7-14-92 My mother died.

Fifteen years ago today my mother died. She had been in a coma for about 24 hours. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 42 days before this date.

I am used to her being gone now. It was difficult to lose her 15 years ago. Now I realize that 15 years from now, I will be the same age she was when she died.

I remember months after my mother's death, little three year old MJ would say matter-of-factly, "Mommy is crying again." Sometimes she would even ask me when Grannie would come home from the hospital.

Death. Though I was not an observant Christian then, I believed that someone who died would be with God. I always knew my mother was all right, but I missed her greatly. It seems like the cost of love is losing what or whom we loved. I used to think the pain was so much because I had loved her so much, being an only child, after all.

Today I am also sad remembering the isolation my father and I felt, from each other and from God, whom we did not even think of. We were called and told very early in the morning that my mother had died in the hospital, so we went there in the dark. The room was unlit and gray where she was lying. My father and I looked at her and left. No prayers, no hugs, nothing. We didn't know what to do and didn't know how to turn to each other. Upon returning home, my dad started cleaning and throwing out her things from her bathroom--all the vitamins, swearing about them, as they were tossed. The discarding continued until her funeral.

Maybe some of this is due to my mother not going through all the phases of grief concerning death, according to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. (Denial and isolation; anger; bargaining; depression; and finally acceptance.) My mother always refused the idea that she was dying, and so we never talked about it at all. She didn't cry about it, though I did down in the basement, where MJ and I were staying.

My mother had an experience of the Holy before she died, which is another reason that I believe she did not think the cancer would kill her. Although not "religious," she practiced transcendental meditation. She told me how once during a meditation, she felt (and maybe saw) herself enveloped by light and love. That told her that she would be all right. Even then, I knew that meant that she would be "all right" after she died. I don't think she told anyone else of this experience.

The day my mother went into the coma, she had had an appointment with a pancreatic specialist in Seattle. Weeks before, I had driven her to the Olympic Penninsula to visit a homeopathic specialist. I will always remember how we went on a day that my father was working out of town. As we were driving on the freeway south, my thin, jaundiced mother would crouch out of sight when we thought we saw a car like my dad's approaching. I still have pictures of her sitting with MJ on the ferry.

Since both of my parents' deaths, I have experienced several friends dying, who suffered but also seemed to be "midwifed" into death. Alice, who had pancreatic cancer, and Margy, who suffered from ovarian cancer, both talked about death and God, plus had friends and family who encouraged them with visits, singing, and care. They had longer periods to adjust to the fact of dying, which probably helped, but they also were open to the fear and the inevitable process of dying. A church community helps, too, as would a family that was more intimate than my nuclear family had the capacity to be.

Today I remember my mother and my father. Now they experience the Love they did not know while alive.