Dear Beloved:
There is a metaphorical mess in my metaphorical room and all I can think about is "I don't know where to metaphorically start," so I don't start. I sit in the mess and I am metaphorically ashamed of the mess, and all I can think about is how I don't know where to start and I am so so metaphorically ashamed.
Here is my mess:
Round and round and round my body contemplates its own inevitable demise as it struggles and resists to rationalize or understand the demise of others.
My mother is dead. While I dream of her spirit, my mother will be dead in the human and social sense for the rest of my life. Grief blooms from the soil of her Goneness. The flower of grief is the truth of my mother's Everywhereness. The stem is anchored in the silent soil of the smoke from blowing a candle out.
Grief has been a colorful experience. It has been an experience of inkstains all over all of my other experiences. As if one of the pens in my brain snapped open and poured all over my ideas and instruments and pages in my brain. The part of me which solves problems says maybe I could paint all the ink stains with white-out, wouldn't I be better off then?
-
My mother was diagnosed with cancer in September of 2020.
We both celebrated our birthdays then. She got me a garden rain gauge. I didn't get her anything. Driving up for quality time over coffee felt like gift enough.
She underwent a 2nd round of Chemo in late October of 2020. I drove back up early to surprise her, and she was surprised! I was there talking to her during her entire chemotherapy infusion. I took the day off work. I stayed for a week at my parents house after, working remotely and helping out around the house and drinking coffee with my mom every morning for an hour before I went back to work.
A week later, I left to return to my life, I remember we said goodbye one more time. I remember we looked right into each other's eyes. I remember the quickness and the wideness of her eyes. I remember the flicker of that moment so brightly passing by. I am glad to have witnessed the flickering of her eye and her soft anxious expression of love in her words. I am sad I watched the moment slip through my fingers as carelessly as it did. I am sad I did not savor the moment how I could have. I am sad I wanted to pray with her in that moment and I did not. I am sad I left her without feeling entirely complete in my heart's expression. I know I am forgiven and I am okay and I am sad my fear of talking about death stopped me from talking to her about death.
She
had one bad night's sleep vomiting, went into urgent care, was sent
to emergency surgery, and then she died on October 26, 2020. I drove up to be with her in her final hours.
I am grateful I was with her as long as I was. I am grateful I talked to her as much as I did, as honestly as I could muster, even when I felt inelegant.
I am sad I did not go to see her sooner, that I did not push harder for her life. I am sad I spent so much time working and didn't spend more time talking with her about mortality.
I am sad she died so suddenly.
I am so thankful she died so quickly.
Her suffering did not go very far beyond typical cancer suffering.
I can imagine her last day was full of incredible pain.
And then the still sound of a closed book.
Just quiet.
-
-
-The tragedy of my mother's death is in the loss of potential, the death of possibilities which I felt entitled to. The possibility of her one day meeting her grandchildren, the possibility of her helping me find a house (she so loved to shop for houses). The possibility of watching her graduate into a season of reflective wisdom and presence and peacefulness. The possibility of talking with her about my life today and tomorrow and the next day over two warm mugs of black coffee over the phone or early in the morning of a quiet day.
It's important to know the last time my mother cried in front of me, she was grieving her the end of her teaching career as she knew it. She'd been diagnosed with cancer the September when school started back up again in the throes of coronavirus. She'd started developing a YouTube curriculum for art programming as a substitute teacher, but she feared that while she handled chemotherapy trips, others were learning how to run a Zoom classroom in a way she never could.
She sent me an email right before her cancer diagnosis that told me that while she knew teaching had afforded her wonderful gifts, and part of her career choice had been fear-based. She was paying attention to where her feelings were coming from and asking each of them whether they were coming from a place of fear or love.
Her last week she kept bringing up the words "blame and responsibility". Her contemplative life during that last week was spent at least partly working with how to move her life from blame (which today I interpret to mean "focusing on what I can't change") into responsibility (which, today, I interpret to mean "focusing on what I can change"). I consider the blame and responsibility I carry with me today. Blaming my difficult feelings on her sudden death, taking responsibility for allowing those difficult feelings to move through me. Allowing those feelings to be seen.
-
Grief is a colorful experience. Sharp. Vibrant. I love to share the gifts of grief. Even the sadness which is cleanly sad. I am loathe to share some of the muddier colors, the feelings which are True and very difficult to express. Feelings which cannot be written because they cannot be understood until they are felt. Feelings which I don't want you to feel, but I want you to understand. The feelings which cannot be affixed to a rational agenda or process. The feelings of sadness that everything very good goes away, and that the departure is what makes them very good. How can I share what you cannot understand? Maybe I'm asking for space to do some external or verbal processing.
There's
something about me that wants some kind of guarantee of safety or
external sense of invitation in order to give myself permission to
express some of what I call "my deeper thoughts". I feel the urge to
say that desire for a safety guarantee is not a unique desire, still,
it's REAL for me. Something about spaciousness or rhythm
in a conversation. Something about the pace of it tells me whether it's
okay to offer up an "unpasteurized" share.
Such a delicate place that is to feel safe enough to bring my process into relationship. I understand I am the only one having this very specific experience of grief. I am the only one who knew my mother the way I knew her, and everyone else knew her uniquely as well. We all lost the part of ourselves which would come out when she shone her light. It is very uniquely my calling to walk this lonely path of missing my mother for the rest of my life. To consider the eternal nature of her goneness is to consider the eternal nature of the universes's HEREness. A divine calling, to be sure. But is it divine to you if you cannot see what I see?
So I hide the "sloppy messy grief" and feel the "sloppy messy lonely grief".
I tell people about the bright colors of grief.
Part of me continues to shout "You don't get it! You don't understand! You all
around me going about your day can't see the permanence of her
goneness!" The messy feelings dwell in me and ask again and again to be shared. So I try sometimes. I write things like this article. In quicker social interactions, I say things like:
"I'm in a fog?"
"I'm letting myself be not okay."
"I've been in a funk"
"The grief-dam is cracked and the repressed stuff is going to flood."
"I've entered another level of grief."
The responses I get when I try to express all of this into a few words:
"I'm sorry you had a drag of a weekend"
"That's good it was sunny out at least"
"I'm sorry you're going through this"
"There are no words"
The words themselves do not always comfort. I look instead for indicators of presence. A willingness to be messy with me, rather than helping me clean up. Grief is colorful, and it is not clean. And in order to understand some of the more delicate gifts of grief, I must listen carefully to, and so make time and space for the mess as well.
So Yes,
thank you, at least I have grown I understand the poignancy, the wonderful lessons and affirmations
which arise in the face of considering how delicate and uncertain life
is, and how close death is each day. Still, I really would actually enjoy having another cup of coffee and a chat with my mom today.
I
feel like the contents of this post are a bunch of things that have
been stuck for me these past weeks. I'm pausing here to notice what about them has been
stuck and what about our connection here as blogger and reader gives them space.
Some space for uncertain, unpronounced, unclear, fuzzy-wuzzy wisps and waves of emotive experience being a living human bearing witness to the eternal void of bodydeath of Other, and bodydeath of Self.
at the foot of this small altar of time we have built together, I invite offerings of reflections and resonance and response. I leave my own offering, a poem my mother's eldest sister wrote, modified for my own expression, as I bid you a good night:
Yes:
I lost my mother;
not playing peek-a-boo,
not a game of hide-and-seek,
not just out-of-sight –
not around a corner,
not like
coin,
keys,
phone,
wallet,
glasses,
or any timespacestuffnonono
No:
I lost her to the ether,
to the air,
to the space between the unknowable moment of be-ing
between me and you;
She is close as thought,
Brush of wings and light.
She is lost.
She is gone.
She is everywhere,
And everywhere's been here
all along.
--
