MONEY
Don’t talk to me about monetary assets now. Tell me all her other assets.
RELIEF
The healthy, hefty neighbor’s cat comes in to purr like an engine and offer his silky coat to my mom’s ever-slowing hand.
At the local café, a worker asks the usual “How are you?” and I find myself summing up the truth: My mother is dying. Etiquette broken, not giving the usual “Fine,” but he takes it with kind empathy and insists I dine for free.
Friends who have offered to be “on call” anytime for moral support are wise and warmer than I already knew them to be. One of them, now in her own struggle with serious illness, courageously reads me a frank yet luminous passage about the moment of death, so that I may imbue that crossing for my mom with the grace that she and I both hope for not just my mother, but this remarkable friend as well.
The “inconvenience” of taking a few weeks off to be fully in the transition from life to death is supported by coworkers, who take on the extra load that I should be doing.
DEEP PEACE
At her deepest resting times, Mom at 80 looks 20 years younger. I whisper compliments of her beauty to her and know she’d like to hear it in spite of her lifelong deflection of praise.
The overlay of personal carriage—the modesty and concern of appearances—dissolves as she deepens into unconscious rest, becoming simply the human animal at its common denominator: eager airways, diligent heart, limbs at angles neither feminine nor masculine. Beneath her demure self is the pure animal power I knew was in her all along.
It will be a long time before my father and I reach a deep peace in my mother’s passing, but we are soothed after her death, to my surprise, by continuing to play the same tender music, and lighting the same host of candles, that carried our little trio through this vigil for days, around the clock.
SACRED
The room in which a person is passing becomes a sacred space. Or, it should. Sometimes you have to fight to maintain that. You have to assert yourself over others who haven’t realized it yet. Certain conversations, ways of being, noises, people—they don’t fit anymore, in this sacred space.
You are a mother and a child at the same time, as you care for your mother in her last days, tending the helpless, wide-open soul that birthed you—ushering her back across the threshold she opened for you.
It is nauseating, literally, to have on your left the loved one dying, and on your right the surviving one talking afterdeath banking and taxes.
Candle flames, even in the 2010 technorich world, are still a magical sustenance for the soul.
When my mother finally stopped breathing, we lay next to her for an hour, in the same position as when we supported her last days of life. No tears for now, just silence, holding her hands, kissing her sometimes. Later, when hospice women come to bathe her and I join them, we are three women of today suddenly immersed in the sacred, ancient ritual of honoring one woman in the eternal lineage of women. The sloshing of washcloths in the water basin and the gentle tending to limb and face and hair is a farewell of another kind. I kiss her face and wish her eyes would stay closed, and tears pour out of me. But with this ritual, she is finally the goddess I’ve seen her as, in my new-agey ways, which she never would have allowed herself to be.
