Marjorie - 3:30am
By Tom Lutes

Wide-awake, sitting quietly by myself, overwhelming silence fills the pores of each new moment. Snow falling gently outside adds to the hush. Allowing stillness within to match that around me, I glide into a larger awareness and release the need to do something other than be. These moments of extended Self come as a welcome relief to the usual pace and perspective of life.

My mother is dying and she finds little of this stillness within or around her. The hospital is filled with caring people, but no real peace. She wants to go home, but has not the strength. She needs to eat, but can’t stand the food. She feels loved, but can’t let go. Maybe it’s not her time yet, but the time she does have she doesn’t want.

Dying seems like reverse life. Dis-integrating, we let go of all we once cared so much to develop – our looks, our thoughts, our body, our clothes, our words, our concerns, our money - returning back to the stillness, the forever, the unknown. Yet that territory is difficult to navigate with no peace around and within.

Mom tells us she just wants to die, that she has had a good life, and that there is nothing else to do. Yet there she stays day after day, for almost a month now, eating nearly nothing, intravenously fed both nutrients and liquid, not really getting better, not really getting worse…. looking for the doorway out. Wanting to arrive without departing. She’s not afraid to die, she’s afraid of transition, of change, of letting go.

Her family rides with her on this adventure constantly coming to see her, loving her, talking to her, always supportive, positive and present. Birthday cards, pictures of grandchildren and flowers line the shelves. Moisturizer for her lips, a spray bottle for air scent, a phone, and of course the television all stay close. At home the dog and her neighbors wait hopefully for her return.

Each morning physical therapists arrive for her “walk”. Fully garbed in throwaway gloves and gowns they gently and lovingly remove her from the bed. With their help, and a rolling chair, she walks maybe 20 feet on a good day. She then returns to bed, gowns and gloves are tossed, the therapists leave and she resumes her waiting. The doctor visits, does his exam, and then listens intently as she explains her desire to die. When she is done, and after a long pause, he says, “Marjorie, if you want to die I will honor your desire. But I must tell you: your body has nothing that will kill it. It is your mind which is sick.”

I shake my head as the doctor leaves. From my perspective her mind is the healthiest part about her. Mostly she thinks and talks quite clearly. Yet she doesn’t pee on her own, drink or eat on her own, walk, or much of anything else essential to a vital life. Most importantly her desire to live is less and less present.

At this point I can’t help thinking back to our last trip to Africa and the old woman we met one afternoon while visiting the Hadsa tribe. Being hunter-gathers they move as the vegetation changes to new regions of land each season of the year. When an elderly person is not strong enough to make the next trip the tribe moves on without them, for it is understood this is their natural time to die. It is not uncaring, or harsh, or brutal, or uncompassionate, or any of the other words our modern mentality might lay on it, just part of the natural flow and rhythm of all life.

The other day mom said to all of us, “This isn’t living. I’ve had a wonderful life. Just let me go home. Dying is my first priority.” Yet the wheels of support don’t stop: the family makes sure she feels loved and not obligated to die, the doctor says nothing is terminal and she just needs to eat, the nurses check and recheck monitors of her heart, her urine, her nutrition, her stool, her fluids, her pills and a zillion other things. Day after day we go on – expenses mounting, nurses caring, family praying – everyone attempting to make the situation positive.

Like most of us she carries a load of control inside her, built up over a lifetime of attempting to raise good kids, pay the bills, love her husband, make ends meet, contribute to society, be liked by others, look good, have nice clothes, take care of the house, and on and on. But how do we give it all up at the end? The hospital television blares on, all the caring people keep bustling about, her internal noise has not stopped, and she still wants to do everything right. How do you find your original self in all this?

With nothing to live into and little pulling us forward, with the unconfronted truth of our aloneness finally setting in, and with each step of our deterioration not leading to a rising of anything we trust, how can we actually let go?

Well, I don’t know either. We all give great advice when it comes to someone else’s life.

As he was nearing his death a wise old man once said this to me: “We die just like we live”. In light of that we would all do well to look at the quality of our last moments through the quality of our present ones. How can the looming prospect of facing our essence at death build dignity and choice now? The quality and depth of our choices now has everything to do with life at the end.

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