“But it’s dry heat” my dad used to say when I would suggest that summers in Tucson were truly unbearable. “In other words, my dear Daddy, rather than a cleansing steam bath, it is like baking in a hot oven.” I would sarcastically respond. Ignoring my remark he would warn, “Just make certain you drink water before you get thirsty, the dry air evaporates your sweat before you realize you are losing fluids.”
It was one of those blistering days in June, a Tucson summer in full blaze when I came together with my 3 children to say goodbye to my mother who had spent the last 4 weeks in the memory care unit down the hall from where she and my dad had lived in a small two room assisted living apartment for several months. Those last moments with her are forever a part of the fabric I continue to add to the patchwork quilt that houses my journey. A square for each memory, each joy, sorrow, heartbreak, success and failure the colors and textures that make a single life. As my mother’s last patch was being fitted into the colorful and eclectic pattern of her life’s quilt, I gazed at her asleep on a mattress on the floor of her small room. She had been sleeping on the floor for some time because of an irrational delusion around sleeping up on the bed. This was the woman who gave me life. My impulse was to lie down next to her for one last cuddle, with her adoring grandchildren surrounding. A movie perfect image to be sure.
Shifting my thoughts to the consequences here in the real world, realizing how she would startle awake, leaving the peace of slumber to once again be enveloped in the panic that had replaced her wit, humor and creativity I decided to leave her in peace. If not we would leave for the airport and the staff on the unit would be left with a screaming hysterical shell of the woman I had called Mother for 60 years. No, I closed the door quietly to the relief of the nurse and we each alone in our grief, silently said our final goodbyes.
Today, the humidity hangs in the air on my porch in South Dakota, where I sit and reflect on how elastic time is. 9 years ago today my mother’s journey on earth was complete. It seems impossible that it has been that long, and on the other hand it seems like forever ago.
I feel her presence almost daily, it is there whenever I open my heart to the possibility that she lives on in the energy that once filled her human body, and in the love that I finally can feel, and in the memories of the moments when she hit her stride as a parent and gave the exact right answer to the profound pondering of a child, her only daughter, or reacted in a way that felt gentle to my soul.
My mother’s death was not my first rodeo with loss. The longer the journey, the more places one has lived and friends you have made along the way, the more chances the universe has in prying open the deep regions of our hearts lifting the floodgates of sorrow. I have learned that those tidal waves recede with time. With each new loss they wash over my soul once more, perhaps no longer as a tsunami but now a wave that leaves tears on my cheeks and a longing in my chest.
There once was a time that I panicked with the imagined moment of my own death. It was a heart stopping breathtaking feeling of entrapment that I struggled to reckoned with. There is no way out I would think as I attempted to gain control of my breathing, I am stuck in this body that is prey to the inevitability of the circle of life. With time, I have put my mortality and that of loved ones in perspective. I realize that there are many many things out of my control and to spend concern and worry and energy attempting to control those things only takes the focus away from the here and now resulting in missed opportunities and the simple pleasures and joys that each moment of each day holds. Life is too short for the worry, the shoulds and should nots, the deferring of gratification year after year. There is no stopping the passage of time which takes on an elastic quality the older I become, with the past and present converging in a place not of this world but of a place out in the universe where there are no manmade conventions, no societal norms, or rules that keep us grounded, nailed fast to the earth.
Indeed my mother’s dying and death were not my first rodeo and there will be many more, that I am certain. For today, I will breathe in the humid heat of a Midwest summer and embrace what joy and love there is in this moment, on my porch in South Dakota.
Pause: The Space In-between 