My Mother Is Gone

At 4:00 pm on February 1, 2016, my mother breathed her last breath and her heart stopped shortly thereafter. She was in a hospital bed surrounded by family. It was a very hard end for her and everyone around her. It was her choice to go when she did the way she did it, by discontinuing her dialysis treatments. I still don't agree with her choice but it was her choice to make, not mine. She had been very unhappy for a long time.

Once again, everything in my life has stopped and must be rebooted all over again. But that's life, isn't it?

 Helen Loretta Crowe Perry during our last time together in October 2015

Here's some food for thought from other people:

from my good friend Jae Paul Harrison

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with some friends. The conversation flowed through many subjects — some hilarious, many frivolous, but also some substantive and, though discussed with a certain dark wit, markedly sad. All of us at the table had lost a parent, a couple of us just within the past year or so, and I mused at one point that I know (actually KNOW, not just am acquainted with) a full dozen people who had a parent die in 2015.

I know this is the circle of life (or whatever sugarcoated Disney metaphor one prefers), but I can say now with an authority conferred by personal experience, anectodal evidence, and overwhelming proof than no one is every really ready to be orphaned, even if only partially.

Today, a dear friend's mother passed away, making my friend the 16th person I know to lose a parent since I lost my dad last January. Yes, since that dinner just a few weeks ago, 4 more of my friends have been left to make arrangements and find inner reserves of grace they didn't know they had to weather the kind support and helplessness their friends display at these awful moments of grief. We all stand by, hoping that there is something that we can offer, knowing that there really isn't. Comfort comes only with time, and it takes a lot more of that than you might expect if you haven't been through it.

A friend of mine who lost his father shockingly and unexpectedly when my friend was not yet 30 years old told me that he always checks back with the bereaved after 6 months or so because "by then, everyone else has forgotten and moved on, but that's when it really hits you that you never get to have a conversation with your dad ever again, and that's when you feel most alone." In a book by Christopher Buckley, I read, "You don't remember who shows up, but you definitely remember who doesn't."

I don't know where I'm going with this except that my friend lost her mother today. I want better words than "I'm sorry for your loss." I want something more tangible to offer than yet another question for my friend to answer when I ask, as everyone she knows will ask, "Is there anything I can do for you?" I want somehow to ease what cannot be eased and to shine light I do not have into a darkness that I haven't found my way out of even yet.

But all I have is this concern, this compassion, this empathy, and this wish that we didn't have this thing in common.

For all of you who have walked this year with me, carrying your own sorrow for your own losses, you were in my prayers at your freshest loss, and you are still in my prayers.

Always Go To The Funeral
by DEIRDRE SULLIVAN
August 08, 2005
I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.
The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. "Dee," he said, “you’re going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family.”
So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there. When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson's shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, "Sorry about all this," and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss Emerson's mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.
That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, "You can't come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral."
Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.
"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.
On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.