Dying

Now that my mother is in hospice care and in her last hours of a long life, I sit by her bed and am reminded of the many similar deathbed vigils I have kept professionally. I suppose it is a verification of my humanism that I am not going through any tumultuous cognitive dissonance in this situation. I am feeling the same deep sadness over the human condition...mine, my mother's and all the others. We have the privilege of understanding our lives in this scientific age, but also the suffering of knowing our inevitable loss of them.

My mother has been angry. Since surviving breast cancer over twenty-five years ago, she has become something of a professional patient. I believe she has five or six doctors for various parts of her anatomy. She has seen them all regularly by religiously booking appointments exactly within the payment parameters of her rather generous health insurance plan, a benefit of her well earned retirement. Since her recent diagnosis with an untreatable cancer, which is now killing her, my 91-year-old trooper has said repeatedly with consternation and frustration, "I don't believe this happened to me."

We've discussed the inevitability of death and dying for years. Sometimes our discussions were heated since she did not want to do any planning for this inevitability. "I'll just go to a nursing home. That's what I want!" This was always her discussion closer, for which I had skeptical respect. Now she is unconscious in the nursing home near her home, where she holed up for the last eight years since my father's death after 60 years of marriage.

I sit by her bed as she is breathing the deep, sonorous breaths of the dying. Last evening I drew her portrait twice as I kept my vigil. I drew the lines, some the same as those in my own face, and shared that suspended space between self-conscious life and oblivion. All my technical knowledge of what is happening is useless now. I have gotten her to a safe place, where she is meticulously cared for by good people. She is beyond waking. We are beyond discussions or disagreements or difficult histories.

I once asked Richard Alpert, also known as Ram Dass, how he continued to do work with the dying over the years. He said serenely, "You must fall in love with each one and then let him go." My mother's death is the death of the source of my own life. I am of her. This is the ultimate realization, taken in with full mindfulness and feeling, of my own human condition. With this understanding, how can I bear anything but compassion for another living being?