A few short days ago my dear mother passed from this life and into the next. She was three weeks shy of her 95th birthday.
Now her seeming inexistence has drawn mixed moods, acts, and emotions among the members of my family. The fact that for the last eight years Mom neither knew nor could remember any family member, neighbor or friend, may have contributed to the turmoil of justifying the sorrow of grief with the elation of release.
When I took Mom to the nursing home to stay she had already crossed over into the haze and swirl of dementia’s oblivion. The inscrutable fact that she no longer knew her adoring son launched me into the initial stages of coping with grief — specifically, denial and anger.
Mom had moved in with us during the sad and catastrophic stretch of grief — marking the onset of her slippage in awareness and mental acuity — following the death of my father and her husband of 60 years. “The Long and Winding Road” by The Beatles was playing on the car radio during the drive over and ever since that day whenever I hear that sad ballad play (“You left me standing here….”) it brings a tear and then sadness or depression will weigh.
Most people hope to live to a ripe old age, but an interesting paradox occurs when time is given priority irrespective of the character and condition of the body’s occupant — and precisely where modern society fails in dealing with death properly.
Time does not equal happiness, especially in the over-medicalized treatment of our final years. In having given doctors license to extend our existence, regardless of any quality those remaining days may hold, we may have lost something even greater: the age-old wisdom of ritualistic traditions, rites, and ceremonies to deal with such loss. Fortunately, all is not lost — death and its resultant process of mourning and commemoration is something we are still figuring out today, though only through dying itself and examining its attendant effects of grief and celebration.
The violence of disease changes us from the person we once were. That observation alone should give pause to even the least reflective among us; whether you are the forgotten or forgetting party, the sense of loss indicated and exhibited is staggering. This brings new meaning to Joan Didion’s advice: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” The same can be said for the people we become and to whom one’s own death will occur.
Covered with a black sheet, before we had a chance to leave, a funeral home attendant wheeled mom out on a gurney to a van waiting outside the door. My mother (and daughter’s grandmother) had already left and the pale bluish stiff underneath that black cloth was a just a corpse. Mom left us standing in dementia’s sleep — like memory and time — what we cannot keep.
There is a sense of freedom that comes with the death of the afflicted to all who have cared for their loved ones through the long goodbye of Alzheimer’s and extreme dementia. That independence sets us free to celebrate the healthier and best times about those who suffered. I testify of, and celebrate, that independence today.
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Mom and Me
