Mind Set Go

Perhaps almost a decade and a half ago, my life would be forever changed.  Not because anything was different, but because I became more aware.  I was driving in an old, used Honda Civic we had picked up on a whim.  Our best friend/best man had been undergoing treatment for some time for lung cancer, although he was not a smoker.  And, his mother could not drive his truck with manual transmission on her visits from the same foreign country they had left many years prior, literally walking out together with foremost on their minds: freedom.

And there I was in that old automatic vehicle, not our transmission of choice.  I had said, “You know, we should just buy a car,” with automatic transmission, “and his mother could use it; then, when they no longer need it, we could just give it to one of our kids as an extra vehicle if they should want or need it.”  Little did I know that many lives would be forever changed in the course of the next week, my own included.

It wasn’t long before I started out my journey in that little car to our nation’s capital when the flimsy cloth ceiling fell down behind me and began flapping in the car.  It meant I couldn’t see behind me, the cars seemingly pushing me on my way, literally tailgating me and nudging me on, reminding me of where I had just been only a nanosecond before.  I wondered if they were thinking, “they” being the people I couldn’t see back there, that I normally drove a car of this stature, but did I really care?  I must have or I wouldn’t have thought it?  But I found that I sort of liked not having to worry if someone was back there surly judging and living in their own paradigm of wants and needs and inherent bias.  Out of sight; out of mind. I cranked up the radio that, yes, worked, and I didn’t care.  Or, so at least, I sort of told myself.

We grow old in this world, very aware of others.  We make sense of them, not for who they really are, but through our visions, hopes and dreams of our own perceived reality.  I was on a mission.  Say hello, finally meet his mother after all these years and say goodbye leaving a vehicle she could drive with no strings attached.  I wouldn’t even miss work.  Just hop back on a plane and be back “in town” in no time.  My husband was away for work in Germany that week.  I could do this on my own, no problem.

I was somehow embarrassed that the car, which by the way was running great, even if I wasn’t used to automatic transmissions, appeared to be falling apart measured entirely by a thin piece of gauze hanging where it was never meant to be.  It had obviously happened before, too. But, I had bought the car when it must have been temporarily tacked back on. I have to admit that before I showed up I distantly remember trying to tack it back up with some spray adhesive I purchased at a car parts place.  But it is difficult to hold half a ceiling of fabric up as it dries, and my attempts were pretty much futile.  When I finally arrived, it was apparent that his mom really didn’t care about the ceiling or the car, for that matter.  Her son was dying, and I had just dropped into that world, a world where time seemed to be standing still, and there were decisions to be made. 

The decision was, that a hospice facility was next.  And so, in that little car, that had been my temporary new home for the last 7 hours or so, we drove to a hospice facility, where for the first time in some years our friend would reunite with his ex-wife, where the next day a priest would come to give last rites and where, starting the next day, I would spend four nights sleeping or meditating on a love seat in the center of a large room where I could watch many families saying goodbye, including my husband’s best friend’s mother.

At some point, I called the prep school and the college where I had been working. I called the leader of the music group where I was paid to sing, and private music students’ parents to say I didn’t know when I would be back.  And, also at some point, I realized, that this wasn’t about me at all. 

Time wasn’t measured in seconds and minutes and hours and days, either.  It, seemingly, stood still.  There was an energy in that place like I had never experienced before.  And there I was, on that little love seat, meditating and existing for days, not sure of my role other than to support, listen and care.

It seemed like it was just two weeks prior when I had last visited our friend, arriving before my husband would get in.  Our friend picked me up at the airport in his truck with a stick and drove me to his now-bachelor pad.  After a quick meal, we went to his college course.  He was someone who had engineering degrees, having studied in the most prestigious universities in the country.  And, he continued to learn, to study, to wonder.  And on this particular night, I accompanied him to his class.  It wasn’t robotics this time.  I can’t remember the subject.  But I do remember the elevator ride up.  After he figuratively punched in the number for the floor we would step out at, he turned and looked at me ,and said, “What’s it all for?  I mean, really?  What is it all for?”  I guess I tried a quick, nervous smile, but he was dead serious.  Perhaps a poor choice of words.

It gives me goose bumps right now, remembering the hospice facility.  We had left to gather some things, and unbeknownst to me, I left the lights on on that car when we returned.  You know, the one that was imperfect with the ceiling falling into the back seat.  I was no longer accustomed to having a vehicle that didn’t have an automatic setting to turn the lights off when you switched off the vehicle.  We had walked back in to the hospice facility, not noticing that the lights were on, and that they would soon drain the poor car’s battery.  It didn’t matter then.  It would sit in that parking lot for some time.  Days, in fact. 

I don’t remember eating there.  I guess they fed me and my friend’s mother.  She spent much time at her son’s bedside.  I tried not to interfere.  I wasn’t really sure I should be there.  His ex-wife had said to both of us, “Don’t leave him,” as if by order.  We weren’t really sure what to make of that.  “I will be back.”  She was gone, making arrangements. It wasn’t for me to judge what she must have been going through, and so, I tended to avoid doing so.  But then, she didn’t come back.  She was going through her own… hell… after that first night back together when his mother and I went back to his home to ponder.

But it wasn’t hell in this place.  It was the complete opposite.  I was able to actually console families, “Your mother (or father) passed peacefully last night.  Every one was so kind.  It was peaceful.  I have been told often people wait until they are alone,” seemingly letting them know that they did the right thing by going home to sleep and somehow missing their loved-one’s last breath.  It was okay.  They were okay.  Truly.

What I didn’t know, was the energy I would start to sense.  It was there.  It was real.  Not exactly effervescent; there’s no real word or way to describe it.  Something was happening in that place much, much more than death.  It was life-changing.  Literally.  If I wasn’t a believer before, I was now.  I had the “proof” I needed even if I still couldn’t touch it or see it.  I could feel it as I had never before. 

I stayed near but out of the way.  I stayed in touch with my husband and another fraternity brother.  His mother slept on a recliner, and I, the best friend’s wife, had a two-seat sofa for a bed, perched at the back wall of a giant room, flanked by two beds on my left and a single bed and a recliner to my right.  My legs dangled and draped, and I spent moments that seemed to lilt while I took in the energy.  Days went by. 

And then it happened.  His mother was holding his hand.  And, it seemed, he was gone forever. 

The east-European wale of despair, that only a mother could make, commenced.  I had witnessed a mother’s love first-hand with my own mother who cared for a very sick baby, one born unable to digest milk.  That problem I would outgrow.  I know what it feels like to be loved by two parents until, they too, passed. And, I had witnessed it as a mother, myself, on more than one occasion. 

I remember wondering just before our second-born was born, how would I love more than one baby?  I loved the first so, so much.  How could love divide?  And when I saw that new face, I knew.  Love doesn’t divide.  It multiplies.  And it did.  But what happens when one’s baby dies?  Where does that love go?

It was decided that we would not leave until the body had been taken.  I waited until what I thought the proper protocol had been followed.  First his father should be called.  Then his ex-wife.  Then my husband.  (I had met someone with even a smaller circle of family than my own.)  And when I called my husband, who could not be there, who was still in Germany, I woke him up.  At that point, it had been a while since his best friend had passed on, after the other calls were made.  And, it wasn’t a call I really wanted to be in the position to make. 

I just said, “It happened.  He’s gone,” but before we could really cry together, my husband surprised me.  “What time?” he urgently wanted to know.  “At exactly what time?”  While he held on at the other end of my phone, I asked at the nurses’ station.  Exactly what time was his death recorded? 

And my husband said, “That was it.”  “Was what?” I wanted to know.  It was the exact time that he felt it.  Someone had been in his room.  It had awoken him.  There was a presence in his room. Okay, weird. 

After that, I was waiting for the ambulance or hearse to come.  I was, after all, totally immersed in sorrow, and would do anything.  As I mentioned before, time didn’t really matter, nor did time of day.  But his mother said, “Come.  We go.”  “But they haven’t come for him,” I said gently. I knew she had wanted to wait, and it was fine with me.  “No.  We go.  Now.”  I didn’t argue.

We went, outside, to the dead car.  Outside into the wee hours of the early morning, black with stars still shining. There in the car, we looked at each other, strangers who had just met days ago.  I turned the key… and nothing happened.  Numbly, I opened the trunk and walked around the parking lot until someone, a nurse, showed to up either come or go, and I jumped the car and realized then that the lights had been left on.  The nurse didn’t know what to do, but all I needed was for her to open her hood with her vehicle nearby, I explained.  We drove, in silence, back to his home.

We walked into the mudroom/laundry room.  We were there in the white light, sort of staring at each other.  We hugged.  I had bonded with her like I had known her for years.  Perhaps, because my husband and I were so close to her son, it made sense.  If someone could be like a brother, it made sense that you would be close to his mother?  Didn’t it?  We laid our things on the dryer, still standing there numb.  And then we heard it.

You see, our friend had found out too late to have it paid for, that his copper pipes were all recalled, and so they were never replaced.  Instead, whenever he left the house, he turned the water main off, just in case.  We had done that when we all drove to the hospital that first day.  He had made sure.  But in our numbness, when his mother and I had left the hospice facility that first night to come “home” to rest and gather what we needed, when his ex-wife had arrived to stay, we had forgotten to do that.  Here was a home filled with copper pipes that could and often did, spring leaks.  But it wasn’t leaking after all these days with the water main being on, creating pressure on those pipes.  We had been standing there for a moment, numb in that laundry room when, low and behold, it was at that moment (and not in all the days prior,) that a pipe sprang its first leak since we had been gone.

His mother rushed to the sound.  It was in the closet where his black leather coat hung, next to the hot water tank.  She is a smart lady, and she quickly turned the water off and began crying with his wet, leather coat in her hands.  We sat in front of the tv where trays and oxygen bottles and reminders of all kinds, lived.  The sun came up.  It was another day. And at some point I called our best man’s ex-wife.  She reported that something really unusual had happened.

Some time after she had been called, each of their children still living in her home, came to her at different times.  They had been sleeping after the initial call.  But each had been awoken, saying something about their father.  It was as if he had visited them, too—a visit similar to what my husband had experienced. 

The tingly feeling I had in that place, the hospice facility, happens every now and then.  It is real, and it comes out of nowhere.  I once passed by a dead soldier’s boots and my entire body zinged, seemingly out of nowhere. 

On another occasion, for instance, I had told a friend where a mutual friend’s grave was and as I was half way to my next stop in my car, I thought of her, our mutual friend who died much too early.  And there it was, when I thought of her, my entire body zinged.  Sometime before that, when I was in New Orleans and was with my cousin where some of our relatives are buried, we were together in the cemetery’s office to see if there was more information to be had.  We waited for a while to meet with the man after already seeing the burial site.  Then, as we walked out of the building, we walked by two doors where funerals were being held.  Nothing happened at the first; I, of course, I wasn’t thinking anything.  But as I passed by the second door, there it was: that zing. 

It all started at that hospice facility.  The one where I witnessed a mother’s love when a child was dying and did die.  While there, I couldn’t rightly answer, “What’s it all for?”  While I didn’t know then what it was for, I do know now what it’s about. 

And as I write, I’m experiencing it again and again.  That zingy feeling I won’t have for months.  It’s like some confirmation that overcomes me.  There is a spirit that is undeniable.  If you have not felt it, it’s okay.  Go ahead, and even deny it if you would like.  However, this spirit transcends earthly explanations and formal religions.  It is, instead, what connects those religions and each and every one of us.  I honestly believe that to be true.

I have held a parent’s hand at that moment a last breath is taken.  It is with tears that I write, that I do know what the answer is.  The answer is love.  At that moment, when my own parent died, that is what I felt and was pretty much all I could say,  “I love you; I love you; I love you.”  It’s what interconnects us and makes us all one.  There are no language barriers with love.  Nothing selfish.  Nothing to be gained or lost.  Just ever present.  The spirit you and I can feel is love.  Whole.  Pure. 

We all go home, a place we never left.  Before it ever started there was love, all through your life there is love, and after you are gone, love.  You are loved, you are capable of love and you can give love.  When I say you have everything you need, it is because love never ceases and is always there for you.  It abounds.  It’s real.  It’s yours.  Forever: freedom.