RReif11.jpg

Where Did She Go?

After my mother breathed her final breath, where did she go? Being present at her death was to find myself suspended in the profound mystery of things; death, I suppose, the original mystery, that is, after life itself. Even after we wrapped her body, covered her face and stood as she was carried on a pallet from her home, I couldn’t leave, as it was clear to me she hadn’t entirely left.

My sisters, niece and nephew dispersed to other rooms and I sat in a mild stupor on the couch alongside the now empty hospital bed. The atmosphere was strange, the air thinner and lighter. I sat on the couch alongside the now empty hospital bed and, in the stillness, became aware of my body abuzz with activity; I could vaguely sense colonies of living atoms cohering as my solid form. But as my attention extended beyond my body, it was clear that I was not alone.

It was clear that I was not alone.

There was no question that she was gone from the earth in the way I’d always known her. I realize now, I must have believed she was her body; exclusively her body. In form, she was so . . . well, Natalie. Her eyes were eager and warm. They telegraphed hunger and in every department they were, so to speak, bigger than her stomach, always overestimating how much of anything she needed: children, sweaters (on sale, she’d buy 12), love, prosperity, status, attention. Her waves of auburn hair trailed “look at me” wherever she went. Feeling herself entitled to walk the earth unopposed, at least on home turf, she could be as spontaneously generous as reflexively mean.

With the years, her features softened, generosity deepened; and her meanness relaxed into hilarious saltiness, even in her last days. Near my mother’s bedside, maybe a week before she died, Sister 1 mentioned something to me about a neighbor, at which my mother’s eyes opened: “Who would have sex with him, that big fatty?” she said, then went back into her stupor.

More than Form

But as much as she inhabited the form of Natalie, what struck me at the moment of death was that she was more than that form. Her body had exited but she had not. Was I in an altered state? Perhaps. Still, it strongly seemed that a coherent energy, a “self” of sorts had not dissipated. I felt its presence and stayed to sit with it one last time.

Don’t think I’ve thought seriously about “soul” since I was a sophomore philosophy major. But new wonderings hit me now with some urgency: What is soul? Is it a function of the body; an unseen part of ourselves that lives as long as we do? Is soul eternal and immutable, as some religions would have it? Can it be refined or sullied, depending on how we live? Suddenly the question doesn’t seem irrelevant or easily dismissed.