"The Bigger Meaning"

(San Francisco, Sun, Mar 9, 2003, 6:42 PM)

Around midnight on Friday evening, after my scary experience at the gym, the phone rang. I happened to have the phone next to me in bed, only because I'd promised Cecilia I'd keep it there just in case I had another attack. But the phone number wasn't available to the caller-id, so I didn't bother answering it.

In the morning, after I'd written my journal, the phone rang again, and as I checked the caller id to see again an unavailable number, I had a sudden premonition about whose voice I'd hear when I picked up the phone. So it was no surprise at all to hear my sister's voice, and I knew immediately why she was calling. My mother had passed away early Saturday morning, English time. For the briefest of moments, I felt a surge of grief deep underneath my skin, a surge which was immediately supplanted by a feeling of relief. I'd been hoping this moment might come, but hadn't believed it would come so soon.

Kirstie filled me in on what had happened, that she'd passed during the night, comfortably, in her sleep. My mother had had Alzheimers for several years now, but her body had been fading more rapidly than her mind, and she'd been looking increasingly frail during the past few months. I think she just didn't have enough strength to wake up that last night.

She hasn't known me for the last two years, at least, and in recent months, she'd finally lost all recognition of my sisters too. She still clung to recognition of my Dad, though, and it was comforting to him that in the week before she died, he'd spent a couple of nice hours visiting her where she chatted and joked gaily in whatever mysterious language she still possessed. Her language was beyond my Dad's comprehension, but he was happy to see her so animated, and so keen on sharing whatever it was she was experiencing.

In the day and a half since I learned of it, I've wondered at myself, that I have no feeling of loss? And I think it's because I really lost her two years ago when I realized she didn't know who I was. This afternoon, when I was making an omelette, I stopped to stare, for the first time in months, at a photo of her on my refridgerator door. That bend of her nose as she smiled, feeling all the while that my Dad was just daft to be taking a photo of her. It bought a smile to my face too, but no sense of loss, more a sense of appreciation. Now that she's dead, my Dad, my brother and my sisters can finally stop grieving, and remember the woman we knew, who was full of love, caring to a fault, though with a sharpness to her if pushed.

I called my brother, my sisters and my Dad, and we all, I think, felt the same things. Now the questions are all about the funeral. Should I go? What songs should we play at the funeral, should I say something during the service? I find myself wondering at the meaning of a funeral. My mother had nobody in her life at its end except my Dad. Who else will be at the funeral? What's the point of playing her favorite music? I don't understand. When I imagine myself getting up and saying something, it feels more like something that would happen in a movie - something that's done to get other people to go misty eyed.

I had another mild anxiety attack this afternoon. Nowhere near as bad as Friday's, but it makes me a little scared about going back to my routine, since I never know if it's going to happen again. It makes me also scared about flying home to England next week. What if it happens in the middle of the flight? It's weird. My life was just going along, then all of a sudden, Friday night makes me suddenly question my own strength. And that the first hint of it should happen just four hours before my Mother died.