LOSING MOM - Part 12
Death is a funny thing. It’s something that all of us will experience, yet it seems no one ever wants to talk about. I wonder why? Maybe if we talked about it more, it might become less scary. Less of a giant elephant in the room.
So as Sal, Lib and I waited in the hallway for the nurse to get Mom settled in her room, I found myself wondering what it was going to be like to spend time in a place where pretty much everyone was dying. All the time.
Looking up and down the long corridor, I guessed that there were probably 20 rooms or so, and in every single one someone was facing the end of their life.
You would think that in such a place, where death was lurking around every corner, it would be dark and gloomy, maybe smell like antiseptic, or worse. You might imagine corridors lined with grim-faced relatives, with even more grim-faced nurses coming and going from the dying patients’ rooms.
But what I remember most as I sat waiting with my sisters in that Hospice hallway was not darkness, but light. Not light that I could see...evening had fallen so the windows were dark, and the overhead fluorescent lighting seemed soft and subdued, at least in my memory.
It was more a lightness around me, not exactly cheerful, but certainly not cheerless, either. Something clear and spacious that lifted my spirit, despite the heaviness in my heart.
Maybe it was simply a reflection of the gentle smiles from the people who passed by, or Juno, the therapy dog, wandering quietly up and down the hall, pausing patiently whenever someone stooped down to pat him.
Wherever this light came from, though, it permeated the air with a pervasive sense of calm, rather than fear.
Which for me was a really good thing, because there was a time when I was absolutely terrified of death. I mean really and truly, panic-attack-inducing terrified.
The first time it happened I was probably 10 years old. I was reading in bed while I waited for Mom to come in and say goodnight.
“Did you say your prayers?” she asked, tucking me in and switching off the lamp on my bedside table.
“Not yet,” I replied, and clasped my hands together.
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
For some reason, as Mom kissed me on the head and left me alone in the dark that night, the meaning of the words I’d been saying my whole life registered in my consciousness. It had never occurred to me that I could ‘die before I wake’, and I started to think about what it would be like if I never woke up.
To not be me anymore.
How could it even be possible, I wondered, for me not to exist?
I felt so real, so solid. Where would I go?
It’s not that I didn’t believe in God, or heaven. I’d been to enough Sunday School classes to have a pretty good idea of what heaven looked like. But somehow, on that particular night, I just couldn’t picture myself there.
I felt too big and too small, all at the same time.
So as I lay alone in my childhood bed, I tried to imagine being nothing, forever. I closed my eyes and stared into the darkness, curious what it would be like if that was all there ever was. Down and down into the dark emptiness I let my mind wander, until I started to imagine the darkness stretching all the way to infinity, spiraling on and on and on and…
My eyes popped open, my heart racing so hard at the idea of this endless, dark nothing that it propelled my 10-year-old self right out of bed, through the door, and down the hall to my parents' room.
I didn't go in, though. Maybe I was somehow embarrassed, I was after all 10 years old. Or maybe I just didn’t want to give voice to the deep, dark nothing and make it more real. I stood outside the door listening to the muffled sounds of my parents getting ready for bed. A toilet flushed, a drawer closed, Mom’s voice murmured something I couldn’t make out.
Their reassuring presence, even on the other side of the door, was enough to calm me down so that I could finally turn away and tiptoe quietly back to my room.
Crawling into bed, I pulled the covers up tight around me and started to tell myself a story, something Mom had taught me to do a couple of years earlier when I couldn’t fall asleep one night. It had actually never really worked before, but magically that night I was able to lull myself away from thoughts about the deep, dark nothing, and fall into the safety net of sleep.
Luckily, these panic attacks didn’t happen often over the ensuing years, but every once in a while something would trigger a thought in my head that would lead me back into the scary void.
One time, when I was around 23 and living on my own in New York City, I had just settled in to watch Cheers, one of my favorite TV shows back then. Normally I loved the beginning where they showed a series of sepia-toned photographs of people in the olden days hanging out in a bar. On this night, however, it occurred to me that all the people in those pictures, who had once been alive, having fun in a bar, were now dead.
Which made me remember that one day I would be dead, just like them. My heart started to race as I wondered who those people were, those nameless faces caught in a moment in time. They’d been in the world, and now they weren’t. Where did they go?
The suffocating panic began to bubble up through my chest and, trying to get away from it, I jumped up and quickly turned off the TV. Pacing around the small apartment, I searched for something to distract myself away from the deep, dark nothing where my thoughts were taking me.
I guess just the physical act of moving helped, because a few minutes later the panic receded and I was able to go back and watch the rest of the show without a problem. But I never did watch the opening sequence of Cheers again, at least by myself.
Ironically, this debilitating fear of death died in me the same day as my father. Always a white-knuckled flier (probably because I was so scared of dying, and planes were known to crash), I was on my way to Ohio to be with Mom when, 30,000 feet in the air, I realized I wasn’t scared anymore.
Not of crashing, not of dying, and not of the deep, dark nothing.
It was like a switch went off in my head, and I suddenly understood that it just wasn’t possible that we become nothing when we die...our souls have to go somewhere.
Because even though Dad was dead, I could still sense him all around me. I could hear his voice in my head reminding me, as he often had, that planes rarely crash, so I shouldn't worry too much. I even thought I saw a flash of his clear, blue eyes looking out from my own, as I stood in front of the plane's small bathroom mirror.
And though I may have imagined some of it, I know for sure that his reassuring presence was in me and around me on the plane that day, and in the difficult days that followed.
He was there, but not there - and it brought me great comfort.
So even if my worst case scenario came true, and the plane suddenly fell from the sky in a fiery ball of screaming metal, I knew without a glimmer of doubt that Dad would be there waiting for me, wherever ‘there’ was.
Interestingly, a year or so before Mom’s fall, when we were just finishing dinner one night, she looked at me across the table and asked what I thought death would be like.
‘I’m not sure, Mom,’ I replied carefully, caught a bit-off guard by the bluntness of her question. ‘I think there must be something more, though, don’t you? I mean, this just can’t be all there is...what would be the point?”
“I don’t know,’ Mom paused, looking down at her empty plate. “I think maybe it might be just a big, dark nothing.”
Now you have to understand that at this point in my life I hadn't thought about my own deep, dark nothing for a long time. And I had certainly never told my mom about it. So I was pretty surprised to hear her describe death in the same way my 10-year-old self had thought of it.
Surprised, but also really sad...I wanted her to see death the way I'd come to see it, but I wasn't sure I knew how to explain it in a way she would understand.
I'd actually never talked about it with anyone before.
In the years after dad had died, I'd read countless books and watched umpteen webinars on near-death experiences, spirituality, and even science, trying to understand why his death, rather than making me more scared of dying, had somehow made me less scared.
Where was this ‘there’ that I was so sure he'd be waiting? And what part of him would be there?
Surprisingly, the answer that finally brought me the most clarity came, not from the spiritual world as I'd expected, but from the scientific world. Quantum physics to be exact.
I know, I know. Anyone who's ever known me is probably scratching their head right now, because honestly, math and science are not my strong suits.
But it seems that, according to quantum physics, everything in the universe is energy, but vibrating at different frequencies. The lower the frequency, the more solid something appears, while something vibrating very fast is much harder to see.
So if everything is energy, then we must be energy, too.
And since physics has proven, through the Law of Conservation, that energy can never be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed, then there must be a part of us that can never be destroyed, too. Right?
For me, this was the missing piece to the puzzle I'd been searching for.
Because even though I'd always had faith that my soul was 'eternal', I never understood how. But as soon as I started to think of my soul as a spark of energy, and God as the source of that energy, it began to make sense to me.
I could suddenly see how it was this spark, the energy of my soul, that would transcend death. Because this spark, vibrating at its own unique frequency making me, me, was what would transform from the physical to the non-physical when I died.
So death wasn't an ending at all. It was simply a transition to a higher frequency.
Which explained why I could still feel my dad around me, even after he died. His unique spark of energy, the energy of his soul, had continued to vibrate, but at a much higher frequency once shed of his physical body. So even though I couldn’t see him anymore, I could still feel him.
It was like he'd stepped behind a curtain that I couldn't see through, though I could sense his presence on the other side.
So I think that's the 'there' where my dad is waiting for me. On the other side of the curtain, just out of sight.
Unfortunately, when I tried to explain all this to my 88-year-old mother, wanting it to bring her the same comfort as it did me, I stumbled over my words so much that I'm pretty sure she didn't understand a thing I was saying.
“Well, we’ll see,” she said, as she stood up to clear her plate from the table, “I suppose we won’t know until we know.”
~~~~~~~~~~~
It felt like we'd been waiting in the hall forever when the nurse finally opened the door to Mom’s room and beckoned us in with a smile.
“I think she’s a bit worn out from the trip over from the hospital, so she’s sleeping now. The intake nurse will be by shortly to ask you some questions, but make yourselves comfortable.”
I followed my sisters into the room with a certain amount of trepidation, nervous that the trip might have taken the last of Mom's strength. Would she even wake up? I wondered. Would she just drift off and never open her eyes again?
But we found her sleeping peacefully, tucked in neatly beneath the covers, all cleaned up with her hair brushed and her gown changed, looking as comfortable as I’d seen her in a few days. I pulled out the blanket I’d brought and spread it over the end of the bed, then leaned in to kiss the top of her head.
The problem I realized, as I pulled up a chair next to her bed, was that even though I wasn't afraid of my own death anymore, I was still pretty scared for my mom to die.
Even if it wasn't to a big, dark nothing. Even if it was only to the other side of a curtain.
I wanted her to stay on this side, where I could see her.
*Note to Reader: This is a story in progress, so I am sharing it as I write it, as a way to spur me on. If you're interested in following along, here is the link to the others I've written so far. Thanks!