My mother took a bad fall last week. She had been at my brother’s house for dinner. He drove her home, and she, after looking a while for her keys (which is a common ritual with her) she got out of the car and headed up the brick walkway. Taylor, my brother, said to me that it crossed his mind that he probably should have walked her to the door. But instead he waited in the car to make sure she got into the house. In the middle of the brick walkway are two fairly steep steps. She got to the top and her knee buckled and she fell backwards first landing on her bottom, which may have saved her life, and then on the back of her head. She was unconscious briefly, and Taylor took her to the emergency room. After running a ct scan the E.R doctor recommended that she be admitted to the hospital for observation. She told me from her hospital bed, “that the Italians would never design steps that steep.” The next day after another ct scan they diagnosed her as having a concussion and sent her home. She was advised to rest and not to drive for two weeks. She’s eighty years old. She’s still having a few dizzy spells and she’s still tired from the trauma, but she’s improving. We’ve all agreed that we’ve got to acknowledge that she is in fact eighty years old…she just doesn’t seem so.
This has caused me to think about her death, not that she is ill, but that her death, like our own, is inevitable. I find it surreal to think of life without her in it. I have recognized the profound influence she has had in my life, in the lives of my brothers and in the lives of her close friends….she can be ornery…she is often outspoken and opinionated to a fault…hmmm…perhaps a family trait…..One time a friend challenged her outspokenness…to which she replied, “honey you ought to hear what I don’t say”….but when push comes to shove…in moments of despair and in moments of joy, she has always been able to name the truth of the matter, put things in perspective…she has always, in my memory, been able to seek out and hear that deep inner voice that knows that all manner of thing will be well…even in the face of death itself. She told me just a few years ago that she felt her vocation, given the season of her life, her “call” as she put it, is to face death whenever that may be…to face death creatively…that God is ever the teacher of truth even at our moment of yielding our lives into whatever it is that is next. I’m amazed at her lack of fear, her courage…to her, her death is one more exciting adventure, and I suspect she’ll make the best of it, as she has made the best of all our family crises. Love she says indeed conquers all.
The tired leaves are turning and falling, the October light on the water is now at a familiar slant heralding the shortening of days as the earth tilts on its axis….In our hemisphere we journey towards the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. On All Saints Sunday we will celebrate our dead…perhaps they celebrate with us….a few nights before we will ritually mock the dark with macabre images of what death conjures up in our imaginations….and to these images we crack a knowing smile, because living in a community of love we have the knowledge that death has lost its sting, and that death is merely one more adventure in the course of eternity, as the universe turns inevitably towards its perfection…our deaths making way for new life, death and life harmonies of the same song….fear not good people of God, love is as it ever has been, the last word.
