Originally posted by: skyking
Mom has finally found peace at 12:25 AM. My sisters said she would make it past midnight and that was important to them.
I believe it was important to Betty, and that it was her final act of will on this earth. It's just a belief I choose to hold.
Our bodies can be broken and will eventually wither away, but our spirit, like your Mom's, lives on in all the people whose lives we have touched and inspired while we were here.
Any one of us alone may seem laughably inconsequential. We come and go - 80 short years or so - in an
eyeblink in the multi-millennial scheme of things, but linked over generations by bonds of family and friendship, we DO make a difference.
Men most of us don't know stormed ashore at Normandy beach knowing they would most probably die so that we can now sit here with our 'puters and ipods and bitch about the rising price of gas.
We owe each other EVERYTHING. No man is an island. Only in family and community do we prevail. Only in family and community do we have even the slightest chance of doing so.
Perhaps the greatest act of blind, defiant courage and faith is that of a mother giving birth, bringing a helpless, squalling baby into this world of random cruelty and ignorant, deadly bigotry.
You and I are that baby.
This life has what meaning we give to it. Whether it has any other meaning at all can't be proven by logic and is best left to the realm of faith.
I have that faith. It can't be argued one way or the other, it is simply my choice.
Nothing quite surpasses a mother's fierce, protective love for her young. It is one of the ugliest tragedies of all for a mother to outlive one of her own, to have to bear helpless witness to the death of a life that for nine long months before it could even breath on its own lived and breathed within her, that suckled at her teat thereafter, drawing its life's nourishment literally from within her.
That is a tragedy that can break part of even the strongest spirit.
But your Mom had one last act of love and protection and defiance within her, Kelly, and kept her broken body breathing a full 25 minutes past midnight, that her family might forever be able to separate her death from your brother's death, that one deep sadness might not forever compound another.
This I believe. It is just my belief. But faith in the face of tragedy is what can keep us going.
My Dad died at age 89. He had an indomitable will. His very last act of will was, I believe, similar to your Mom's.
He kept it largely hidden from me, but he was slowly losing his capacities to senile dementia. Afterwards, I found the long, detailed lists he'd make each night to guide him through the next day.
He drove to his doctor, who then apparently scolded him for driving. Enraged, he stormed out, only to be found a couple of hours later wandering around the parking lot. They institutionalized him against his will, and for an entire week, he refused to give them my contact info because he didn't want me involved.
Finally, they got hold of me and I made plans to fly down and bring him back to live with me. We both knew this would be a great challenge for both of us. We are, uhhhh, way too much
alike.
He was completely lucid in our phone conversations, as he always had been, but the one thing he kept asking is if he would have his own bathroom, my one clue to the onset of his dementia.
My father was a very proud man, and crusty, to say the least, but I loved him and he loved me and we both were secure in that knowledge. Our last words to each other on the phone that night were, "I love you, Dad" and "I love you, son."
The next morning, LITERALLY as I was walking out my front door to my ride to the airport, the phone rang and I went back. My Dad had passed away that morning. He was found, fully clothed on top of his bed with one leg dangled over the side.
They literally didn't know how he had died, there was simply NOTHING medically or physically wrong with him that could have caused him to pass away like that, so they fudged the damn death certificate and put "multiple causes of old age" on it.
I believe that was HIS last act of will on this Earth, to spare us both the ripe indignity of his having to be dependent on his son. It is just my belief, but there you have it.
There was a song I wanted to (attempt) to sing at my Dad's funeral. But then, my wife Jessie unexpectedly died first, one short year before. She was only 42. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
So I sang parts of that song,
For A Dancer, at her service instead. It pretty much sums up my life's view. Here are the parts I "sung":
I don't know what happens when people die
Cant seem to grasp it as hard as I try
Its like a song
I can hear playing right in my ear
That I cant sing
I cant help listening
And I cant help feeling stupid standing round
Crying as they ease you down
cause I know that you'd rather we were dancing
Dancing our sorrow away
(right on dancing)
No matter what fate chooses to play
(there's nothing you can do about it anyway)
Just do the steps that you've been shown
By everyone you've ever known
Until the dance becomes your very own
No matter how close to yours
Another's steps have grown
In the end there is one dance you'll do alone
[...]
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed
somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive
But you'll never know
My heart and my thoughts are with you, Kelly. The freight train has gone roaring past, and now the track is clear again, and our lives, with whatever meaning we chose to ascribe to them, go on.
But, Kelly, know this, the apple does not fall far from the tree. You come from great stock and have been imbued with the very finest of personal values.
You are an extraordinarily good, good man, one I am proud to call my friend.
Your Mom lives on within you.
Death be not proud.