The Ultimate Surrender

My mom has been studying death, dying and spirituality for as long as I can remember, and I've been resisting it for about that long.  My excuse for many years was that I didn't have time to think about God, life and death - I mean, Christ, let me get a boyfriend first -- I would tell her, some semblance of a purpose/career and then we could talk.  She never pushed it on me, it was more something I grew up knowing was there, from her yoga and meditation practice, her talk of karma, past lives and reincarnation, to her work with shriveling old people in nursing homes, and those dying on hospice. What I did absorb was an understanding that it was important to think about the fact that we are all already dying, that we will all die, and that along the way there were systems of thought to help make sense of the world. Although I didn't study or practice any of her Buddhist, Zen or Hindu beliefs, let alone read her library full of books about dying, I've come to realize how much of her spiritual world I've taken in from her via a kind of osmosis, all the more intensely these last few years. I can't go along with everything, but in terms of the ideas of karma and service to others, and my intrinsic draw to yoga over the last decade, I plunk along pretty well on my own weird little spiritual path.  As my stepfather said at the beginning of all this, "Now, I know you aren't all about the monkey gods and the old Indian guys, so how are you going to deal with what's happening?" Writing, I said. Reading. Seeing my friends. Loving Matt. Working out harder and harder to stave off the sadness. Drinking as a distraction, ditto bad TV shows. More yoga. Half-assed meditation. And this is pretty much what I have done, give or take a few glasses of wine. What I didn't realize was that so much of the process would be learning directly from her, separate from her beliefs, simply by witnessing how much of her life is guided by her grace, love and ultimately, her surrender.

I'm down with grace and love. It's the surrender I am constantly Indian leg wrestling with, and not the surrender to her illness or taking care of her, it's the surrender to the worst, hardest thing since learning her diagnosis was terminal: she's going to die, and it's going to happen relatively soon.

What floors me is that I think she surrenders to this fact almost every day, (albeit some days more than others), and what I am constantly blown away by is how she continues to read, listen and study death as if there is still a limitless amount for her to learn about it, even still. She has already surrended so gracefully to so many huge changes -- to cancer, to paralysis, to dependence, to statis, to boredom, to being at the mercy of whomever is in the room, to losing her ability to talk, and then, to the idea of her own death. She recently had me order her a CD collection of Ram Dass's early lectures, circa 1973 or so, after his first trip to India and meeting Maharjji. There are the words "love" and "devotion" in the title, but all I could focus on was the subtitle, "The Ultimate Surrender." It seemed to me ironic and borderline hysterical all at once, in terms of what she is doing, has been doing, for these past few years - I mean what else is it than "the ultimate surrender"? For the week or so after it arrived, I would tease her about how the uber surrendering was going. She would laugh and shake her head, say, "Hard," if she could get it out, or more likely, "Fuck," and then ask for me to put the next CD in for her. She still so actively wants to study, listen and learn about how to live with suffering and death in this lifetime, when it is so clear to me that no one I know has mastered all of these things as beautifully as she has. As I wrote in an earlier blog, "no further study necessary." 

My study habits regarding this issue plainly suck, as despite how much I've grown accustomed to what is happening to her, and in turn to me, I can't say I've been surrendering to it. I mostly fight it, hold it at arm's length and take her to the movies instead. Sometimes I figure the surrender will come at the very end, when she actually dies, but that doesn't happen for everyone. Plenty of people hold on to their grief for the rest of their lives in a way that doesn't allow them to move forward. That doesn't sound so good to me. I do know that I am letting go of pieces of her all the time, and that I have clear moments of surrender, when the day is too fucking hard and there is nothing else to do but collapse and weep at the reality. What is interesting to me is that I always fight it when I feel it coming on, that edge of grief, that glimpse of barren landscape, the knowledge that she is shifting, going, fading. I fight it with distractions or work or TV or obsessing or the internet until there is no way around it, I have to go through it, look its sharp blackness in the face and -- fuck me -- surrender. Part of this fight is the constant sense that I should be doing so many other things with my days: writing, looking for freelance gigs, cleaning out my closets, grocery shopping, laundry. Tangible goals,   lists of things I can check off so I have something to show for my time.  Grieving and surrendering just never seem to make it on my "to-dos." Who has time for that shit?

I was talking to a dear friend today about how hard we are on ourselves, how much we feel we are "behind in our lives" and therefore there is even more daily pressure to get something done. We are almost 40, and there is not this, this or this. You know, this and that and the other thing that we haven't done, or experienced or checked off the list. "Real" jobs, husbands, children, PTA membership, houseplants that live. It is bullshit, yes, but the silent pressure is still there, if only inside ourselves.  It is hard sometimes to feel as though I have sat still for more than two years in this process; I can only imagine how Ma must feel in terms of both her journey and mine. Yet when I can stop all the buzzing in my head, erase that stupid list of shit to do, I know this time with her might be the most important thing I'll ever do in my life. There is just nothing tangible to show for it; nothing to point to when people ask. There is no book or marriage or family.

Last year, I went to a writing expo thingy, and made the terrible mistake of forgetting that people go to these things to network, to get something done, to talk about writing. I was left mute at every turn, unable to choke much out when someone asked, "And are you a writer?" Yes, sort of? Maybe? I have no fucking idea. I was awkward, tongue-tied, exhausted. What I should have said was: "My world is eclipsed by the fact that my mom is dying, and so, that's all I know at the moment." But who would understand that? Hardly anyone, certainly not that guy over there with his self-published book filled with clever cat haikus. No one really gets it out there in the middle of the rest of the world. I came home that night somewhat demoralized and demolished and cried in the kitchen with Ma and my stepfather Jim, and said, "I'm doing important work here. Doesn't anybody get that?" And they did, of course. And so does Matt and a few of my closest, dearest friends. They are who I hold onto in the meantime, in between surrender and fight. And too, in the middle of all of it, the lesson I've had to keep learning my whole life returns to me again: patience. And with it, of course, surrender. And then there is Ma's voice in my head, gentle, loving and wise -- book, husband, family - there are none of those things -yet. But they are coming.

Lately, if I'm gone for five or six days, I can see the differences in her when I get back.  The changes are most often small and difficult to explain to someone who has not been close to this journey with us, so I'm often at a loss when someone asks me how she is, how I am. (I am always grateful for the question, just a little stuck as to the answers). How do I explain that these last few months, she literally can't get a full sentence out anymore? That the words are stuck somewhere between her brain and her mouth, and just as quickly, they are erased and she is forced to let them go? I want to say this to them: "I can no longer talk for hours with my mom the way I have my entire life.  I run out of things to say to her some days and this makes me sadder than anything; that our one-sided conversations are limited to what I can contribute, and lately, I struggle for the funny tidbit to tell her, a tiny slice of news from the outside world that might engage her. But then, if I do engage her, she wants to respond, and she simply can't. How do I surrender to that? Do you have any suggestions? That is how I am. That is how Ma is."

A few weeks ago, when her brain kept sticking on a loop of trying to say something and all that kept coming out was, "Um, um, um," she switched over to "Ram, Ram, Ram," the Hindu word for God. This calmed her down, allowed her to let go without the frustration that usually accompanies this stuck-ness, and she shrugged and smiled. I told her she should do this from now on when the words won't come, as it might reset the needle on the record of her brain. This trick isn't the sake of getting out what she has to say,  but for the sake of skipping the aggravation.  Ma has thanked me several times for this minuscule reprieve from what is happening in her brain, but really, it was all her idea, I just told her to keep doing it. I still hate that she can't get out what she wants to say, but there's not a lot I can do about it. When I told a friend of hers about this, she told me that "Ram, Ram, Ram," is what Gandhi was softly chanting when he died. Of course.

I have no doubt that Ma is my guru, as reluctant as I am sometimes to be on this path.  I was/am so busy trying to figure out the next step in my life that spirituality, death and dying has always seemed to me something I *might* get to later. Much, much later. Right after I get "caught up with my life." Whatever that looks like. But given the current circumstances, faith has put me in something of a choke hold; the universe has given me no choice but to believe.  How else to organize my thoughts or find solace in what is happening, what has happened? There is the theory that we reincarnate in pods of souls, grouped together for several lifetimes. Sometimes, when Ma is apologizing to me for what it is she needs in that moment, or for the way I've put my life on hold, I remind her that we chose this together, and no one soul is more responsible for this nutty shit than any other. This usually makes her feel better and it does me too. We are together in this now and if we are lucky, we will be together in a different pile of nutty shit again at some point.

But then there is the surrender.  Where I'm at with it right now makes me think of the beautiful little girl Ma and I saw playing in a fountain downtown a few weeks ago.  We were drinking coffee after the movies and this dark-haired, Asian cherub in a red polka-dotted bathing suit was running from one stream of water bubbling up from the cement to the next.  She would stand and point for her mother to step on the stream on contain it, stop it from flowing for a few seconds. Each time this happened, she screamed with delight when her mother stepped the water out of existence. Then she would run to the next stream and demand the same performance. After several minutes, the little girl started doing it on her own with moderate to limited success. Sometimes the water would be cutoff halfway and squirt up suddenly into her face, as if someone had their thumb partway over a garden house. Shocked and at the brink of tears, she would step back and rub her eyes and look around for her mother. And she would be there, pointing at a jet of water a few feet away, telling her little girl, "Both feet, both feet!." And the little girl would try again. And again. Water in the eyes, up the diaper, spewing everywhere. But once or twice she got it, held that water down and laughed triumphantly, then released it and moved on to the next one, not noticing that the one she left behind had returned to normal.

That is what I feel like in terms of all of this -- there are so many leaks to contain, so many unexpected ways to feel this loss that I can't possibly contain them all, no matter how many hours I spend running in circles trying to catch up with my life or attempting to accept the fact that she really is dying. Just when I think I've got it managed, it hits me in the back of the throat and chokes me, it stings my eyes, it soaks my clothes. It is relentless and it pisses me off.  Soon enough I will have no choice but to surrender to it, when there aren't enough sandbags in the world to stop the flood.  In the meantime, I'll keep thinking about what it is to surrender, while still holding on fiercely to what is left.