Something I have known for a long time is how important it is that we share our stories with one another. There is great healing in telling our stories, and the potential for true connection and learning in the telling. It is one very important ways we make sense of our lives, and live with complexity. Frederic Beuchner, a German theologian, has this to say about stories:

On Telling Our Stories…

“My story is important not because it is mine…but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track…of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity that God makes himself (herself) known to each of us most powerfully and personally…to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually. I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.”

So bear with me as I share with you a story from my recent life: the story of the loss of my mother. All my life I have felt that I wasn’t sure I could stand to lose my mother, and I have been very blessed with having both of my parents live into their 80’s, to get a chance to know them over many years and through the lens of my own maturing eyes.

Right after the Christmas holidays, my mother starting experiencing severe pain in her back, and after several weeks ended up in the hospital with emergency surgery on her lower back. At that time we all believed her difficulty was a little fall she had taken, and the surgery was to correct the damage from that. I flew down to care for her when she got out of the hospital, only to watch her further suffer as she lost the use of her legs, and continued to experience tremendous pain. As time went on she was put into a rehabilitation hospital to try to help her adjust to her paralysis, and to our horror, she just kept getting worse. After more trips to California, spinal taps, MRI’s and more pain for Mom, they finally decided that she had a rare disease where her immune system attacked her spine. They did some intensive drug therapy to try to arrest the paralysis, and she came out of that even weaker, and finally died on April 8th when her heart gave out. It was like watching someone fall off a cliff in slow motion, helpless to stop the fall, but noting the progress in all its stages, never really being able to comprehend that she would actually hit the bottom. All the safety nets full of holes, my own denial and hope insulating me from believing what was really going on.

As I look back on this stage of losing Mom, I am struck by how we grasped to hang on to how we had always had Mom, healthy, mentally alert and in charge, how we resisted knowing the truth of what was unfolding in front of our eyes: she was dying. I am reminded now of Buddhist teachings around impermanence, and how much I fight that awareness when it is so vividly in my face. Pema Chodrin, in her book, The Places That Scare You, states it so well:

“That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything---every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and inanimate---is always changing, moment to moment. We don’t have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life isn’t always going to go our way. It means there’s loss as well as gain. And we don’t like that….Because we take what is always changing to be permanent, we suffer.”

Jay came home last night and noted how much change is going on at his new college. We dedicated the new building this fall, with a plack honoring the people that were instrumental in building it, and now, all but one person on the plack has moved on, and he is retiring! So change is rapid and all about us.

My family’s way of resisting the fact of my mother’s decline, was to continue to hope that medical interventions would help her, could fix it, could save her. I don’t think this was wrong, but perhaps by focusing so much on this, we may have missed other ways of being with her as she went through this long passage into death. As much experience I have in this area, it was really hard for me to have much perspective in my own situation.

I did have enough warning that she was not doing well that there was time for visits with Mom, and time to realize that we may be losing her, or even if she did live, it would be in extremely compromised conditions. My family was changed forever. Everyone kept asking me if I was preparing, and I found it hard to know what it means to prepare for a death. I didn’t feel any great ‘unfinished business’ or any huge issue looming between us. I felt helpless to protect her from what was occurring and very concerned about my Dad. I was facilitating a retreat the weekend before her death, and someone there mentioned that he wished that he had apologized to his mother for some of his behavior, but couldn’t because of her death. I decided to do some journaling that weekend around that question, since there was a period during and after college when I was quite a self-righteous jerk about politics and lifestyle issues, a period of rebellion….but as I wrote, I realized that what I really wanted to say to Mom was “thank you.” Thank for you all of the millions of times she really listened to me, thank you for all of the times she didn’t give me advise when I was making really bad decisions, thank you for getting me into Camp Fire Girls and putting up with all of those endless tacky craft projects, sending me to camp, and welcoming my friends and family over the years.

But when I got back to Bend after the retreat, she was feeling worse. We talked about her nausea and lack of appetite, and how irritated she was with the physical therapy. She couldn’t understand why they didn’t know how rotten she felt, and why they wouldn’t leave her alone. My mother was a nutritionist and the last thing she said to me the day she died was that all they do is feed old people sweet things in these places, a certain sacrilege for someone who put Tabasco sauce on oatmeal! This was not a deeply spiritual conversation, as you can tell. A few hours later she passed over, leaving her tired body behind. By this point, I had been praying for her to have an easy transition to the other side, and that she be released from this body that was torturing her and diminishing any quality of life she had left. She was not a person who would want to live like this. My sister called that afternoon to warn me that they were taking her to the hospital and were going to perform life-saving procedures on her. My first reaction was to say, “Oh, Sue, don’t’ let them do that. We have to let her go.” Later we found out that she probably died on the way to the hospital.

I wasn’t there, but I knew that it was important that someone sit with her in the hospital as she was making this transition out of her body, so I asked Sue, my sister, to do this, even though she had little experience with this sort of thing. In many cultures, people sit vigil with a body and pray for the person for many days and even weeks. Mom had her cell phone clutched in her hand on the way to the hospital, and when I called Sue back on her cell phone as she sat vigil with Mom, she asked me if I wanted to talk to Mom. The absurdity and rightness of this struck me and I sobbed my blessings and assurances to my mom on the cell phone, about how she was safe to move on, that she was in the loving protection of the Divine, that we were ok, and we knew she would be free of her tortured body. I think of this now as a little example of how we all pulled together in this time and operated out of the box as the situation demanded. Truly in death, there are no boundaries to expressing our love and connection.

As my mother’s health declined, my parents were still living in the home they built fifty three years ago, and it was clear that they would need to move to accommodate mom’s worsening condition and nursing needs, so we sold the house and arranged to have them move to a facility where both of them could live while mom was in nursing care. When she died, the house had been sold, but Dad was still living in it. So, we were faced with not only handling the funeral and a huge party afterwards, but then closing out our family home, and the intense emotional attachment to that place that held us together for so long, packing things up, figuring out where Dad would want to live now that Mom was gone, and his intense grief after 62 years of marriage…this was so much change at once. My sister and I basically spent 3 weeks working with all of these endings. I conducted the memorial service where over 100 old friends going back to their college years were able to attend, and where Dad and my family could say goodbye to the community where we grew up and left for our adult lives. In the memorial, I was able to say thank you to my mother as well. My grief was put on hold as my father’s needs took front row. I found myself packing boxes for him, comforting him in the moments I watched him stand before my mother’s portrait, kiss it, and cry. I talked with him about his fears of living alone in this new community of people he didn’t know, after depending so fiercely on my mother’s strength and leadership during their years together. It began to feel like this tremendous role reversal, and I was sending him off to college. Or graduate school. In many ways, it was a tender time, and I am grateful we could cushion his transition into widowhood.

While there is nothing especially unique in my story, for we all, if we live long enough, face losing our parents. A friend of mine said to me in the midst of this that losing her mother was a very precious and deep time for her. I have been trying to hold that intention and learn from this season of loss as I pass through it. I would like to focus this morning on some of the lessons I am learning about grief, and change and life, and also invite you to share some of your thoughts at the end of the service. It only makes sense to offer these reflections to one another in a spiritual community. I once heard someone say that if our faith community can’t help us with death, what can? That’s a worthy question.

Now that we have Dad moved in to where he is going to live, now that the house is gone and lifetime of belongings have been divided up and shared in the family, now that I am back in the comfort and solitude of my own home in Bend, I find myself on a journey of grief. It feels like an initiation of sorts.

Mircea Eliade, in his book, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, describes the basic pattern of initiations in different cultures:

First the torture at the hands of spirits; second, the ritual death; third the resurrection to a new mode of being. Through initiation we die to what we are; we do not emerge from these ordeals as the same person.

In “A Gathering of Men,” Robert Bly describes a ritual still practiced today in New Guinea, where the boy who is considered ready for initiation into manhood undergoes a ritual enactment of separation. Armed with spears, he and his mother walk onto a bridge. They are met by a group of men, also armed, who threaten to take the boy. The boy clings to his mother, looking to her to protect him as she always has. But this time is different. The time for separation has come, and after a long mock battle the boy is led by the men away from his mother. They take him to an island where he is isolated from the rest of the community. After weeks or months he emerges as a man with a new name and place in the community. He has died as a boy and been reborn as a man.

In telling this story in Alexandra Kennedy’s book, Losing a Parent, she notes how this initiation ritual serves as a metaphor for what we pass through when a parent dies. The death of a parent, in true initiatory fashion, shakes up the very foundation of our lives, and does away a sense of protection our parent has always provided.

What was apparent almost immediately, was, much like the adolescent boy in the initiation, how stripped down I felt, and how exaggerated everything seemed. I felt like I was in shock. My parent’s relationship was laid bare, exposed to the Truth as all of their patterns were amplified at the end. Next to a deep commitment of 62 years, there were many tensions and patterns that were not especially healthy for either of them, and my sister and I found ourselves listening to my mother’s intense frustration with this primary relationship in her life as she lay helpless in the hospital. She had real regrets. My father had developed a great dependency on her, and even as she was getting worse, much of our energy went into helping him learn some basic life skills so he could become more self-sufficient to begin living on his own…how to use the washing machine, how to make coffee, pick up his clothes, and so on. I learned how very important our partners are in our lives, how much this primary relationship shapes so much of our life experience, and to tend carefully to how this relationship unfolds. Our relationships to others have a real presence at our deaths, and the question of ‘right relation’ arises.

During mom’s illness I saw how the world was turned upside down, where, even when sick and elderly, life demands so much of us. My Mother, who was always in control and so active, faced a total loss of control and paralysis. My father, who had leaned into my mother’s strength and became almost helpless in that leaning, was faced with coming to terms with becoming independent, standing on his own two feet, at age 88. I had to wonder what big issue would be in my face at this stage of my life.

I realized that there is unfinished business at the end of one’s life, and to accept that. One’s life is never easily wrapped up, even at the end, and this is probably normal. I can’t think of many times so far where all has felt wrapped up. A life is not a Hollywood movie. I saw their generations’ contracts between husband and wife, and asked my self how my generation is doing. What a gift to be living these questions.

I also found myself asking, as I prepared the memorial service, “What was the meaning of my mother’s life?” I think this is one of the big questions a death confronts us with, and one of the great values for me in writing the memorial service was to explore this question in depth. I found myself struck by how another person’s life, even one’s mother’s, is, on some level, a mystery. As I discussed this with Jay, he made the comment that he thought that all of us were entitled to our mysteries, and I think that there is truth and wisdom in this perspective.

I was asking hard questions: What was unlived in her life? Why did so many people gravitate to her? What was the source of her strength? Who was she really? What did she take on incarnation for in order to learn? and so on. Of course, once I started asking these questions in any sort of focused way about my mother, I also started asking these questions about my own life.

In grief, the inwardness and withdrawal from life that goes on is demanding in its call for a reflection of how I am living, and what I am living for. The boy in the initiation is sent off to an island, and part of me thinks that the grieving person should do the same. The boy is at first surrounded by the armed men, and at first, I was cushioned by the love of my family, all of the business of taking care of everything, and the disarming compassion from friends and my husband, Jay. I was so touched by the love and support that poured out, and felt renewed in our human capacity to love one another through these times…the great human capacity for compassion and love.

But at a point, it was time for seclusion, to face the loss before me alone. I find myself, not exactly depressed, but extremely tired much of the time, and vulnerable to more self-criticism, with less energy for regular life. A loss like this puts one in shock, and I am coming to realized that the way back to more ‘normal life’ is to take a little piece of the experience each day, and work with small insights, memories, or dreams, and gradually digest it. As I do this, I find myself gradually coming back to life as well. I think there is just so much one can digest at one time, and this quiet process is very healing.