The Heart of Forgiveness
Mother and daughterMy mother died recently, just a month after her ninety-second birthday. She had enjoyed a rich long life but she was weary in both body and soul and was convinced that it was time to finally return home. Even though we were happy that she had finally found release from her frail ancient body, her passing began a grieving process in me that caught me quite by surprise. It also opened a place of forgiveness that turned out to be an important healing for my heart.
My older brother had called me late in the evening to say that mom was back in the hospital. He suspected that because of her weak heart and her generally deteriorating health, she would very likely pass over within the next few days. She had been close to death more than once over the past few years but each time, after being hospitalized, she would recover her strength and return to her normal life again. Once about four years ago, I returned to the States to be with her at her deathbed and in the plane between Zurich and Detroit, with tears in my eyes I prepared the Eulogy for her funeral. When I got to her bedside in the hospital, she was in great distress, gasping for breath and very weak. She took my hand and I could feel the energy beginning to flow to her out of my own body. It was as if she was a thirsty wanderer in the desert and I was an oasis that she happened upon. I spent every day with her and within a week she was out of the hospital and on her way to a full recovery. Well, as full a recovery as one can make at her age with long-term congestive heart failure. I put my Eulogy text aside and we fell back into our pattern of weekly transatlantic telephone calls.
So when my brother called this time, I seriously debated whether or not I actually should make the trip. I placed a call to her room at the hospital but the nurse said she was too weak and short of breath to speak to me. About a year before when she was enjoying a period of relative good health, I had asked her if she wanted me to be there when she finally died and she had responded, "I don't want anybody to be there! I just want to die in my sleep." This was typical of the exchanges that we had often had over the years, leading us always further into misunderstanding and conflict. My personal path through this lifetime has been focused on spiritual awakening. My life was about becoming conscious myself as well as offering support to others along this path. Here was my own mother saying that she wanted to be totally unconscious at her death and no, thank you very much, she would not need my help with this process. It made me so mad! Just like so many of the other misunderstandings that we had experienced over the years, it left me feeling disrespected, unseen and unloved. I took it totally personally; it was all about me not her. At such moments, I was triggered into experiencing once again some very painful feelings of rejection from my childhood.
Over the years, I had worked intensively with the critically ill and dying and I had been beside the bed of a number of my patients when they let go into death. It felt to me like my mother didn't value my expertise. It seemed she didn't really believe that my hospice experience had taught me a kind of compassion that could support her and ease her transition. It was as if she didn't really acknowledge that I had learned something of value and had something important to offer even to her. We had experienced this same type of conflict so many times throughout my lifetime; many different themes but always with the same basic personality structures in place. It seemed absurd that I could so easily and so gently bring compassion to the death of a stranger yet with my own mother it presented such a difficult struggle.
Now she really was dying and there was some stingy, angry, mean-spirited part of me that wanted to punish her by keeping my word and not showing up for her death. I could hear this sassy little-girl's voice inside my head saying, "OK lady. You think you're so tough! You want to die alone – be my guest! You don't need me there, fine. Go ahead, die alone in your hospital bed – see if I care!" I hung out in the loveless energy of my hurt inner child for about five minutes before I gave in and booked an airline ticket to Detroit. Another aspect of my mother's personality was that she could never ask for help and I knew this all too well. You just had to figure out for yourself what she needed and hope she would let you give it to her.
I arrived at the hospital to find her like an 85 pound bird, perched on the edge of her hospital bed, supporting her head with one emaciated, claw-like hand. A few days before, she had fallen in the nursing home where she lived and the open wounds on her legs did not heal. Instead, her legs, feet and ankles were painfully swollen and black with blood that refused to be reabsorbed. In addition, the nurses here at the hospital kept taking blood samples every few hours to send to the lab for "testing" and this had turned both her arms black as well. When she had fallen, she had also injured her right eye. The bleeding behind the retina blinded her and caused her eye to swell and bulge out like a prizefighter's. She looked so wounded and broken that I could hardly bare to look at her. She was exhausted and her heart was struggling to continue supporting her worn out old body. She had developed pneumonia, she felt miserable and told me that she was longing to die.
"I had a dream last night" she said the following day when I arrived early in the morning at her bedside. Her voice had overnight been reduced to a tiny squeak, just barely audible. "They moved my bed into a really large hall and all my old friends were dressed up and sitting around me on chairs," she went on. "Then everybody stood up and left and there was nobody but me and those empty chairs in that big empty room. I wanted to go back to my own room, to my own bed but then the nurse came and she wouldn't let me get up. All my friends had left and I wanted to leave too." The nurse told me later that mom had been hallucinating in the night and that she had screamed, "HELP, HELP" at the top of her lungs for more than an hour, waking all the other patients on the floor. As mom told me the story, I realized that she wasn't completely sure if her friends had actually been there in the night or not. She told me that the nurse had been kind to her and had pointed out her rosary beads, her bathrobe and other personal belongings in the room so that she could accept that she was actually in her own room and could relax and go back to sleep. The experience frightened her and her voice, wounded from screaming out her terror in the night, never returned to normal.
That day, according to her wishes, I had all active treatments stopped. The pills, the lab work, the blood tests, the visiting specialists with all their invasive treatment were all discontinued. Despite her age and her condition, her husky young MD had in all seriousness proposed a complicated surgical procedure that he told me might give her a few more months of life. When I questioned the wisdom of operating on a 92-year-old patient in her condition, he admitted rather sheepishly that it was an absurd suggestion. We switched instead to what is known as "comfort care". Within hours David, a compassionate young hospice nurse, appeared like an angel bringing the necessary knowledge and experience to make her comfortable for this last act of her life. He gave the nursing staff orders to sedate her sufficiently with morphine so that she would feel comfortable. My greatest fear was that she would choke to death because her lungs were so congested and she barely had the strength to cough anymore. It was a relief for both of us when the medicines finally kicked in and she became less restless in her bed. She was still awake and able to communicate but her spirit seemed to be slipping further away from moment to moment.
She smiled weakly and squeezed my hand as each of my four brothers and my younger sister arrived and stood by her bedside to say their last good-byes. We all lived far away from our birthplace so this was our first reunion in almost 20 years. Mom stared in disbelief as her "boys", all over 60 by now, stood arm-in-arm around her bed. My oldest brother said, "look mom, we're all here and we're not even fighting." She offered up a small smile and whispered, "I never thought I'd see the day."
After two days, when her breathing became even more labored and irregular and she finally slipped from consciousness, family and friends took turns around the clock sitting by her bedside. Jerry, her friend from the nursing home came by to say the rosary with her from 12 to 2 in the morning. I picked the 2 to 4 AM shift and sang to her in the darkened hospital room. It was very quiet. She was no longer restlessly shifting around in her bed. She had settled down into the final hours of her life and there was only the irregularity of her breath coming and going in the room. I was at peace as I sat beside her. I drifted into meditation, my mind empty of thoughts or fears, my breathing keeping tempo with hers.
In this quiet space, with all our personal differences far, far behind us, I realized how deeply I loved her. I realized that it was really the things we SAID to one another that so often got in the way of our love. It was the opinions that we held, the ideas and concepts that we had learned that separated us. When we were silent together, just breathing, just being, it was impossible to disagree. Without the ego "stuff" that made up our personalities, we could share an enormous, vast, peaceful love. I had felt this once before with her. It was when she was close to death four years before. I had sat by her side, holding her hand then too. We had been quiet then too. I had been able to enter with her that very narrow space between what we imagine ourselves to be and that which is in reality our true and divine essence, precious and timeless; the part that was, at this very moment, trying to release itself from the broken vessel of her body. In this profound moment, when the body and the soul peel away from one another, the fleeting, meaningless, "dust" of our persona can finally be revealed for what it is. All the things that we insisted on, all the hardness in our heart, all the self-righteousness, the unyielding concepts and convictions simply melt into insignificance. She was in that place now and I found my way through all the layers of disappointment and misunderstanding to finally meet her and touch that love that so deeply connected us. It was so pure and real. I knew in that moment that she had always loved me. She had always wished me well, even if in the context of our lives together she had not communicated it in the way that I wanted, in a way that I could understand. Through the years of our differences, she had offered me the possibility of learning and growing through a program of challenges that was uniquely our own. It was our story, precious and individual like a snowflake, one of a kind, never to be repeated again.
My mother died the following afternoon. We were all there with her, children and grandchildren, even some of her great-grandchildren. We stood around her bed that last day wavering between exhaustion, grief and joy. A kind of hysterical energy seemed to take over as we witnessed her amazing and terrifying passage. It seemed that everyone was talking too fast, too loud. All at once, the room became crowded and stuffy and there wasn't enough Kleenex to go around. Her body, still at last, lay quietly on the bed in the center of all the family confusion and chatter. The color in her face was gone and her skin took on a dull yellow tone within minutes. I sat on the edge of the bed, leaned over her body and began stroking her face and kissing her cheeks. I heard myself calling to her in a broken-hearted voice, as tears begin to wash down my face. I had held back my love and closed my heart to her for so many years and now she was gone. I was unable to restrain myself, "Mommy, Mommy" I called out to her with the grief of an abandoned 4 years old.
There was a small bouquet of flowers by the window. My niece had brought some of mother's favorite pink roses that she had grown in her own garden. I put these into her hands, which were cooler now to the touch. The following day, at the funeral home, we viewed her body one last time before it was sent to the crematorium. The flowers were still in her hands, wilted, crumpled but still full of color.
What I had always assumed about who we were as mother and daughter was, in that final week and with her death, effaced. What had been the heavy reality of our difficult relationship, in an instant was replaced by purity and softness, warmth and acceptance. I was changed. My heart was changed. I could feel something new, strong and enduring taking up residence inside me. In meeting her finally with an undefended heart, for the first time open to her and without false expectations, all personal struggling fell away. The veil of misunderstanding was lifted and after years of suffering and separation, we were able to simply love each other.
When I returned home, I put a photo of her on my personal altar. It is a picture taken when she was about 40 years old, probably around the time I was born. My mother was an elegant and beautiful woman. In this photo, she wears a white summer dress, her hair a soft shiny wave around her face. She holds a delicate white teacup trimmed with gold before her. Her hands are perfectly manicured and her nails are painted the same red as her lips. Each time I pass by, I light a small tea candle in front of her photo. I study the picture, absorb the details, remembering her beauty and honoring her femininity. My heart still grieves for her and I am thankful that she gave me life. With my mother's death I say goodbye to one of my finest teachers, acknowledging that life with her was a hard school. I am grateful that she didn't give up on me, that no matter what I did or said over the years, no matter how much I fought with her, rebelled, whined, blamed and complained, she continued to love me. And I am grateful for the healing of our relationship, even if it was a lifetime in coming.
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