pastor invited us to pray, then to sing a hymn, but the organist played so loudly it wasn't clear whether anyone else was singing either.
    And after the family was allowed to leave, we all followed to join them in the community room. All of Rudy's four children seemed to recognize me and be glad that I'd come, and I too was glad that I'd come. They are fine-looking young people, somewhat older than my own two children. (Rudy was fourteen or fifteen years older than I.)

Later, I thought about Rudy, about his children, about my children. I wondered whether he really thought he'd seen Jesus and his wife. Both the eulogist and the obituary in the local paper had emphasized that one of Rudy's major principles in life had been that the family comes first. It was easy to imagine that he could have invented that about Jesus to comfort his daughter.
    Maybe he had even figured she would tell the pastor, and the pastor might pass it on for anyone else in the church who might be able to be comforted by it. (Rudy had, after all, "faithfully served [these people] as a deacon and elder" for many years.)
    It might be thought more likely that Rudy's daughter made up the conversation for the sake of her children, but Rudy's grandchildren whom I saw yesterday seemed too old for Santa Claus.
    So maybe the conversation actually took place and Rudy really did think he saw Jesus. Maybe it was he most of all, in the hour of his death, who needed comforting.
    One hopes one won't need that.