Death dropped by this day.
In the early morning hours my mother died. After a long life, (94+ years) death dropped in, a welcome visitor after years of diminished ability to speak, think or remember. In the days before, my siblings and I took turns at her side; speaking gently, playing music she loved, reading poems and scripture, and, depending on the child at her side, crying and pleading with death.
The passing of a mother is never easy. There lies the body that brought you forth. There the mouth that said both "I love you" and "Shame on you." There the arms that held you close and the hands that gently stroked or gave a deserved swat on the rear. (She came from a different generation.)
Memories flood and at times break the heart- the if onlys and what ifs can choke you.
But there are also the many memories that bring sunshine and those that help us to understand the past with more kindness and resolve to not only remember but do better or at least as well.
My mother has passed from this life to the next and lives on I believe in the many people she touched through her care and and concern, most especially the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren too, whose very selves came directly from her, as she came from those who came before in a never ending eternal life that has no beginning and no end, except of course in the matter of the stars from which we all descend.
It was a hard day in Oregon as students and teacher died at the hands of a gun toting mad man who took the lives of people he barely knew, if he knew them at all. I read this news a little at a time as it filtered in over my tiny pocket computer that is called a phone. My heart was already open wide with maternal grief at the loss of my mother and the need to hold my children close and then on the news there was this mother searching for her daughter only later to learn she had died before her mother was shown to everyone tragically seeking she who was no more. The unbearable grief of lives too soon ended, of death dropping by unscheduled to take those whose bodies could no longer contain promise and hope as it spilled out where bullets punctured and forced an exit. And still the sheriff of that small town kept his small town view that guns were good and shouldn't be kept out of the hands of just anyone who wanted a gun that could destroy so much even calling death unscheduled in a place where death would have happily passed by. There is something deeply wrong here.
At last in the afternoon I was able to lay down my head. My mother was gone. There was trauma in the news. My heart was racing as hearts do when grief is rolling like waves through the soul unrestrained because of the emptiness where previously there was a border that held it in. I am old enough to know that time will shape the loss of my mother into the understandable, the acknowledged order of things that we expect. 94 years was a very good span of time for a life but still my body reminded me that grief is never easy.
At night fall I went out to lock the chicken coop. April, our Plymouth Hen lay quiet just inside the coop. I stooped down to touch her and realized by her rigidity and the faint warmth that death had just recently made another stop that night. I picked her up and placed her body where it could be safely kept until morning when we could bury her. I had no more energy to offer sorrow, but with the discipline of time knew that her body would attract other creatures where none were wanted.
Death again: integrally part of life, yet rarely welcomed when dropping by.
No comments:
Post a Comment