Loving Me Home

We lived with my maternal grandma from before I was born until I was just 5 years old. I was tied to her apron strings. She was a second mother. A Slovak, she spoke pidgeon English while my folks spoke American. I started speaking a year late from being raised in a bilingual home. Words for or about her death weren't spoken with me. Losing her disrupted a natural sense of being at home in me. My maternal aunt died when I was 10, the same year my brother went into the Infantry and unknowingly, into combat at the start of the Tet Offensive. My only sibling, his service rocked my family to the core. Watching the news on TV each night was one way my mom prayed in community. Then mom died when I was 13, a month after graduating 8th grade. She had breast cancer for six months, rallied to celebrate my graduation, then went into a free fall. Quite ill, the doctor suggested she go into the hospital. The ambulance came. She told me to look after my dad. I didn't know it at the time, but those would be her last words to me. She went into a coma. The doctors thought she'd make it through. She died three days later. I didn't get to say good-bye. My dad had two amputations and chose to stop eating instead of having a third amputation. That was when I was 34. Before the first amputation, I attended a weekend workshop with Stephen and Ondrea Levine on conscious death and dying. Naive, I was convinced I had mastered how to support someone in dying. The spiritual community I lived in from age 18 to 37 blew apart with sexual abuse and abuse of power. I recently supported my husband who had asked not to go into a nursing home should he have dementia, to let go through fasting when fronto-temporal dementia scammed his brain, stripped away language, and opened his extraordinary heart wider to spirit. I made it through these experiences by coming to terms with my own grief, felt a lot of pain, discovered something was frozen from a young age, explored my inner world through practice, therapy, ritual, writing, and in the good company of others. This process, over and over again, until it is finally dawning on me, that I and we are all going to die one day. It paradoxically motivates me to get on with living fully while I can, and doing whatever good I can while I'm here.