Adjustment

After several weeks dealing with my mother's declining health and ultimate demise, I can feel life returning to normal. I actually colored and uploaded a cartoon yesterday, something I hadn't done for several days--in part because I was wrapped up in family matters, and in part because my internet was down, due, it turns out, to a faulty modem even though all signs pointed to a server problem. Talk about bad timing! To be without internet access when you're trying to coordinate a memorial service, newspaper obituaries and all the other attendant matters of a death? Disastrous! Still, we all soldiered on. The obit will be over a week after the fact, but it will still say the same thing, and simply let people outside the core circle know about her demise a bit later than they would have if I'd acted more quickly. The organizations mentioned will still accept any donations people send, Mom will still have had a long life, and she'll still be gone. I haven't melted or lost my mind. Waves of sorrow appear unexpectedly, but for the most part, I'm handling it well. Part of it may be that I believe in Heaven.

Not the Heaven that we see in movies, books and TV. Not a place where we look the same as we did on earth...although someone made the delightful suggestion that everyone in heaven is in their thirties, because that's probably when most people have some money, have a loving family and are still healthy. I think it's indescribable. I had your basic out-of-body experience on an operating table once, and I recall a sense of calm so free of anything negative that I think I've only experienced that same calm for maybe thirty seconds total in all the years since--with that thirty seconds made up of a second here, two seconds there...we're talking True Peace.

It turns out that my experience was almost identical to that of many people who've "died" and come back. I described it to a friend years ago, having never read anything on the subject, and she told me with wide eyes that mine matched the descriptions she'd read by others who had "come back". Some scientific studies have suggested that neurons and electrical signals in the brain just fire and create these experiences in the brain; that none of it is "real" beyond our thinking it is. That may be true, although I have a very hard time believing it.

But it doesn't really matter, because if a person does just Die when they pass, they still live on in memories and in the people they've raised, befriended, or otherwise affected. I know that's a cliche, but I can't deny that things I do, the way I react in certain situations, little tics or quirks I may have, are all a function of the people I've known.

As a young man, I thought that it was a cop-out when people said someone has "passed" or "passed away", that it was just a way to avoid saying they'd died. Now, I think it's an acknowledgment that they haven't ceased to exist, but that they've moved on to another state. If the atheists are right, it still doesn't diminish the power of the aftereffects of a person's life on earth as a living thing. A life still counts, even after it's done. I'm quite comfortable in not knowing or trying to figure out what the afterlife is, or even if it's a part of some continuum that doesn't fit our conventional notions of Time. I figure it's either what I briefly experienced after floating above the O.R. watching the doctors and nurses rushing around and then "going to the light", or it's something else, or it's just the way we live on in others. I think there's a Oneness that we share and maybe merge into at some point. I don't know. No one does.

My mother passed away last week. Wherever she is or isn't, I have faith that although she's died, she hasn't Died, at least not completely. I have faith that she's in a better place in some form, a form of which I can't conceive; but those who don't believe that will have to concede that when I do something the way she would have, or don't do something because she taught me not to, she's "alive" in that action.

She did something funny that I only learned of after she was gone. A Virgin Mary is sometimes called a Bloody Shame, and, mixing up the two names, she once asked a waiter, unintentionally, for a Bloody Virgin. She was very embarrassed at the time. I just learned, however, that in later years she did the same thing on purpose several times, telling her dining companions and the waiter that she was old now, and didn't have to worry what people would think of her. My mother was always a bit straight-laced; you'd never hear her say anything risque or ironic--or so I thought. Now, whenever I write something sarcastic or edgy, I'll think of her. And if someone is offended, I'll say, "My Mom made me do it."