Tag Archives: Grief

The real question of life after death…

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The real question of life after death isn’t whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Statues, Berlin, (c) Carole Craig

 

I am waiting for my mother’s ghost. So far, she has failed to appear.
Do I believe in ghosts? Yes. Whether they are of our own or another’s making is not important.

My mother, proudly atheist, would have said she expected to disappear, a that’s-all-there-is view of life. She was the daughter and the granddaughter of Methodist ministers; neither were good men. When I was still young enough for her to sit beside me as I fell asleep she would tell me about lying in her own bed as a child and  praying every night not to die in her sleep because she knew death would bring her straight to hell. Oblivion was the safer option.

Can anyone really wish for that?

Among my mother’s papers (myriad, obsessive, revelatory), in a folder with the poems about death and the quotes about living well, is an interview with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, she of dying’s five stages fame. The interview is not, as one would expect, about those famous stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — but about life after death and Kubler-Ross’s late life conversion to a firm belief in same. As a scientist, Kubler Ross’s words, it was the empirical evidence, the near death experiences that did it. Later, Kubler-Ross would speak of contact with ‘afterlife’ guides in a manner which would have done any19th Century Spiritualist proud. Before her own death, hobbled by strokes she was asked what stage she had reached. “Anger” she answered and said she would be making no return.

I wonder where my mother was on Kubler-Ross’s list. Certainly not  acceptance, she didn’t die with that. Depression? Perhaps. If so, it seems unkind to ask her back, but among her things I find so many questions.
Love letters. dozens of them, from a man I’ve never heard about. Who was he? Did you love him back? Things she wrote about me that were unkind and seem unfair. Is that the way it really was for you? Terracotta tiles she painted with frail blue fish; they are beautiful. Why did you stop making things with your hands?

The more residue of her life I encounter, the more she becomes like smoke sliding through my fingers. A ghostly form sitting by the bed would be more corporeal. Who were you? I’d ask. I’d like to know.

 

“The worst of it is over now,

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kensal angel
Kensal Green (c) carole craig
“The worst of it is over now, and I can’t say that I am glad.   Amy Hempel, BG, SL TOG, INC, CONT, REP 

I don’t know how to grieve. Perhaps I lost the knowledge when my daughter was very ill and there were times, many times, when it wasn’t clear if she would live or die.  I would come back from the hospital, lie on the bed, and wrap my arms around the dog.  After awhile, I would get up and go on with the inconsequential tasks of living. I believed, egotistically, and probably erroneously, that if I went down into the pit, fell into the abyss, if I didn’t keep going, my daughter wouldn’t either.

With my mother it is different, of course.  My daughter lived, my mother died.  Since her death I’ve filled time with the things to be done: papers to find, papers to sign; her cremation and her wake (yes, in that order),  papers to send, papers to examine, her garden to save, her house to repair, her memorial to plan, her plants to water, her friends to find the right words for. “It was a good, long life, a triumph,” I say.  “She was herself until the very end.”

It is not that I don’t recognise that something is wrong.   I talk too much. I don’t call my friends. I say the stupid things and have to apologise often.   I take the dogs on the short walks only.  I can’t sleep.  I don’t play with the cat. I can’t clean my mother’s room. I sleep too much. I can’t clean my own room.  I almost remember my dreams.   The basement is full of dust.  I don’t cry.

I hoped the Day of the Dead might me teach something.  In the Mission,   people whose faces have been painted white like sugar skulls follow Choc Mool.  When the line arrives at the square, brimming with its alters, its photographs, its candles, it as though some darkness has been conquered, the zombies smothered in a blanket of love. Next year, I think, maybe, I can put something there for my mother there.

But I don’t feel any different and I get on with the jobs.

There is a meeting to plan my mother’s memorial.  We discuss the tickets and who will perform.  What is needed and how to get it.  These are intelligent, competent people.  They loved her. She will enjoy her memorial and I can leave it in their hands.  When the meeting is over I walk out into strange, dark Berkeley and realise that I have now done everything for my mother I had to do.  There is nothing left.  For the first time I am profoundly empty. I am bereft.