Sitting with my dying mother is possibly the hardest thing I have ever done. The only thing that comes closest is the 4 days I spent without food or water in the Arizona desert on a vision quest. This passage is equally grueling and exhausting, a test of faith and how to be with sorrow. Like not taking in food or water, facilitating the death of the person you love the most goes against all biological instinct. But my mother has advanced Alzheimer’s dementia and cannot move, speak or swallow. Mom’s past wishes still echo clearly in my ear: “Never let me become one of those people, stuck in one of those places.” Doctor Murray has agreed that she need not and take food and she drinks from a pink saturated sponge at the end of a lollipop stick.
“Dying is not for sissies”, my dear friend Evie Frost once said. Over the last 3 years of her life, my mother Susan has gradually lost touch with the way the world is constructed. First she lost the words for people, places and things (how is it that names for objects go first? Is it most obvious that the names we attach to the world of name and form are made up?) Then she lost the ability to read, watch tv, order from a menu. And further—to speak her needs and recognize people. Her capacity to cognize most everything on the planet has vanished, except for the vanilla ice-cream the aid brought her yesterday and the sound composition to Ave Maria I play to her on Spotify (the church reared part of the brain may never fossilize). But mom knows it is me through my touch. Touch seems to cut through the fog of anonymity. Immediate, corporeal and tender, it bypasses the mind that conjures up sense.
So I perch beside her on the bed, one had on the top of her heart, the other cradling the top of her skull. Like palpating the soft spot of an infant, where you can feel the murmur of a new born infant’s heart, I feel a synchronicity between my hands. They entrain together like crickets in the garden. The upper most bone in the body is the sacred bone in both Christianity and yoga. It is seat of the crown chakra, the sahasrara, home to “the thousand petaled lotus”. In Latin it is the calvaria, so named after the hill outside Jerusalem where Christ was crucified.
It is then that I feel a little flutter kick underneath my hand, a tremor like a sudden wind reminiscent of the strong kicks my mother always said I gave in the final term of her pregnancy carrying me in her womb. “You were knocking and bumping all day long,” she would say. Now my mother’s nerves bang around as her hands and shoulders twitch and shudder. My mother’s ravaged brain finally begins to let go of its plaque encased grip. Like an insect trapped in amber resin, a golden aura surrounds her.
