For some reason this morning I told a client the story of my mother’s passing. On reflection, it was because this woman had been struggling for twenty years to accept a devastating experience in her life. She hadn’t accepted it twenty years ago and still couldn’t come to terms with it, all these years later. She hated what it had done to her life.
During our conversation, I flashed to my mother’s passing three years ago and decided to tell my client the story. My mother had had a massive heart attack and had lost half her heart. Unable to breathe on her own, she was put on a respirator while we waited for the rest of the family to arrive. My dad wanted to make the decision with all five kids there. So we waited in that limbo space with her, with him, with all of us. When we were all there my dad gave the order to have the tube removed. It took some time for my mother to regain consciousness. When she did, she looked around, blinking, and with a scratchy voice asked, “What happened?”
That moment will live as the defining courageous and humble moment of my life. My dad, my Irish Catholic, not very talkative dad, looked at my mother and spoke without embellishment or elaboration. The clarity defined the moment. “Dorothy, you’re dying.” He let the words hang in the air. I felt myself explode into the grandness of the moment. The immense reality had been spoken. There was no dissonance there.
My mother, trying to grasp it, spoke the question back, “I’m dying?” “Yes, Dorothy, you’re dying. You had a heart attack and you won’t recover.” No “ifs,” “buts,” or any confusion. There it was. The reality of the moment. My father opened us to reality and allowed us to enter this sacred journey with my mother as she left her body.
The story led my client and me into a larger question: How often do we let ourselves be with reality as it is? Mostly we seem to want to change it, alter it, shift it, bargain with it. What courage it takes to be with it. Soften into it. Allow it to be there, talk to us, communicate with us and alter us. My client thanked me for the story. I thanked myself actually. The memory always alters me. The inquiry invites me into quiet reflection. Mostly I thank my father for the courage of his being.
