It’s been four weeks since I held my mother’s hand and watched the life leave her face. A day, a month, a lifetime. It all feels the same. She was 66 years old. She’d retired the year before, when illness robbed her of the ability to do the work she loved. She retired with no time to enjoy the life she had been promised. Just in time to die from her second bout of colorectal cancer, surrounded by family, three days after the Indianapolis 500.
When people ask how I’m doing I hide behind Shakespeare and Jefferson and men tried in the school of grief. I tell them only a fool grieves a soul in heaven, that the time is not far distant when we will be reunited with the ones we have loved so deeply and lost so unfairly. I don’t know if any of that is true, but it lets the other person feel like they’ve done something worthwhile in asking.
I don’t know where my mother is, even though I believe in a God. A few weeks after her death I looked at her ashes, processed through the high definition of my sister’s cell phone camera seven hundred miles away in Indianapolis. Seven hundred miles as the crow flies. As I flew, again and again, to say so many goodbyes that I finally found I had no more goodbyes left to say. Whatever those ashes were, I knew my mother was not in them.
It was in the weeks after my mother’s death that I realized my family had, in a sense, forgotten how to be healthy. The three years of her progressive illness — or was it four, or five — had consumed us so totally that our reality ceased to exist beyond the management of illness. My father became a caregiver to the point of emotional and physical collapse. My sister did the same. I offered help where I could, from half a country away, but I knew even then it was not and would never be enough.
In the last week of my mother’s life I sat by her bedside in an almost unbroken vigil. Midnight to the morning was always the hardest, the time when everyone else was asleep and I feared I would have to face her death alone. It was only in those moments that I felt I was truly honoring her. To stay awake I’d recite poems I’d memorized as a child, poems learned from the cassette tapes she’d play for me on nights when I couldn’t sleep. Even as she faded away, she would always lock eyes with me as I whispered the lines.
Here on this summer night, in the grass and the lilac smell
Drunk on the crickets and the starry sky
Oh, what fine stories we could tell
With this moonlight to tell them by
A summer night, and you, and paradise
So lovely and so full of grace
Above our heads the universe has hung its lights
And I reach out my hand to touch your face
I believe in impulse, in all that is green
In the foolish vision that comes out true
I believe all that is eternal is unseen
And for this lifetime I believe in you
In the minutes after my mother died, a cardinal landed on our mailbox, bright and red and in prime mating form. As my mother had grown sicker she had taken up bird watching, something she could do from the confines of the couch, and later from her hospice bed. My father transformed our yard into an elaborate bird watching metropolis: woodpeckers, hummingbirds, bullying blue jays. Cardinals.
The Minoans believed that a bull shepherded the dead into the afterlife. For the Egyptians it was the jackal-headed Anubis. My mother believed she would be ushered into eternity by the cardinals. Maybe she was right. It wouldn’t be the first time she had been wiser and seen farther into the realm of the metaphysical than any of us. My mother always lived with one foot in the land of the mystical and unnameable.
At some point those ashes that are only superficially my mother will find their resting place at her cabin in southern Indiana, and her ashes will nourish the curly maples that gave homes to her cardinals. The wind will pick up her dust and spread it out to the creek, and from there to the White River, to the Wabash, to the slow churn of the Ohio, into the Mississippi and finally out into the sea. Her ashes will deposit in too many places to count, and like her soul she will flow on forever.
My mother never dwelled in grief. When I would ask her if she was scared, she would roll her eyes in boredom. She had no time for fear, or grief, or self-pity. She lived consciously and alertly until the day of her death, when she looked me directly in the eyes and disappeared like the spray of a fountain on a windy afternoon. She refused to be defined by the illness that killed her, or by the long and miserable process of dying. She remained a complete and unmistakable person until the moment she was not. The Romans would call it a noble death. It was.
I still talk to her. I made her promises that I have kept, and I like to keep her apprised of how well I’m holding to them. I see her in the birds on the Empire State Trail. I hear her voice when I dream, full of life and happy to see me. I feel the parts of me that are her more acutely now than I ever did when she was alive.
It’s been four weeks since I held my mother’s hand and watched the life leave her face, and yet when I look for photos of her I can’t find any in which she is alone. Every photo of my mother contains others: family, friends, politicians, baseball players, race car drivers, musicians. Hers was a life lived in the midst of others. Her death means a lifetime of photos that will no longer contain her. That will be difficult, but what choice have we?
My mother’s death forces us to create new photos and new memories and new lives, freed in a sense from the ever-present shackles of illness and caregiving and worry and constant pulsating fear that defined the last few years. She would expect — demand — nothing less. She would resent anyone using her death as an excuse to avoid a life she embraced so completely in all of its beauty and horror. So I will not. But I will miss you, and I will love you forever.
Lisa Ann Burns
March 26, 1958
May 29, 2024