Death Becomes Her: Being with the Stillness of Mother-Loss
My mother died in the afternoon of December 4th, amidst the soft Winter light. The clouds seemed joined in oneness, still and languid for as far as the eye could see. The pale yellow sun cast a cold but comforting orb-like glow on the land. Wheat fields slept. Magpies and swallows gathered by her window.
And two magnificent bald eagles, rare on her stretch of the Snake river, circled her home in wide, breathtaking arches during the days surrounding her dying-time. Their open-winged soaring was contrasted, sharp as noonday shadow, by long stretches of motionless perches on the bare tree at the edge of the ranch— watching, waiting, silent as ice.
They departed the day of her ceremony, not to be seen again. She went with them.
“It’s the winter of my life,” she’d said, smiling softly, mere days before as we watched snow fall outside. She marveled at it, having spent the last few years blissfully chasing summer up and down the west coast, being truly free for the first time in a long time. I could tell as she gazed smiling at the white landscape that her season-loving old soul missed the magic of Winter. I smiled back, despite myself. Despite the unfathomable truth pressing down on us. Her hallmark sense of wonder, still in tact at such a moment, was breathtaking. We held hands for hours.
And so, there it was that in her first Winter in years and also her last, she slipped into infinity, held and witnessed by her children, her partner, a dear friend and her sister. We surrounded her bed. We called in the ancestors. My sister bathed her. My brother warmed her. I read poems to her, and we waited.
And then, just like that, her moment came. We held every limb. We kissed her again and again. We couldn’t stop whispering we love you, nothing to fear, you can go, it’s ok, we love you, we love you mom… I love you. Even though we were granted eight months to prepare ourselves from the moment of her diagnosis until her departure, her death still came quick, shocking, unexpected. Mystery does that.
There’s simply less time than any of us think.
Be specific about your love and your needs alike. Strive to be honest because you will never regret it. Tell your stories, the ones you think your kin won’t understand or hold dear. Trust the ones you love more. Trust yourself more. Trust the seasons of your life more.
Strive we did to open our hearts and mouths. And for that, gratitude moves through all the details of her leaving, weaving peace into our tore-up hearts. It will never be enough.
* * * * *
The doctor’s were so vague as we made plans to leave an emergency hospital stay and transition home to hospice care~ six weeks, maybe six months, definitely less than a year, they said.
When yet another doctor left the room, taking with him the hope of clarity I had wished for, my mother turned and looked directly into my soul, her turquoise eyes sparkling even amidst wild physical pain, her strong hand gripping mine. She said to me, “This is happening now.”
I stepped out to chase the doctor down… “She said this is happening now.” I felt like a little girl. For weeks I’d been careened back and forth between childlike innocence and full-breadth maturity.
His eyes softened. “And that could also be true,” he said.
At first, my stomach writhed tight and thick in anger, panic.
And then I realized the truth of it all.
They don’t know.
So, I settled in. Braced myself. Decided to trust my mother. It was time to go home.
There is a vast tundra of life, of healing and death-walking that they can never know.
No matter the technology, no matter the advancements.
We were in the domain of Mystery now. Beyond reasoning or estimates, beyond modern medicine, far out past physical salvation. Paradoxically close to the miraculous yet far from hope.
They will never pierce the heart of Mystery, and maybe for that we should be grateful.
My mother, blessed brave woman, not only knew this but named it.
And out there in the desert, in the beautiful end-lands, in the deep pitch black ocean at the twilight hour, the blessing is that we have each other. We have Mother clay beneath us, holding us up. We have our own, ever-loyal inner-knowing. We have the the sky, the wind, sun, moon, the vast waters. They stand faithfully by us, guiding us if only we will open our eyes.
My siblings arrived less than 12 hours before she left this world. A few days later, we held ceremony on the land, and afterwards a close friend of my moms shared that my mother had called her days before while still in the hospital. She’d told her that her days were numbered and she was coming home. She said not to visit her, but to remember her healthy and whole. She told her, “I won’t be seeing you again. I love you. I’m waiting for my babies.”
And wait she did.
And never to be seen again she is. And that way of knowing out beyond fact or logic is a gift and responsibility that none of us can afford to disavow or second guess. Brava, mama.
Nor can anyone but us decide when and how much and with whom to share what Mystery has shared with us.
The voice of our own Soul longs to be heard, and though it will show up in its own, colored ways across each life and death, it is always there, telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
* * * * *
We spent much of the weeks that followed thousands of miles away, in the Atlantic Northeast, where she’d raised us and lived 95% of her life. We celebrated my new niece, whom my Mother had flown alone, riddled with cancer, to go meet just 2 months prior.
We did as many of Mom’s beloved holiday traditions we could manage, and wept in each other’s arms often. I found myself, too, suddenly lost in the beauty and stark grace of Winter after over a decade in the Pacific Northwest— which is dark and rainy but rarely frozen and blue and gleaming with snow and ice.
On numerous long walks, I came into deepened relationship with ice and its healing stillness. When my mother died, as strange as it may sound, I found myself staring at her chest often in the hours we sat with her body in grief. In some mixture of desperation and soulful courage, I watched her chest in its otherworldly, absolute stillness~ in part as a child wishing beyond wishing for her to come back to us. And in part to make it real in my own body. To face it. To know it to be true physically— ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
It had been so long since I’d sauntered through Winter woods. The sun sparkling on the packed snow and pine boughs was spiritual. But above all it was the ice that cracked me open— the frozen bogs at my mom’s favorite nature preserve. The completely still lake down the street from my brother’s house. The large silent pond outside our airbnb. The river, frozen-solid, near a dear friend’s house, so thick you could throw a huge log at it and watch it just skate across the top, barely making a dent.
How satisfying it can be to break through and find the soft, wet life coursing beneath the freeze! Just knowing it’s there changed me. It changed me forever. It shaped and molded the memory of my mom’s still chest into something less desperate. Properly dark but not tragic.
The perfect vacancy of movement in these wildish places, so soon after losing her, soothed me and continued my education in death and dying. I sat with each of these bodies of water, just as I’d sat with my mother’s. I watched the surface do nothing, as if gazing again at my mother’s beautiful landscape. As if looking at the exact instructions of what I must now do~ which is, namely, to apprentice to Stillness, to Slowness, to the art of being.
There is trust and truth in ice, sorrow alongside overwhelming clarity. There is warmth in ice, nurturance and sanity. A new beginning promised deep within. This is the gift of Winter. The quiet so refreshing, so healing. The water moving beneath always; not to worry. The Springtime will come again, but not yet. Slowness is sanctioned, vulnerabilities given asylum. Ample rest obvious and logical. “Triple how much you think you need,” Frost whispers.
The prerequisite for clarity and creative genius and true confidence begins in the dark. Always, always. In Winter, in the Death Lodge, in the process of pre-emergence we are rightly pressed into a patience so thick, a non-doing so unnerving to the modern mind, that it feels as if we are, in fact, dying.
Most run. Because, in a sense, we are and we do and we must die. Again and again as the wheel turns. The point at such times is not, in fact, to plan or to occupy your time, but instead to occupy energetically all that it is you long to be, all that it is you long to feel, so you’re at the ready when the pulse quickens.
For weeks I wandered in those Winter landscapes, calling out: “Mom, Mama, Mom… Where are you; where are you?!”
Utter silence answered. Unbearably honest silence.
But to be willing to stay with the dangerous possibilities of the fallow times long enough to find something precious and powerful and instructive is to be willing to live again.
The seeds of an entire landscape— or life— are all there, waiting, watching with silent eyes, letting things simply be for a while before they take flight again. Just like the Eagles. Just like my mother in her transition time. And, just like all of us in Winter…aching to reclaim our endangered, beloved season of pause and restoration— ecologically, climatically, spiritually, personally, professionally. Winter calls to us to protect Her, be her spokeswoman. And to protect and speak up for our own, inner-winters. She calls on us to trust how exquisitely close stillness and death live to incubation and renewal.
Dedicated in loving memory of my beautiful mother, Jessica.
A Masterclass In Stillness…
It’s with great excitement that I return to my own work, slowly and surely, following the passing of my mama, beginning with a new offering that has emerged from this stirring, liminal time: A Masterclass in Stillness (coming soon). I hope you will join me in apprenticing to stillness for a while before the quickening of the year really takes hold~ so that whatever it is Mystery wishes you to hear at the start of this new decade can be heard and loved and watched closely, patiently, reverently.
