Grieving as an act of love in a time of loss

Four days ago, my mother took her last labored breath.

I’ve been busy ever since, taking care of the business that is a requirement in our modern world of industrialized death rituals.

And also…

I’ve been softly sinking into the depths of the pool of eternity, unmoored in the abyss of the liminality between life and death. 

It’s strange to switch gears in my brain between being the rock and lifeline for so many others, to calculating ice packs and thermometers to keep her body cool, and hosting funeral planning meetings over Zoom. 

And then retreating into the quiet, allowing myself to let go and sink into the echoes of a life. To sit with her last load of laundry, unwilling to see it folded and done. To imagine her breathing, living body in that soft pink shirt I bought her that says “Blessed Grandma”. The shirt she was literally wearing just a week ago (and that she was wearing the last time she said to me, “I love you”)…

I have been mentally preparing for this death for many years. Contemplating what might happen if my mom needed 24/7 care, and how I might handle being that caretaker (as I knew no one else would do it). 

There were times when the intensity of my mother’s energy was so much that I looked forward to the someday relief I might feel when the journey would be over, and I could finally sink into a calm quiet I had never known in my own life.

But no amount of thought processes, learning, courses, books, conversations, or befriending death could truly prepare me for what it would be like to say goodbye to the version of my mother who was breathing and living, and to say hello to the version of her I care for now and will soon lay to rest in the ground. 

How does one tell a death story? Certainly not in linear form, and not from a rational place. Death is too sacred for that.

But, as it is fresh, and still consuming my every cell… the story must be told from the grieving place that is formed in each of us when our mothers depart from this world.

Injured Mothers are a Symptom of a Broken Society

I write a lot about how our modern world is not set up for the biologically-necessary support required for mothers to feel whole, held, and safe. Industrialization, modernization, and the disintegration of our species-appropriate villages has caused a lot of pain and grief for mothers and their babies (and therefore, all of us).

A large part of the reason I write so passionately about this is because my own mother was also a victim of this social structure that inherently harms women and their babies. Mothers are imbued with instincts to protect and nurture, and when they don’t, we can look at the larger environment and ask, “How were they not safe? How were they being harmed? Why were they so focused on survival and unable to behave in biologically-appropriate ways?” 

In our society, we have pathologized the individual. We pressure mothers to be perfect angels, while stripping them of the tools they need to be a thriving human so they can successfully mother. We carry around the myth of the Good Mother, and use it as a beating stick with which to hit women who do not conform or who do not know how to function in a dysfunctional society. 

But we rarely ask: “How are we failing women and their children? How is our society causing the lack of safety needed to do mothering well? How can we use biology to support women in their inborn instincts, instead of subjecting them to the torture of choosing their own survival over nurturing their children?”

My mother was an injured animal…a tortured female mammal. She wanted so badly to love and to be loved. She felt incredibly misunderstood, and could never quite find her way out of injury. Her life was a series of beatings from others who could not get past their own traumas to offer a balm to another hurting soul. She was abandoned over and over again, causing her to become even more hypervigilant in her self-protection (as well as beautifully resilient in many ways).

Weaving a Relationship of Healing

For whatever reason, I came into the world highly observant and capable of deep compassion. My mother was often not a safe person for me, as she was generally not a safe person for many people (with some exceptions). However, I am forever grateful for my childhood with her, as she gave me the gift of sitting with a deeply aching human being and having a profound understanding of that deep ache at a very young age. 

She taught me what it looks like when a human goes into wild animal fight/flight mode. She showed me that the same wild animal could also gently and sweetly co-regulate with her fiercely loved little girl. 

She taught me paradox and complexity. She taught me that every human being holds a universe inside, full of nuance and so many stories.

She also taught me fierceness, fire, independence, and that women are the strongest creatures this planet has ever seen. 

I learned what it looks like when someone spends their life clinging to victim mode, relentlessly spinning in ruminations. I was able to shed much of my own ancestral baggage to a large degree because she showed me what it looks like when a person doesn’t do that.

I am deeply in love with life and the painful depths of self growth because of her. 

The most profound lesson of all has been having the opportunity to learn how to unconditionally love someone in all of their human messiness, even when they can’t offer that love back. To be able to see through the prickliness and triggering words, deep into her heart. 

To have the ability to SEE HER in ways that no other human on this planet ever could, and to know that she knew that and felt safest with me because of that.

She also gave me the profound opportunity to learn to stand up for myself and loudly say NO when I was 17 years old and ran away from home (a story I’ll tell another time). In that moment, I said yes to my own fierceness and said no to further abuse, which taught my nervous system to be bold instead of cowering. By honoring my own safety and needs, I set a new pattern for my maternal line and for my children. 

I know the profound hurt and abandonment this caused my mother. And I also know, even all these years later, that it was the right thing to do so that I wouldn’t also get stuck in the rut my mother was stuck in. I broke an ancestral chain that day, one that had been a ball and chain for my mother and all the mothers before her.

Daughtering Through the Mother Wound

Over the past 23 years, our relationship was often tense. She struggled with my choice not to continue in my childhood religion, and it became an obsession for her that eclipsed any ability to have a deeper relationship with me. 

She never truly got to know me, and never seemed able to even try. She never got to know my kids, and it never seemed to occur to her that she wasn’t trying. A couple of times, she stopped talking to me, cutting me off from all communication for a year or more, simply because she was so angry that I wouldn’t go back to church.

Every conversation would always quickly lead right back to her, her thoughts, and her life hurts. So for the vast majority of my life, she never even knew me or took the time to hear me. She didn’t know about my accomplishments, she wasn’t interested in my passions, she wouldn’t listen when I would tell her about my kids. I stopped trying to tell her about my life, because it hurt too much to have her not seem to care. I could never leave my life heartaches at her feet, as my own pain wasn’t safe with her.

And yet. The lessons I had acquired from loving her allowed me to continue to show up for her. Yes, it often hurt that she didn’t seem to want to know me. And yet, I was able to practice non-attachment and accept her for who she was choosing to be. I was able to recognize that her inability didn’t come from a lack of *want* but instead from a deep, unrelenting pain that prevented her from letting others in. It wasn’t me she was rejecting, but instead parts of herself.

I still made sure she had family on holidays, our family enduring several uncomfortable days of hosting her at our home each holiday, just so she wouldn’t be alone. One to two times per month, I would spend a whole day with her, helping her with errands, getting lunch together, finding treats I knew she would like, and fixing things in her house — 100% focused on her.

I didn’t always show up, and sometimes I let her church do things that I just couldn’t find the capacity to do. It took me many years to figure out my boundaries so I could show up for her while honoring myself in the process.

When she broke her arm in 2017, as soon as we moved back to town I was immediately helping her find a good physical therapist and driving her there, taking her to her second shoulder surgery, helping her heal, and listening to her pain as her arm healed incorrectly, taking away most of her range of motion.

My children, husband, and husband’s family have been absolute saints throughout these past 20 years. They were kind, patient, and compassionate toward her in ways that I don’t think many other people were. My mom’s neighbor was also a compassionate rock in her life, and she and I have become friends as we’ve communicated about my mom. 

When my mom tipped over on the asphalt while taking the trash to the street this past February 28th, breaking her hip in the process…my gut knew. This was the beginning of the end. 

Walking With Someone as They Wind Up a Life

2023 has been a slow unraveling of her difficult life, and I have so many vivid memories of sitting, watching, and contemplating throughout it all…

• Watching her completely doped up in the hospital bed after surgery

• Showing up every single day at the hospital (I live an hour away) 

• Listening to her fight with the nurses over silly things like how much she hates pillows, refusing their entertainment offers, and trying to do everything herself

• When she demanded to be taken straight home, no home health, no rehab (which, thankfully, my brother was able to talk her out of)

• The first time I visited her in the rehab center and I got my first view of my mother sitting in a wheelchair, nonsense TV blasting, slumped over in a stupor (and the intense gut punch I felt as a result)

• Listening to her fight with the rehab center staff, and her being reprimanded and reminded to be kind

• Driving to her house many, many times after she was released home to make sure she was okay and taking care of herself

• Watching her fight everyone as she stubbornly insisted that she didn’t need a walker and could do everything herself

• Sympathizing with the home health staff as they struggled to figure out this prickly woman and how to help her be safe

• The two months of physical recovery work she did, demanding to keep her independence at home

• The sinking feeling as I knew home health was winding up their care, and knowing something was going to happen (and that it was going to fall onto me, as usual)

• Conversations with her nurse and a nurse in her church who agreed that my mom was showing serious signs of dementia, and what was I going to do (but really, what was I going to do...????)

• Driving down to check on her after hearing worrying reports from the nurse, and finding her in the darkest cave of a bedroom, completely disoriented and having no memory of eating for 24-48 hours

• Feeding her, shopping for her, preparing easy-to-get food for her so she would have no excuse not to eat

• Taking blood pressure reading after blood pressure reading, and talking her into her medication so she wouldn’t have a stroke right then and there

• Getting a call in the middle of the night that she had fallen while showering alone in the bathtub, and then spent 3 hours propelling herself out of the tub and then scooting around the house on her bare back, trying to find her phone

• Deciding she needed to come to my house, and everyone in my family immediately tearing apart the house so we could create a bedroom for her

• Thinking I could get her a couple of days later, but after getting another call that she had fallen off the toilet, instead going straight down to pick her up and bring her home

• The number of times I’ve spent sitting in the ER with her, the vast number of times I’ve taken her for x-rays, doctor visits, and the amount of supplements and nutrition I’ve tried to pour into her over the years to help…

Then came the months of intensive 24/7 care once I brought her home. The weeks when she had no clue who I was and thought I was imprisoning her in my house (yes, my heart broke when I realized she didn’t remember me — thankfully she was able to remember again a few weeks later).

We also developed a sweetness together over these months, that was often peppered by many days of pure meanness. I even allowed the hospice nurse to give her a lecture about being nice (he volunteered), which he did well. It didn’t fix the problem, but it did make me feel supported and defended for the very first time in my whole life (yes, the little girl inside of me cried with relief).

Then came the utter burnout and compassion fatigue. Not just from my mom, but from having next to zero help from my siblings and being the only one in my house willing to take care of her. 

The intensity of that experience will take a while to fully metabolize and recover from.

Thankfully, I was able to do the legwork and nearly demand that my siblings do something so I wouldn’t head into a nervous breakdown. And they did show up. 

I was able to have very hard conversations with her, and convince her to move into a lovely local assisted living facility (more like a home than a facility, which was important to me). It was cozy, and she spent a couple of months having fun with other elderly women. We made her room feel like home, and I spent a lot of time there with her so she wouldn’t feel alone or abandoned.

When she fell 6 weeks ago, I knew that was the turning point. She wasn’t going to stick around for much longer. Her decline was slow at first, then started picking up speed. It rapidly accelerated over the past 3 weeks, until she finally released herself from life this past Wednesday.

I was able to spend a ton of time with her over the past month – often 2-3 hours each day, just being with her. The day before she died, I finally demanded to be able to bring her home, and everyone moved mountains to help me do just that. 

I nested in, thinking we would have a few days together at least. But less than 24 hours later, she had taken her last breath.

Death Is a Winding Journey

The lead up to death is never a clear journey, and it’s only in hindsight that we can see the signs and properly interpret the events. During the experience itself, we’re just guessing and hoping we get it right.

The night before she died, I was awake every single hour, running into the living room to listen to her breathe and kiss her cheek. Even though she no longer could make eye contact and I knew that the majority of her brain had checked out, I still whispered “I love you” into her ear over and over again. I kissed her cheek and forehead. Stroked her hair. Squeezed her hand. I turned on soft meditation music and nature sounds so she had gentleness surrounding her whole being while she was doing the hard work of dying.

Dying looks a lot like the labor of giving birth. It’s an altered state of mind. It’s absolutely an endogenous trip, wherein our brain gives us the gift of a flood of hormones to make us feel a euphoric high. Yes, the body is in pain and hurting. But our brain is transporting us into an altered state of being, just as it does during birth. 

Dying is the process of rebirth, of transporting our souls out of our bodies and into a different state of being.

Our bodies will always be us and will always be full of life, but once we die we return our gift back to our Mother to be reformed into new life. We are part of the whole, and at death we are reintegrated back into All That Is. 

The soul is a conversation we can contemplate from many different perspectives. Whether one believes in a soul or not, there is absolutely a Life Force of sorts that is mysterious and magical. We aren’t able to see this with our physical eyes, but it's quite apparent when you see a body shortly after death and recognize that something very important has gone.

The force that animated the body is no longer in the body. So where did it go?

We will likely never know for sure until it’s our turn to join that Life Force, and we experience it firsthand. Humans have many different ideas, religious practices, and spiritual beliefs they hold dear, and have had for thousands of years.

I personally have found a profound peace in the Not Knowing. I prefer to sink into the mysterious Universe that surrounds me, and to allow my human self to just exist in that mystery. I don’t need to control or contain. I don’t need clear answers. In fact, I don’t want them at all. I don’t want to know, as that allows me to stay in a state of humility and reverence. 

As a human mammal, I am quite committed to being as human and as mammal as I can be. In other words, I believe in deep embodiment. I believe that as long as I occupy a body, I AM THAT BODY, and will honor the profound gift that it is to exist in this state.

To be a human being is a magical and mystical experience. To allow for the mystery is a humbling experience of surrendering to the profound unknown that likely isn’t even possible for this brain formed from clay to comprehend. 

Does this mean I’m an atheist? Absolutely not. Does this mean I think religion is wrong? Nope. I believe we are all on our own paths that inform the fabric of the lives we came here to lead. We all have a purpose and place. We are all right and wrong about everything.

Being a human means being a servant to life. It means diversity of thought. It means pain, joy, sadness, bliss. It’s not meant to be happy… it’s meant to BE FELT deeply, through and through. 

I hold a profound love and respect for all thoughts and beliefs about what it means to be human… simply because THAT is the human experience. 

My own inner peace comes from talking with and honoring my ancestors and the Great Mother. I am oriented toward a meta perspective of life, and I find great meaning in resting my monkey mind in the metaphorical hands of those who are orchestrating this all. I offer them trust, and I surrender to the intensity of this journey, no matter what it may be or how it might hurt.

I believe that this Universe is more complicated and incredible than our human minds could ever, ever, ever conceptualize. I hold that in my heart, and turn toward the presence of What Is Now – the work I am currently asked to do.

Life is fleeting. It is a gift. To be fully alive within your life is to humbly accept the gift and to take seriously the challenge of honoring that gift with every cell of your being.

Dying doesn’t start at the end of our lives. Dying begins with our very first breath.

And so we practice having a good death in each breath that we take. Within our embrace of life is also our embrace of death.

Death Nesting and Death Sitting is an Honor

Sitting by my mother as she labored through her last breaths was an honor. To watch her face contort as she gasped for air, to watch the beads of sweat forming with the intense effort, to see her forehead turn a darker color as her heart fought to continue beating blood through her veins… 

Dying is a labor of love, honoring a life lived as fully as that human was capable of doing.

Listening as the remaining air escaped from her lungs… Feeling her pulse as it became like a tiny butterfly, fluttering in her wrist. Listening for her heart, only to hear the gasps of her remaining breath. Watching as her body released the remaining stored life energy, leading to deep relaxation of the nervous system as she let go…

Seeing as her blood succumbed to gravity, turning the back of her body a purple color and the visible surface of her body so very marble white. 

Running my fingers through her sweaty hair. Kissing her cheek, forehead, and nose. Telling her she did good. Whispering in her ear, one more time, “I love you”. 

The hospice team showed up shortly thereafter, helping my sister and I (plus our daughters) to bathe her and dress her. I rubbed my homemade tallow balm over all of her skin, giving her one last loving massage — imprinting in mind how her soft pliable skin felt, for the very last time. Memorizing her scars, the way her chin curves, the slope of her nose, those beautiful fingers I adored as a child…

It took us a bit of work to figure out how to convince her jaw muscles to relax so we could close her mouth (thank goodness for a resourceful hospice team). We dressed her in her white LDS temple clothes, and laid her to rest on her hospital bed for a few hours. 

Sitting with a dead body is truly an honor. Especially one that is your mother’s. Our culture has created such fear around death and bodies. Some of it is instinct – we are programmed to always seek survival and life, and avoid death. 

But our culture in particular has lost its traditional death rituals. We no longer care for our own dead. We don’t often look death in the face and say, “I see you and honor you.” Instead, we hand it over to paid professionals who go about hiding it from us (as we do almost everything else). 

I wanted to honor my mother and myself by doing death in an ancestral way. It took a bit of conversing with my siblings, as they have entirely different worldviews from my own. But lucky for me, I didn’t get a lot of pushback and most of them instead gave their blessing.

So after my mom died, I filed her death myself as the dispositioner and took over care of her body. 

We made tea.

We admired her pretty face and soft silver hair.

After my sister left, my daughter and I sat with her. We discussed next steps for body care. 

There was chaos with funeral plans with my siblings, and I regret that I allowed it to cause me stress and to make choices with her body out of worry instead of my intention of slowness. 

But these are our processes too. Grace is always a requirement in times of learning and growth.

We won’t always get it right, and that is absolutely okay. We’re not meant to.

And so, a few hours after my mother’s death, my daughter and I carried her body out to her beautiful handmade wooden casket that I had bought for her the Saturday before. We settled her into her final resting nest, covering her with a soft white blanket I had bought just for this occasion. I brought out the ice packs to start the cooling process.

The next day, my sister-in-law and children helped me to set up a cozy sanctuary to contain the casket, to offer privacy, and to create protection from the outer world. 

After much discussion with my siblings and my friends who are knowledgeable about home funerals, I decided to ask a local mortuary if I could keep her in their refrigerator for a few days, and so we delivered her to them just yesterday.

I kept her body for 3 days, keeping her cool during the day and warm at night. It was an honoring process that I am so very glad I was able to do for her and for me (and for my children to witness, as well). After being asked to delay the funeral for 9 days, however, I decided that enlisting the help of community resources was a wise choice. 

Lucky for me, the local mortuary was all too willing to help and the funeral director that helped us move her into the fridge was super sweet. He said he had never had anyone ask for this before, but that he loves it when families get involved with their loved one’s care. He also looked right at my mom and said, “Hello, Judith” when I opened the casket, which felt intensely beautiful as well.

One of my contemplations in this experience is that dead bodies are a lot like cut flowers. Fragile. Beautiful. To preserve a flower, we shouldn’t touch its petals and should leave it as undisturbed as possible. To preserve a body for longer than 3 days, we must offer the same precautions and gentle respect. 

So she will lie undisturbed in her casket in a temperature regulated environment for 5 days, until I retrieve her and bring her back to my sanctuary for final preparations the evening before the funeral and burial.

Caring for a Dead Body is Normal

I know you are wondering…is it weird caring for a dead body? Yes. And no.

Yes, because it's a mental trip to see my mother as a dead person. To watch the videos on my phone of her just last week, full of life. And then to gaze at her body, watching as it becomes more and more solidified in its dead form. 

But it also isn’t weird at all, as it feels encoded in my bones. It’s a very human thing to care for one’s dead. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. It wasn’t until the funeral industry took over that things changed for the past few generations.

It is perfectly normal to care for, love on, and mourn for those we love — in a physical form. 

We are left with their bodies, and so they become the symbols of our love and the receivers of our rituals.

As it should be. 

Death is not an intellectual process. It is an embodied experience in which we viscerally process a loss. It is a hands on, witnessing, touching, all five senses experience. Our nervous system needs that experience in order to integrate the reality of loss.

Our mammal brains need to see death to comprehend loss.

We are deeply afraid of pain and discomfort in our culture. And yet, it is in the pain and discomfort that we find our deepest, wisest, most alive selves.

As someone who has been committed to being completely used up by the time I die, I have committed to a life of showing up, fully present for the intense experiences. 

I’ve learned through many experiences to face the fear and do it anyway (despite my anxious tendencies). Because in that fear lies a seedling that leads to wisdom and resilience.

In other words, many things led up to this moment of capacity. The resiliency I built through breaking my ankle gave me the strength to care for my mom through dementia, and to then care for her through death and afterwards too.

The scaffolding built by these experiences is deeply human. (There is a lot of research detailing how much meaning and deep inner satisfaction we derive from intense, hard experiences that make us stronger.)

There is another mother story that is missing from our culture however – one I had glimpses of, but have now stepped into on full blast…

When Our Mother Dies, We Begin Our Own Unwinding

As Z. Budapest said, “There are two kinds of people on Earth… Mothers and their children.”

Our mothers weave us together in their wombs, and then go to retrieve our souls from the stars during labor and birth. They breathe life into us at birth, and then sustain that life from their breasts, hands, and hearts. 

The mother-baby dyad is one of deep visceral attachment. We need our mothers more than any other human being on Earth. Yes, even more than our fathers (they have other important roles).

Mothers are a special kind of creature. Our ancestors believed in mother worship, which likely came from biological necessity. Their gods were of female form, because what else would make sense in a world where babies magically appear from a woman’s vagina?

Women are incredible creatures and their power has been eclipsed by longstanding cultural norms that have tried to repaint them as weak and pathetic. 

We are anything but that.

Mothers give birth to every single human alive. They give them part of their soul and heart, with which to sustain their life. 

They selflessly love and nurture more than their own lives.

They are vulnerable. They are powerful.

They are the embodiment of the Great Mother in all of her aspects (both dark and light).

Mothers are the core of humanity, and all else is built around them, and always has been, from the beginning.

They did not come second. They came FIRST.

The loss of a mother isn’t just a sad thing. It is the loss of our first and most important primal attachment. 

It is the loss of our maternal thread that extends for hundreds of generations. 

It is the beginning of the unweaving of our own lives, as our mothers take with them the thread that was holding us connected to them. 

When they are gone, we are now handed the mantle of thread-holder for our own children, keeping the web together for them as our own begins to unweave behind us.

The loss of our mothers is a profound rite of passage that deserves honoring and a humble surrender to the cycle of life and death. It asks us to sit at the feet of death, and to make friends there. To invite death in for tea and a chat. To pull back the cultural mask that covers death and to recognize the beauty underneath. 

Inviting in death means deep acceptance of our own someday-deaths. It means establishing a deeply beautiful connection to the Dark Mother. 

It means allowing our friendship with death to inform our deepest love and passion for life.

And so with my mother’s passing, I can feel that death has moved into my being, and it feels warm and safe. It feels right. It feels as though a torch has been handed to me to carry through the rest of my life, honoring these deeply human experiences. 

I embrace the dark nest that death provides, while also embracing the ambition and excitement I have for planning the most wildly alive life I can manage to create in my remaining time.

“Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born.”

–Stephen Jenkinson

Saying Goodbye… For Now

I love you, mama. 

Thank you for allowing dementia to take down your walls, so I could finally love on you the way I felt in my soul.

Thank you for showing me fire and igniting it within me. 

Thank you for loving me so much that you protected me as a child, and sacrificed your own security to protect mine.

Thank you for the endless years of piano, violin, organ, and voice lessons, and for your deep love of my playing…and for always singing with me and instilling in me a love for music.

Thank you for teaching me that my body is whole and healable through deep nutrition and self-care — you might not have gotten it entirely right, but the deep lesson in body love and trust is in my core knowing because of you.

Thank you for showing me how deeply women hurt and how our world harms mothers at their core, and for giving me the strength to do my own life differently.

Thank you for inspiring me to change the world for other women and to be part of a movement of women who are choosing to exist differently.

Thank you for trusting me to care for you, for letting me make choices for you, for allowing me to feed you, clothe you, and manage your wellbeing in these last few months. 

Thank you for the many years of love you gave, even if it came out in a tortured soul sort of way. I see you and I see your love. I see the purity at the core of your being.

Thank you for trusting me with your deepest, darkest stories, for teaching me that even the meanest people can be deeply kind, and that they have hurts that deserve being witnessed and being held by another.

And thank you, thank you for the sweet childlike person you shared with me during our nighttime rituals over the past few months. For allowing me to help you to finally feel safe. For letting me tuck you into bed and making you cozy. For your childlike chatter at bedtime, with your eyes half-closed, telling me about your day with a sleepy voice. For your adorable childlike “Yep” responses to my questions. For the soft clothes you let me dress you in. For letting me bake you molasses and oatmeal raisin cookies, and how excited you would be about them. For the way you would be especially excited about those damn Ensure drinks (with ingredients you once would have balked at) — even just a few days before death, when I was hand-feeding you sips, your adorable excitement about tastes of this stuff will always leave me with fondness.

I’ve cried and grieved many times over the past month, as you slipped away from me one bit at a time. First, the sweet child disappeared as we increased your pain medication. Then our bedtime ritual was taken away by a constant state of half-sleep from narcotics. Then your voice disappeared, as you proceeded to say everything in a barely perceptible whisper. The food stopped, as you lost interest and appetite. You were no longer interested in treats or chocolate — though your excitement over a bite of my birthday pumpkin pie is a memory I’ll treasure forever.

I knew the last time I clipped and filed your fingernails and toenails that it would be the last time, and I memorized the experience. I massaged your feet with the foot balm I bought you last Christmas. You relaxed into a peaceful sleep, and I knew this was the one to remember.

You died in bits and pieces, and I grieved deeply for each one as it floated away…only now existing in memory.

As it should be. 

Grief is a process without a destination. 

For a time, I will bathe in the pool of grief. Loving and losing, over and over again. Grieving the relationship that could have been (though I have already been grieving that for over 30 years now). Grieving the gift that dementia gave me for a short few months, only to then snatch you away.

Allowing the grief to bring energy for the rest of my life, to form even deeper bonds with my own children. 

Grief, the teacher, the wisdom-maker. 

Practicing future elderhood, one intense wisdom-creating experience at a time.

Thank you, mama. For living life so intensely and loving life so profoundly. Thank you for your fire. I accept the torch of life, and promise to do your fire proud. Rest in the cosmic euphoria and mystery, and I’ll take good care of your body, returning her to the Earth that gave her form. 

Love you forever. XOXO

In another universe,
I meet my mother
when she is a child.
We go for a walk at the seaside
and she tells me all the things
she loves about the world.
We share a hundred jokes
and she laughs so easily,
without a single worry.
I want to meet that version of her.
Wide eyed and full of joy.
Easy laughter and carefree.
Before the same world
she loved so deeply
broke her heart.

—Nikita Gill