Grief….it is a funny beast. When someone very near and dear to you passes on to the next great unknown phase of being, it doesn't just happen all in one fell swoop. It's not like that person dies, you are sad for a few weeks, you get over it and go on with your life. Maybe it is that way for some people. However, for most, I think, including myself, grief raises it's head in waves. It peeks out here and there, sometimes when you might least expect it. For me, my mother dying is like this huge intangible web. I can't quite touch it. I can sense it, I know it is around me…but it is fibrous, and silky. It flows in the wind, hangs onto things….like cobwebs that stick to your hair. Sometimes you just walk smack dab into the midst of it….. caught, sticky, messy. Other times, the wind blows it away. But I can never quite put my finger on it, can't quite say, "this is what this is."
In some ways, grief is like love. You cannot put it into a nice, definitive envelope and store it away. You cannot put it together like a puzzle. Sometimes it makes absolutely no sense at all, the dying process, the fact that some people in our lives are meant to be super and powerful and then so hugely absent. Some people, we think will ALWAYS be there…we can't imagine life without them. We take them for granted. My mother birthed me, she watched me grow, she gave me gifts of becoming a decent member of society. I never imagined she wouldn't be around to know MY children. I never imagined I would be longing to talk to her at such a young age! I never thought that both my mother and father would be gone before I hit forty.
You just never think these things…and if you do, you shudder at the thoughts, you try not to think about them.
I can't make sense of my mother's death, or even my father's, for that matter. Sure, in a human, evolutionary sense, I can. We are born, we die. But in the larger scope of it all, it makes no sense. Why do some people die and some people live? Why do some people break down and never recover over another's death, and some remain seemingly unaffected? Why do some close off in anger and others remain like an open, gaping wound?
The strange thing that I am feeling is that witnessing my mother's death and holding her while she passed…it made me less afraid to die. I have never been afraid of the dying process, until I had a child of my own. The thought of someday leaving her behind if she were still a child seemed unbearable to me. But now, the thought seems more bearable. For I see how we all must die. It isn't just a thought anymore, I SEE it. I FEEL it. It is just some deeper understanding within now.
Going through my mother's death made me less afraid of the state of the world. The horrible amounts of radiation that are affecting our air, our waters, our food…..these things that no one even talks about anymore, yet I think about every day. It made me less afraid of nuclear war and cancer and violence. It made me less afraid of natural disasters, becoming ill, losing my sanity. Because somehow, her death put me more in touch with the great unknown, the fact that at the very end, she wasn't afraid, she wanted to go. She knew that where she was going was okay, it was okay to leave, something was there awaiting her with love and open arms. She reached out her hands and said, " I want to go." I heard that, I witnessed that. Before that moment, in the days before, when she couldn't breathe, I witnessed pure terror in her eyes. At the end, all that terror was gone. All that remained was acceptance and willingness…surrender. My soul was touched by the knowing that all these terrors we face as individuals and communities are nothing. They seem huge right now, and they DO matter and we should fight with all our might to bring love, peace and balance to this world, but in the end, all of this just doesn't matter. Our egos will melt away and we will succumb to the larger process and we will go……we will trust. We will be welcomed with open arms….and everything we have been fighting in our lives will just melt away, our earthly heaviness will be lifted. We will soar.