My first teacher

One of the more recent teachers I have had related to death-care impressed me by always sharing a story of her teacher. I’ve heard her present a number of times and she always starts with the story of her first teacher. I have taken that practice to heart. I am grateful that I have been blessed by many great teachers over the years, formal and otherwise, but I know that one of the most formative teachings that I have received about dying and death was from my mom, Lillian.

This is her on the back of a boat in the Kenora harbour, on the Lake of the Woods where I spent my summers growing up.

Her death was untimely,  she was only 64. But she had been ill for some time and when the time came for her death she actually embraced it and she talked openly about her dying, at first it was really hard to listen and not rush in with assurances. For some reason – probably because I could not anticipate the enormity of the grief that lay ahead – I was open to the conversation. She made room for me there. When I asked her what it felt like to die for her – because she had had a few close calls already, she said it was like ‘walking into a big green field’.

At the same time as she knew she was dying, she did not want to stop living and spoke of all the things she was not ready to lose.  But at the end she was actively seeking her death as a relief from her condition. Sometimes she joked about it.  She wondered why she was still lingering near the end and she decided it was because too many people were praying for her – so she tried to turn off those taps and tell people – stop praying that I live.  I remember people being shocked to hear her say that out loud. But it was simply what she wanted.  Her faith, wasn’t one she put into a lot of words, but it held her.

She was present with her full self pretty much right until she died, on the day after my 22^nd birthday.  Maybe some of you have sat at that seat at the end of the world with someone, or wished that you had been able to.  You know that it is a sacred place. What I have discovered since is that it is always a different place.  None of the deaths I have attended since my mom’s were as gracious, and some were downright terrible.

The thing about my mom’s death for me that leaves me wanting is not the time before she died, but the time right after her death.  When she was no longer able to guide me, I was at a loss. Literally. I didn’t know what to do after she died – do I stay, do I go, do I touch her, what now? There was nobody there, except an inarticulate surgeon who stopped by to make a “pronouncement”, and eventually a kind nurse who helped me get her things. But that was it.

Both my mom’s presence, and the absence of any teachers in that very sacred window of time following her death have shaped me, in a way that has kind of hollowed out a space, in me. Today the edges of it are more smooth than rough, but it can still open even 34 years later.

I know now that the person I wanted there at the time after her death was someone who could have helped me to tend to her body, to wash her, to dress her, and to bless her for the last time. I met that person a few years ago, in fact I know a bunch of them now and I aspire to be that person for others.

My mom actually didn’t speak fondly of her Irish roots related to death care. She recalled a story as a young child of being forced to kiss a dead relative good-bye and she still bristled when she told it as an adult. I’m not sure she would go with me where I have come to want to linger at time of death. My mom lost her own mom as a young woman and I wonder if that’s a part of what was missing from her own experience. These are the questions that still linger for me as I carry her loss this many years later. I know it in my bones, that tending to our own dead is a part of my ancestral practice. And I believe that as we reclaim some of those ways (and leave some of them in the past — like forcing the children to kiss the dead people) we connect to the cycles of life and death that are at the heart of humanity.