Category: Bereavement

Late Winter Blues

I got depressed a few weeks ago. Off-and-on depression is a familiar experience for me, but this one was especially nasty, on a par with the grief I felt when my mother died. I was thoroughly blindsided, and felt helpless to pull myself out of it.

Right up until that time, I’d been on a bit of a roller coaster emotionally, but I’d been meditating a lot and was on the whole doing well. Then: bam! I got sucked down into the vortex. There was a trigger, which I won’t go into, but it became a source of desperate fascination for me. Meanwhile, in my daily life I was experiencing a lack of the kinds of experiences that help to produce good feelings. The weather was awful, with a grey sky, rain and snow, and worst of all, ice that made walking the dog a treacherous gauntlet. Even worse, my sleep took a nosedive.

After surgery on my right shoulder in January I still had lots of pain, plus I had developed a case of bursitis in my left shoulder that felt even worse than the one that had been cut open. My ability to do the simplest tasks was severely limited. For awhile I had been enjoying scented candles, which provided sensory pleasure that offset some of the physical nastiness, but then I developed a cough and had to give them up. My brain was foggy enough that I couldn’t read anything even remotely challenging.

Then there was the troubling acknowledgment that I needed to stop taking opioids, now that I was over six weeks out from my shoulder surgery. I can’t say that the pills reduced the pain all that much after the initial week, nor did they provide reliable sleep, but they did make me feel good all over. When I reluctantly gave them up, I discovered that I had become dependent on them, maybe even mildly addicted. Suddenly my nerves became a source of jangly noise in my head and my entire body felt miserable. When I tried to meditate I felt like jumping out of my skin, so I stopped sitting entirely. Prior to this experience I had looked on opioids as an occasional respite from pain. I had an ongoing prescription for times when my fibromyalgia pain got to be too much, which I took at the rate of about three times a week. The result was a welcome feeling of euphoria. Now that was gone, and my own brain chemistry was exposed in all its deficiencies.

The result was overwhelming. I felt as if I had become plugged in to all the sadness and melancholy of the universe. I cried a lot, feverishly struggled to find answers, and dove into distractions. In daily life I could barely function; could barely manage to get dressed and make the bed in the morning or make a cup of tea. My poor dog stayed at my side throughout, but I felt no comfort from his presence out of guilt over how little I could respond to him.

People who knew about this implored me to get therapy, but I didn’t have the energy to pick up the phone and make an appointment. There was nothing I could do by way of self-help either. Throughout this time, I was bedeviled by a painful question: why am I still here? Why am I even alive? My mother’s death of two years ago hung over my head like a cloud of unknowing. She was 97 and had dementia, so at the level of all reason it was more than time for her to go, but her death made me an orphan, a motherless and fatherless child, and at 63 years of age I couldn’t make sense of myself with no parents to mirror myself back to me.

It is impossible to describe this feeling to anyone who hasn’t been through it. I have been a practicing Buddhist for almost 10 years; before that I was a liberal-minded Christian for about 30, yet in the condition of existential despair absolutely nothing made sense. There is nowhere for the logical mind to go under such circumstances, no verbal formula to pull oneself out. The trigger for this recent bout of depression involved another person’s death from years ago. I remember thinking, how can a person be here in the world, making an impact, and then be irretrievably gone? It’s not as if I haven’t understood the teaching on impermanence, nor am I unacquainted with the facts of life and its inevitable end. Yet at certain times, this time being the most recent, death presents itself as an impossible enigma. How can this person, that person be gone and I still be here? And what am I even here for?

The conventional wisdom is to get a person out of this dangerous place as quickly as possible, to return them to ordinary life and functioning. But as I look back on it, I recognize that my time in the wilderness was itself a form of wisdom, a doorway, a point of disclosure. Religions offer among other things a means of making sense of death, but no one ever really makes “sense” of it because death, either the prospect of one’s own or coping with someone else’s, is beyond sense. At the point of someone’s death, even the death of a pet, there is a tear in the fabric of our universe that leaves an aperture into the unknown. For a time we are suspended in this radical uncertainty, until the tear closes up and we begin to inhabit a new universe without the missing piece, in its place memories and stories that give comfort. Of course my mother is gone, my father is gone, and all of this was bound to happen unless something worse were to happen and I were to die first. Of course I will die some day, and here’s hoping it’s not before my time and I leave no loose ends. Life goes on, people move on, adult or even minor children readjust, spouses remarry, friends mourn and then resume their social and work lives in new formations. And all the while, under our feet there is the abyss, which can swallow us without warning when we find ourselves undefended.

Stuff

I need to take time out of my narrative and talk about something that is currently on my mind: the disposition of my parents’ stuff. This is something that I have been doing for years now, ever since my mother moved from Cape Cod to Minnesota eleven years ago. She had been a widow for four years at the time of her move. During the period between my father’s death and moving to be near my family, she rattled around alone in the home they’d made together following his retirement in 1980. Of all the places they’d lived throughout their married life, that last house was the one they’d had the longest.

They both experienced the Great Depression and poverty as children. My maternal grandmother, abandoned with two small children in the 1920s, kept the house she’d paid cash for and took in boarders. Neither child had their own bedroom, sleeping on sofas in the dining room or living room. There were days when they didn’t know what they’d have to eat. My paternal grandfather lost his job and was almost broken by it. My father mowed a golf course from sunup until sundown during the summer and either gave the money to his parents or saved it for college tuition. In college, he never had a spare dime for anything beyond the necessities of life.

By the time my own parents embarked on their life together, having enough and then some was important to them. Over the years they accumulated things and experiences, buying Persian rugs, fine china, and nice clothes, and travelling. They kept their frugal ways in their focus on getting a bargain for everything they bought, which gave them a sense of control, seeing it as beating the system. If something nice was on sale my mother would buy it in quantities far beyond what she could use, stockpiling for a rainy day. These habits persisted for as long as she kept her independence.

My father began showing signs of dementia by the time he was 80, and gradually faded over the next five years until he died. My mother cared for him in their home, only resorting to sending him to an adult day care program in his last year or so. While he was declining I noticed that magazines piled up on furniture all over the house, while unfolded laundry accumulated in the bedroom. In the basement there were more clothes and a lifetime’s worth of miscellaneous stuff, with a room off the main basement full of shelves loaded with canned goods. After my father’s death the clutter increased, not to the point of hoarding, but significant nonetheless.

During the four years in Massachusetts my mother spoke over and over of moving out to be with me but had trouble coming to a decision. She’d come out to our place and look at real estate and talk about moving only to change her mind. I became exasperated and let her know it, but it did no good; my mother needed to let her process unfold in its own time. Finally she announced out of the blue one day that she was coming. The wheels were then put in motion to stage her house for sale, secure a place for her here, and dispose of some of her things and move the rest.

What she wanted was a leisurely process of going through her beloved things and deciding where they would go. Some she would give away to select individuals, others to charity, and reluctantly, still others she would let go to the dump. Unfortunately she had no concept of the scope of the task, nor was she prepared to do what was necessary to complete it. In the spring of 2007 she hired someone at $50 an hour to help her pack, but over several months barely scratched the surface. Above all, she was consumed by the belief that wasting usable things was immoral. By summer, however, the clock was ticking. She had hired a realtor and now had a timetable for getting the place ready.

That summer when I travelled to see her with my husband and son I was also in denial. The moment of truth arrived when, on the last day of our visit, I finally went to see the realtor, who told me that I would have to stay on and tend to the process myself; my mother was completely incapable of doing it, and would die in that house long before it was completed. The realtor proposed getting a group of men and their trucks in to cart everything away en masse over a period of two or three days. Trying to take any but minimal furniture out to Minnesota was unrealistic, as was continuing to sift through things. This meant I had to confront my mother and take the fallout.

It was brutal, but it got done. My mother yelled at me, howled against the realtor, hated the men who did the moving, and railed against the waste that ensued. One evening there wasn’t adequate time to load everything on the trucks, so a lot of her stuff stayed outside on the back patio. This was a scandal to my mother, to see her old television sets and stereo equipment from the 1970s sitting out exposed to the elements. I felt torn between her feelings and the prodding of the realtor, between the cruelty of the process and what I had come to see as its necessity. Eventually the house was beautifully staged, it sold for a good price, and my mother moved out to Minnesota, along with what was still a massive load of stuff. It ended up in a pile of boxes in her new apartment. The story of how we got it unpacked and put away will have to wait for another day.

Dreams of my Mother

I dreamed about her last night, my mother. It was a pleasant, warm, sunny day, and I was going to someone’s funeral, at a nice venue. There were a lot of women there, well-dressed, older. We entered a pretty room where tables were set up for lunch. My mother was with me, saying, “I’d like you to arrange my funeral here, Jane.” “But mother,” I replied, “I already had two funerals for you, a funeral and a committal service,” and thought, no, I can’t go through all that again. And it occurred to me that people don’t typically attend their own funeral services in the flesh.

Now we are sitting at a round table, more or less across from each other, with other women we might have known. I look at her closely, studying her face, her hair, her smile. I know every inch of her face, down to the small beauty spot on her nose. How wonderful that we can be together again! Yes, I think, dreaming is a way I can still be with her, even though she’s gone. I leave my seat and walk over to her, burying my face in her hair, breathing in her scent. My lips brush the soft, papery skin of her cheek, all just as I’d remembered.

On the morning of her death day a hospice worker arrived to give her a sponge bath in her bed. I saw the curve of her thigh, so beautiful, and said, “She did a lot of dancing on those legs.” Later, just before she was prepared to be wheeled out of the room by the funeral director, I uncovered her foot for one last look. Her feet were narrow, and the second toe was longer than her big toe, making it hard for her to find shoes that would fit. I touched the toe and smiled.