I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my life, my aspirations, my memories, what I have learned, what I have shared, what will remain when I am gone, what I will take with me, the thoughts, the feelings, the connections I’ve made along the way that never developed and how the choices I have made have brought me to where I am.
I know when I’m gone there will be nothing left of me. The memories of me will belong to someone else – part of their lives, part of who they are. But I will be gone.
And I wonder when I am absorbed back into the infinite from which I came, if all my experience, my feelings, my understanding, my joy, my gratitude, my love will somehow be dissolved into the primordial essence. I suspect it will. I suspect it’s always been part of it already. I’m just so attached to my life that it is hard to let go. I can’t help wondering if I might get the chance come back and explore some of the other paths and relationships I could have chosen. But of course I would no longer be me if I did that and I’m glad to be me.
I’m very grateful to have found my way to Prem, or, more likely, that he came and found me, and introduced me to the connection between me and the infinite within me.
I remember the night my mother passed away. She and my father met and fell in love when they were 20 and had to wait until she was 21 to get married because her father would not give his permission for her to marry before then. In those days the father’s permission was required for a young girl to get married. My father had died early Christmas morning, a little less than 2 months after he turned 60. A few days before he died the doctor had told him my mother had cancer that had gone to her brain. He died at home when he tried to stop drinking cold turkey. A few days after he died, my mother went into the hospital and the rest of the family learned about her condition. She had been living with lung cancer for quite a while before that, drinking her coffee so black that my aunt one day stood a spoon in her cup to see if it would stand up. In the the story I heard, it did. The first week in that December she was playing racket ball with a girl in her 20s. The girl cried when my mother beat her. My mother was 60 at the time. She had smoked since she was 16 and always said she could stop any time she wanted. When she found out about the cancer, she asked her doctor if should quit now. He told her it wouldn’t hurt, but it was too late to alleviate the cancer. She quit that day.
So, after my father died, our lives all changed. My mother had brain surgery to determine the extent of the tumors. She had the pack of dogs that had lived in our house with us and my parents as four-legged members of the family (except for the little hound that had only three legs and slept with my dad) put down. She sold the house we had all grown up in and bought a condo along with the oldest of my younger sisters and moved into it when she got out of the hospital. There she continued to live an uncompromising life. She had had all her teeth pulled out the summer before and replace them with a set of “uppers” and “lowers” that sat on her bedside table most of time. Her hair that been all shaved off came back in as a grey stubble. But her eyes remained bright and alert and her attitude unfailingly positive. She had her bed set up in the living room and happily received her friends and family whenever they showed up. She wanted to be surrounded by her children and grandchildren as much as they could be there, and we all stayed overnight in the bedrooms upstairs and game room downstairs whenever we could. It continued through her 61st birthday in June. Every night my sister would fix her a chocolate Sunday with vanilla ice cream and lots of Hershey’s syrup. My brother had arranged a new phone number for her, ending 1234, thinking it would be easy for her remember, but overlooking the obvious that she would never be outside her condo again to call back in. This oversight resulted in a nightly obscene phone call at midnight each day, which my sister had to answer. My mother, never phased, one night said, “Here give me that phone” and took it from my sister. She got on the phone and with her best toothless lisp told the caller, “Look Honey, I’m 61 years old and have no teeth and no hair, but I’m ready to go!” At which time he hung up and never called again.
Toward the end of August, three days before she died, she wakened my sister in the middle of the night completely happy and excited because she had seen “The Beauty”. For the next three days she was glowing and told everyone about it. People came to say goodbye those last days. And all her kids and grandkids came and stayed with her. After dinner on her final night, she sat on her bed full of excitement and tried to tell us all something. I remember we gathered around her – on the bed, on the floor, and in a couple of chairs pulled up close. She had aphasia and with her toothless lisp she kept repeating something over and over again. Finally, my brother got it: “Nice Life! Nice Life! Nice Life!” she kept saying. “YES!” she finally said, “Nice Life” and smiled her pink gummy smile and lay back down. She went sleep a while later and the rest of us went to bed. Our sister wakened us in the early morning hours and said she had passed away.
My mother was totally focused on the present and opened each moment as a gift to be embraced and celebrated with gratitude. I want to be like her.
