Make Every Moment Count
Sitting at my laptop listening to an OM meditation, trying to sooth my raising mind.
I want to make sense of death. Two month to the day my father died. Two days ago, I came home to a phone call from my brother, saying that my mom has died. She put her hands to her heart in front of the grocery store and fell over backwards. She died instantly.
I always wanted her to die without suffering, thank you. But what a shock.
What a shock it must be for her, I wonder? One moment she was living the next dead.
Is there life after death? What was I doing when she died? How come I did not feel any different at this moment?
Mary and I have been talking about the intelligence that creates us humans. I am not a scientist, but it is pretty amazing when we imagine how out of sperm and egg cells grow and eventually, in the case of a human, a human will develop.
Even though, our body appears solid, we are more filled with holes then we think. Therefore, is it possible after the intelligence has left this constricted, sometimes painful body for it to enter a moving ocean (a word I like to use)?
Questions........
Is death an opportunity for the living? I think so, but did I need so quickly after the first opportunity a kick in the behind?
My mom and my day were over 60 years together. Mom would have turned 89 on the coming Monday. She was, the last four years as my dad's dementia progressed his main caregiver, this is what she wanted to do, needed to do, her path. When he was diagnosed with dementia she did not comprehend that he would not get better. Her world as she understood it fell apart. After he had died, her life pupose seemed to have died with him.
My mom grew up in Hungary, lived there till she was seventeen. War! She and her dad were taking to a prisoner of war camp into Russia. Her dad died there shortly after their arrival. She was a survivor! Surviving three years of a prisoner of war camp in Russia as a young girl, amazing. When she arrived back in Hungary after the war, her mother was deported to Germany. She made up her mind to follow her, with a stop over in Austria's prison (illegal crossing of boarder), and working on a farm to earn more money in order to continue her journey. Amazing endurance! Finally she did arrive in Germany. She lived in the same village for over 60 years. She loved to garden, cook, but would not tolerate much interference. She approached life in a practical kind of way, however, I remember her also as a curious and adventuresome kind of person. Work was her path in life. Without work, who would she have been? Who could she have been?
Our visits were often strained but when I was supporting her during my father's funeral we developed a warmth that had not been there. It was hard to leave her, not knowing....
Control, death makes it clear how limited our control is... not existing.
I love you mom!
