Christmas 2002: Time past festivity, a gathering with family and friends. Mom’s favorite thing.
Mom died about 3:35 p.m. I was with her, and it really was the first time I’d ever witnessed death up close and personal – face-to-face.
I was seated in a chair next to Mom’s bed, holding her hand, when she began to groan – involuntarily, I think – with every breath. It dawned on me, finally, that she was in her last throes. I began to reassure her: I’m with you, Mom. I’m holding your hand. We’ll take good care of you. I love you. Don’t be afraid. I kissed her forehead again and again and kept on saying, just loud enough (I hope) for her to hear, I’m with you, Mom. I’m holding your hand. We’ll take good care of you. I love you. Don’t be afraid.
While it didn’t last more than 20 minutes or so, it seemed as though something like Eternity intruded upon our time and space. Nothing mystical, but the repeated reassurances began to flow together, at least in my mind and heart – and, I hope, in hers. All I wanted was for Mom to feel as though she was in good hands, trustworthy hands, loving hands – God’s hands, somehow, if God there be. My hands for sure, ably assisted by loving caregivers.
Our eyes locked upon each other those last 20 minutes of her life. I couldn’t turn away. The mantra continued until, finally, she seemed to rest. Her eyes drifted away from mine. Her chest ceased to rise and fall. There was a shudder from within. Then another minutes later. Then, utter stillness of the kind that only death bestows. I pulled a cover away and felt her chest. I felt for a pulse on her wrist and found none. I closed her eyelids, and they lay still. My mother had died, not in my arms but with my gaze.
God, if God there be, let it be so that she died seeing the face of this loved one; that she died unafraid knowing she was loved and that we would care for her and about her for the rest of our lives – and that, above all, there was no reason to fear what comes next, if anything.
The poets are right – there is a kind of banality that attends death. Mom lies where she fell, covered with sheets and a blanket. We sit in the room with her, somewhat stunned but not surprised at this outcome. How could we be? Mom’s been dying for years, it seems. A slow march toward the inevitable. The hospice nurse does her duty, then wonders whether we can get Mom’s mouth to close.
“She’s such a mouth-breather,” says a caregiver.
I said, “It’s closed more, now, than it’s been for months.”
The nurse gives up trying to close Mom’s mouth. She brushes Mom’s hair, as though she’s about to go on a journey.
Well, isn’t she? At least as far as the funeral home where cremation awaits.
The nothingness of ashes.
I’ve been walking slowly through Advent with T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets. It’s been a thoughtful stroll through the rose garden, imagining time before and time after. It’s perfect for the season, but also for this time of Mom’s life, which came to an end just as I was meditating upon East Coker III: “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God.”
There’s a certain kind of joy associated with death, though I’m not sure I’m able to articulate it. Again, Eliot’s words:
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
(T.S. Eliot, East Coker V)
It has something to do with the solemnity and stillness of death itself, the intimate familiarity all must one day have of “time future,” even though – for now, at least – time future is an abstraction; in fact, we’re told by science that it’s no more than a persistent illusion. I guess that makes it unreal, unless one is holding hands with a dying loved one who knows that, within minutes, time future becomes some other kind of time, some other mode of being – ashes in the wind, perhaps, or eternity within the loving embrace of benevolent God.
It is with solemn joy, then, that we remember time past, the time of our lives with Martha George – Mom, Ditty, Ditts, Grandma, Grandma Great – whose names always will be writ large upon our hearts in time present which we hope dilates in every direction, not just one way, into Time Eternal.
Call it Real Time.
Call it Forever.
The pelican papers 