Vanessa’s mother died on Thursday. (http://www.nessahead.com/archives/75) She had cancer and was in pretty bad shape the past few weeks, so it was not unexpected. Nonetheless, it was a very sad day for Vanessa and her family. Death is never an easy thing, even when you know the person has been suffering with a terrible disease and you’re grateful for the suffering to end.
I don’t understand why this world allows us to come into it and form bonds of love with others and then suddenly takes those we love away from us. Yes, we go on, but there’s always this gaping hole in our lives that we are never able to fill. New lives come into our world and that helps, but those we have lost we continue to mourn.
The next few days will be difficult for Vanessa but she has a good support group to help her through these rough times. Veronica (Patrick’s girlfriend, the funeral director) is helping out immensely with all the planning. *Thanks, Veronica!* As of now, most everything is completed with only a few small details remaining to be dealt with. It’s nice to know someone ‘in the industry’ at times like this!
Visitation is on Monday evening and the funeral is on Tuesday, so we have a few days now to relax and regroup. I’m hoping Vanessa is able to get some much needed rest before it all begins on Monday. Say a prayer that the love and support of all her friends will help her and her family get through all this. I’m hopeful that Vanessa will be able to focus on what a wonderful person her mother was to her and to the community in which she was such a vital part for so many years.
Go peacefully, Solly, into what lies ahead, remembering how much love here on earth surrounds you as you make your journey.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackAt my mother’s funeral (which was otherwise full of lies and treachery) I had an epiphany which has stuck with me but remains hard to articulate, and everytime I try to talk about it I end up rambling, but it goes like this: there’s something about endings and how dying turns somebody’s life into a story. Only when it’s all over do you have the distance to appreciate the story. And of course it’s a poor shadow of the warmth of reality, and maybe the ending wasn’t so good (but it was only the last page, or last chapter), but you can’t know that until it’s ended. Afterwards, you have the story to carry with you and like any story you love, remembering it gives you a warm glow.
You ever notice how most fiction is written in the past tense? It’s because the past tense is easier for us to connect with. The present tense is harder for us to engage with, because we’re entangled within the now. We’re much more certain with ‘this happened’ than ‘this is happening’. Just a fact of human nature.
Anyhow, as a storyteller, the ‘people become stories’ comforted me immensely. The specific mechanic was that while my mother was sick, I was haunted by her weakness. She was my mother. And yet she couldn’t comfort me, because she couldn’t comfort herself. My mother had always been a dragon. How could this have happened to her.
It was only at her funeral that all the pieces laid themselves out for me: she was strong. She’d always been strong. She was so strong she’d beaten the cancer. It was a stupid side effect, and stupid people, and discouragement that killed her (in the form of kidney failure). I’d known all that when she was ill, of course, but I was so blinded by the pain of the now of her that I couldn’t make the connections backward to everything she was, and how it all flowed forward.
Anyhow, that’s my crazy inarticulate thought on why death happens. Because we’re stories, and stories have to end to be fully appreciable, or reabsorbed into the worldsoul or whatever you choose to believe. And we incorporate them, now immortal, into our own stories, our own souls.
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