In Memoriam of Mothers

My mother was the most patient explainer of death. She was vacuous when it came to love but competent at giving it all the same. I'll never forget her visit after my father had died the year preceeding. We were driving over to 19th Avenue and Northern to visit her brother Everett in the hospital. He was dying. Her sister had died only months before from lung cancer.

Everywhere she looked she noticed hearses (where there were none) and graveyards (none either). It was death on every corner yet I'd just started life. I was married and had a three year old daughter. I was in college and training to be a nurse.

I became fed up with her terrible desire to see death. I told her so and she became so hurt she swore she'd never come visit me again.

By the time I had my second child, she and I had more or less forgotten our exchange a few years before. She was so frail and sick then that she required a caretaker to drive her on necessary voyages (to hospitals mostly). She came up to stay with me after the birth as all good mothers ought even though she could barely support her own weight on her osteoporotic bones. She weighed no more than a hundred pounds by then.

On the third post partum day while I was taking a nap, she had her caretaker(Tim) pack her things and ready to leave. I came down the stairs and saw her bags by the door and burst into tears. I just couldn't take it but she said that she was just too sick to stay on and burden me anymore. She was having diarrhea and worried about soiling the carpets. I had to let her go but it wasn't easy. Post partum depression never needs an excuse to set in and mine lasted for years until she finally passed away some twelve years ago now and that depression was replaced by mourning her loss which really, has never actually ended.

You never get enough of your mother, especially if she is friendly with the hours of death. She'd explained to me as a very young child that my father only had a few months to live yet he stayed on for another decade. We spent ten or more years talking about nothing but death.

Now, I know why. She was preparing me for hers.

From the Sura called The Women

[4.97] Surely (as for) those whom the angels cause to die while they are unjust to their souls, they shall say: In what state were you? They shall say: We were weak in the earth. They shall say: Was not Allah's earth spacious, so that you should have migrated therein? So these it is whose abode is hell, and it is an evil resort