Sunday 10 July 2011

The First Anniversary of Mum's Death


Even writing those words, “Mum’s death,” still feels weird. It’s been one year but time, somehow, does not seem to apply, at least not in linear terms. I feel as if, in some ways, I actually get sadder and feel more bereft at the loss as time goes by.

         Yesterday for example. Memories arose and stabbed and jabbed at me and I started crying in the car – and then again in London Drugs – then I held onto it until I got home an could let fly. I just suddenly felt her gone-ness so keenly. It is very strange to feel orphaned at sixty-four years old.
             
           I guess this is the stage at which men and women cleave more closely unto their spouses. But my spouse an I separate last year too, five months after she died. It was a year of losses and new things.

         Losing Mum.  Emotionally, as with earthquakes, it’s “the big one.” 

          We were so lucky. She was ninety-six. Almost a century. But there is no one else I will have known for sixty-three years in this life, ever, except my brother. But of course Mother and Sibling are such very different relationships. There is just nothing like your Mum, nothing that comes close to Mother, its positive or negative aspects.

         I miss her every day. 

         Long, long ago, when I was a teen and interested in the concept of reincarnation, I remember we said we’d have a sign so we could let the other know if we had come back. We hadn’t talked about it for decades. Now I can’t remember what the signal was.

        I do know I have been even more careful than always about not killing insects, though.  Just in case. I think we thought she might come back as a butterfly, because she loved butterflies. So I have even been careful about the moths who seem to colonize my closet in this new apartment.

Even if a butterfly did land on me and wink, I’m not sure what coming back as a butterfly would signify though?  That there is something more, I guess. Plus that Mum’s first-life-after was going to be pretty short.

And then what?

What is this impulse to want to know there is more?

 It’s ruled human beings and the world—through religions—for eons. Is it this desperation to think “this isn’t just it” reason enough to have let ourselves be legislated, sent to wars, imprisoned, corralled, controlled from birth to death—even crucified—throughout the ages?

And why are we prepared to believe others (priests, gurus, pastors) know the answers – the “truth” – the secrets – and that old books written by other humans (bibles, gospels, sutras, scriptures) hold the key to what our consciousness is all about?  


I don't now. But with my Mum dying, I guess I understand the impetus a whole lot more now.

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