My Mother’s Death

When the nursing home called me at 2:00 in the morning to tell me that my mother had unexpectedly died, I did not feel sorrow, just a sense of relief.

There would be no more midnight trips to the emergency room to tend to her.

These trips were exhausting, lasting several hours, and I had to be up and ready to teach the next day.

 

I told my colleagues of my mother’s death, because it seemed odd not to mention it since we were such a close-knit department.

But I had to stop myself from saying “Oh, it’s OK” when they commiserated with me or offered heartfelt sympathy.

That would not have been the response of a loving and dutiful daughter.

And my family believed in the appearance of a happy family above all.

When I returned from college the first year at Christmas, I told my mother I thought I would skip the midnight Christmas service because I wasn’t sure I believed in God anymore.

She lashed out and asked me “What would Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt think?”  (an older, very nice couple in the congregation).

So I went to preserve our family image for the Schmidts.

Because she wanted to be cremated, the funeral parlor required that I come in to confirm that they had the right body.

There lay my mother, a sheet drawn up to her chin.

They told me I could have as much time with her as I needed.

I tried to feel some emotion, but couldn’t.

Finally I kissed her forehead, not because I wanted to, but because I was afraid I would feel remorse later if I did not.

Her skin was icy cold and the spark of life that was her soul had obviously left.

When I thought that I had allowed enough time that the funeral director would think that I really had grieved, I called him in.

I remember going to funerals of relatives when I was growing up: two great-uncles and my three grandparents.

And the comments I heard most often from the mourners were “He looks so life-like” and “He looks so peaceful, as if he’s asleep.”

Let me dispel these two platitudes that represent only kudos to the hairdresser and make-up artists that the funeral parlor employs.

But physical death, when not gussied up, is physical death, unless the person is a Bodhisattva. 

But for the rest if us, death simply seems like an ending.

The corpse does not  look alive or as if he’s sleeping peacefully. 

Yet, paradoxically, this inert deadness seems to assure me of another life after death.

For what is the spark of life, which I can only link to the soul?

Where does this go when the human shell has been abandoned?

I can only intuit that we continue to live on another plane after death.

After all, if a car runs out of gasoline, it just stops running; you could not say that it had died and you would notice no external changes in it.

If the universe were  only mechanistic, the sharp dividing line between life and death would not exist.

People who died would be like machines that ceased to function.

And we know that people are not machines, so their deaths must involve some sort of rebirth.