Like the pattern of a snowflake or the imprint of a fingertip, what makes life so beautiful is that every single being is unique. We could say that too about our arrival into this world, that each delivery at birth is unique. So it resonates true for the way we die. No two deaths are the same. That every death is different, leaves the entourage of care—the doctors, nurses, aids and loved ones—at a loss as to exactly what to do. What I have learned in sitting bedside with my mother, holding her hand as she entered the tunnel of death, is that dying, like living, is a totally awesome, perplexing and unfathomable thing. For every mile we walk on the long road through life, for every dip and curve we must navigate, the homeward turn toward death is the most mystifying, arduous and humbling.
Dying is full of contradiction. When we speak of death, when we say in the aftermath “so-and-so died”, we whittle down what in real time is a long, relentless, convulsing, indefinable ordeal to a single word, “death”, as if a three-year or three-month odyssey into dying happens at the drop of a hat. Perhaps it is our massive fear of dying that makes us truncate the whole process, as if you could simply lie down and be done with it. But death is like riding a horse across wide open country. It is full of stops and starts, aches and pains, and long boring stretches across barren, unrecognizable spaces.
When I arrived in Charlottesville Virginia to accompany my mother in her death, I was crystal clear on one thing. I would remain with her to the end. I told myself I would stay in the saddle and ride it out. In doing so, I dropped everything I had going on–the daily routine of sending and receiving, all meetings and deadlines put off. I unplugged from the world at large, because I wanted to be undivided and undistracted in my remaining days with my mother. Given the immense influence my mother had on me, I felt no ambiguity about this choice. My mother had introduced me to yoga in the late 70’s. She sustained a personal yoga practice for four decades. She was an empathetic, big-hearted person, a counselor, a mentor and teacher to so many.
In years past, when I would visit my mother, each morning she and I would practice yoga together in the family room. On many occasion at the end of practice, we would sit back-to-back, spines touching. I recall asking her, “Mom what is your experience like in meditation?” Sensitive and intuitive, she was intimate with the unseen and the unspeakable. In the private space of prayer, she was guided providentially. She spoke of the angels who would come to her. She described them as protectors, keepers of faith. She asked that they watch over her and her loved ones. As the days wore on and mom was confined to the bed, motionless, eyes shut, her breath wisp-like and becoming more distant, I whispered to her that it was time to go to her angels.
While steadfast in my determination to stay with her, I was also confounded and at a great loss. Death can be such a long and grueling march. How many hours, how many days and nights will leaving take? It had been twelve days and I was two-thousand miles from home, while my younger brother, Michael, was eight-thousand miles from his home in India. Being with the dying brings up an immense kind of helplessness. It is as if you are traveling in the wake of a ship, sucked forward by the turbulent chop of roiling water. In our inadequacy, we grasp for something predictable:Will death come in the day or night? Does she wish to die alone or in the company of family? How many days from now? But death just snubs all desire to know or name or measure. In the sway of death, the living are totally outmatched. There is nothing we can do but allow time to unfold, and so open to a kind of bewilderment. It is like an encounter with God, I suppose, where you are shrouded in an all-encompassing, incomprehensible mystery. Time does not care about strategies or protocol. The most we can do is relinquish control to an unseen presence and with two hands together, bow our heads to the great enigma of it all.
