Staring into the abyss

She has been completely bedridden for a year and a half. The Energizer Bunny, we used to call her. She was a docent at the Reagan Library for over a decade, a volunteer for numerous local politicians, a mother of four, a meteorologists' assistant for the Luftwaffe during WWII. She was born in East Germany in 1924. The war ripped her innocence and childhood and family from her. She married an American Army soldier, my father, and said good bye to her homeland. In 1972 my parents bought a home in southern California and that is where she is today, and where she will be, if all goes to plan, when she dies.

That may not be soon. This could be a very long, very slow good bye.

She was raised Protestant, but she turned away from church after coming to America. Her children were allowed complete freedom with regard to religion. My three older sisters are Christian. I haven't found a word to define my own spiritual orientation yet. It is not exclusive of Jesus. It doesn't exclude universal energy. It also doesn't include a strong sense of what happens when we leave our bodies for the last time. The body and the flesh and the material things are finite. Spirit isn't. It is probably bigger and more amazing than I can imagine or try to define. Which means I can't reassure anyone who is afraid of death with an explanation of what the afterlife looks like.

In the face of death there are many religious converts. It's certainly encouraged. Your loved ones want you going to the same place they are going. One of my sisters' best friends was Jewish. His untimely passing left a hole in her heart and her life that would be unbearable, but several days before his death he accepted Jesus. Powerless over his cancer, she could not save his body, but she saved his soul with just days to spare. He is whole again. In this there is comfort for her.

If you are feeling the urge to save our souls, please, resist. One thing mom and I both agree upon is that we don't want or need to be told how to come to God. We will forge our own genuine road. I suspect as she nears her death she will be visited. In times when the veil was thin she saw many departed loved ones. At one point my father came, ready to take her away, but she was not ready to join him. She has had dreams where every dog we ever collectively owned came to her. There were less pleasant dream-visions, where she entered a room full of silent figures who communicated without speaking and yet somehow she could hear them. There was the dream where President Reagan reached out to shake her hand, but somehow their hands could not connect.

I told her during one of those times that I have a Highway Angel, and his name is Jesse, and that when she was ready to leave her body, I asked him to be there for her. She was pretty sure she saw him in one of her dreams.

Today was not a terribly spiritual day. Today she is very much in her body. The material world is the one she knows. It fails her now. She lay in the home she spent half a century decorating and keeping immaculate, and it pains her to no end that it is no longer perfect. She pushes me to keep everything pristine, including a quarter acre of grass. I am exhausted, uncompensated, and running a non profit in my spare time. I've gained weight and lost muscle tone. I need to see a dentist. Did I mention I'm exhausted?

Today mom came to the realization that she is not going to get better. Until now, she thought if she just rested long enough, she'd get strong again. She'd walk again. She's always had this belief that she didn't need to keep up her strength by exercising and moving around and getting in the wheelchair. That some day she would just be done laying in the hospital bed, and she would get up, and things would get back to normal. Today she let go of that belief. Today is a difficult day. Now there is nothing to do but endlessly adjust that bed and rearrange pillows and be miserable...and believe on some level that the material life with its abrupt beginnings and endings are everything you have, and yet they are not enough. If in the end of nearly a century on earth, all you come to is death and then soon after being forgotten...that is not enough.

My mother in her heart of hearts believes that death is the end. If that is true, then we must make all of our magic here and now. We must access the universe and work with it for the good of all while we inhabit these suits of flesh. We must embrace this moment because there is no other...and that is true whether an afterlife exists or not.

We are at the point Eckharte Tolle likes to talk about...how our fleeting lives go up like puffs of smoke and everything we were and had eventually pops like a soap bubble. We are left with the now and with the Spirit, the non material, the essence of who we are which is so much greater than the material, physical forms of who we are.

Is this physical life all there is? It seems fairly important now that I find words to convey my sense and belief that we are a part of something greater that I cannot define and do not understand, but which I can and do access and interact with. To impart upon my mother a sense of hope and wonder without telling her how to think. To define what I have never been able to put to words. That our bodies are finite but our soul-spirit is infinite, and even if we don't believe in Heaven, try to imagine your soul, your essence being released...and being boundless...and seeing Jesus, and highway angels, and all the beautiful dogs and horses and the long-lost friends...

We will fumble through this raw and awkward time, present in the moment.