Meditations on a Death
“And death shall have no dominion” Dylan Thomas
Fifty years ago, I lay blissfully beside my newborn daughter as she drew her first breaths; one year ago, I sat vigil at her hospital bedside when she drew her last.
On the day of my daughter’s death, her room in the ICU was tranquil and serene, reverent almost. The beeping monitors gone, and the ventilator removed, I felt as if I were in a sacred Temple, where a mysterious passage from one world to another was going to take place.
Several months before my daughter died, I told her of a vision I had…a vision of glorious golden angels waiting to greet her. Deborah said she had the same vision but would much rather stay earthbound.
When I think back, it seems only a moment ago when the sound of my baby girl’s first cries rang in my ears. When Deborah left this world, finally free from the suffering of the multiple bone marrow transplants, the chemo, the pills with unpronounceable names, and the debilitating radiation, I literally felt her spirit soar above her troubled body, released and joyous.
During the last months of Deborah’s illness, I often thought of the actress Debbie Reynolds who died within 24 hours of her daughter’s death. I wondered if that would be my fate as well. Independent of any effort of my own, however, my life force stayed strong with no indication that I would follow my daughter to her grave. If I sometimes wondered how I would have the strength to go on after she left, that feeling was fleeting.
Heavily sedated, unconscious, and on a ventilator for the better part of two weeks, and with all of Deborah’s doctors agreeing that no recovery was possible, my son-in-law arranged a farewell Zoom meeting. Over 100 family and friends logged in to say goodbye. The leave-taking was as much for us as it was for Deborah.
When the time came to disconnect the ventilator and the tubes and wires, Deborah’s seven-year-old twin girls insisted on saying good-bye to their mother in person. I was afraid that they would be repelled by what she looked like, or terribly frightened. They were not, and one of the girls sang “The Body Electric”, a song their mother taught them. To this day, the twins honor their mother’s memory with that song.
On the day Deborah died, I didn’t know what to expect, but I fully anticipated that thoughts and feelings of emptiness, despair, and loss, would permeate every aspect of my being. Instead, I experienced grief as a physical force, independent of me, with its own momentum and waves of inconsolable sorrow, rising and falling according to its own dynamic laws and its own imperative.
My grief was in fact a whole body response, so intense and consuming that thoughts had no place. Triggered or not, tears burst out, gushing and sputtering. In addition to my heart and mind, my muscles, sinews, and tissues, reflected the magnitude of my loss, and each cell and fiber and fascia added their inchoate voices to the chorus.
Amazingly, after the tears came a period of profound joy, playfulness, and laughter at the absurdity of our belief that we are in control of our lives and destiny.
I am humbled by my inability to save my only child, but I rest in the wisdom of knowing that I do not know. I welcome the touch of a hand, the kindness of a simple remark of support, and ignore the ideologies and the bromides that cannot measure up to the Mystery.
And wonder of wonders, I still feel her vibrant presence. Not in the same way as the first year when I felt her enter my body, borrow my eyes to look at life and my legs to dance, watching over me, her children, and her husband. My experience of her differs now. She may not be on this earth, but she is in my heart and mind and body. I speak of her in the present tense, and share my day with her. She walks with me. In accepting the Mystery of it all, there is peace and beauty and awe and love.
I have no idea of what happens after death, but my own thinking does not correlate with what many spiritual traditions describe with such absurd certainty. I know that the experiences of seeing the spirits of the dead is considered part of the hallucinatory compensation of grief. But the experts are wrong. The dead do make themselves felt and heard.
The love we felt for each other still fills me. I am grateful for the amount of support and medical expertise that went into trying to save her. I am at peace with our relationship, for whatever discomforts there may have been in our mother/daughter relationship, all is subsumed by the love we felt for each other.
My year of suffering has made me kinder, more compassionate and more detached. What I don’t do is try to figure out the meaning of why my daughter was taken from me.
What has not changed is my faith, which has not been shaken. It has deepened, and I accept and understand that we are each a part of the natural world. We are part of the Mystery that no amount of science can explain. We fancy ourselves in charge of our own destinies, responsible for our successes and failures. In this regard, our extraordinary technological accomplishments have confused us.
We have forgotten that nature has its own laws, and when we perceive ourselves as the center of the universe we forget that nature is impersonal and acts for its own reasons. Death is never at a remove, and the awareness of death, which I have carried my entire life, has given me the gift of grace.
Love is what sustains us: God’s love, if we can feel it, love of partners, children, parents, and community, if we are lucky enough to find it, love of nature with its cruelty and beauty, if we only look at it.
The surprise is not the depth of my grief or its unpredictable appearance and intensification. The surprise is my capacity for joy, for appreciation of the splendor in the everyday, in the hummingbirds on my porch and monarch butterflies on the threshold of my house, at the summer, thick with heat and robust foliage. It’s a child’s innocent hand grasping mine with total trust. It is walking with the living memory and presence of a wonderful being who graced our lives for 50 years.
In the end, Love is all we have.
