Lessons
Caught in the headlights of a car. A startled rabbit. Emotionally paralysed. Nowhere to turn and nowhere to run. Heart broken breathing hard. The last moment has arrived. You can't fight if you can't move. The car's gonna getcha no matter what you do.
Do you accept it? Will you die bitter? Hating? Do you say "I had a good run!"
Do you shed a tear for yourself? If you are startled, what goes through your mind as you realise that you are taking your last breath? Strange things like this have occupied my thoughts lately as I play over my Mum's last days in my head.
My Mum died bitter. She was a lovely person but she was unable to accept that she had a good life and succesfully raised 6 kids. She always thought that somehow things should be better than they were. She put her hopes in things like the lottery and the Catholic Church. Somebody had to offer an alternative, be it money or religion. When they didn't pay off she felt cheated.
We all think this kind of stuff - the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence - and that somehow true happiness is eluding you. Well, a lesson I think I have learned from all this is that true happiness does not really exist and you will probably only be happy when you stop looking for it.
Another thing I've gotten out of all of this is my total lack of belief in any kind of afterlife. As I sat with my family with our Mother after she had passed, it just seemed final. The body was there but there was no breath in it. No overwhelming feeling of spirituality or of the supernatural. No presence of any kind except the energy left behind by what had happened in her life and the effects it had on ours. Memories like fading photgraphs that everyone was at that moment playing in their own heads.
It makes me sad that I feel this as I'd love to think that there is a heaven and a hell and that we meet all our long lost relatives and pets when we get there. Again, I guess this is the promise of true happiness that religion promises us.
I think that it is very important that the energy you leave behind be a positve one. If there is one lesson to be learned in life then that is it.
posted by Dave @ 10:21 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Sorry about your mum, David. I know that paralyzed feeling. When my Gran died a few years ago, I found this poem, in her handwriting, in the bible in her bureau. I think she must have copied it out for herself when her husband, my grandfather, died in the early 80s. I think it helped her, and it helps me, sometimes. We can quibble about the implications of a belief in 'afterlife' as imagined by the church, but what seems to me to be more important is the continuity of life we generate among ourselves, with our memories and our stories. It's important that you remember the good things about your mum, as well as the bad; the laughs as well as the anger. You'll carry her with you, I think, as I carry my father.
http://homepage.mac.com/leahmac/Stories/Pages/poem.html
Leah
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