A Passing
One of the reasons I decided to come back and write here on Bindle is because I feel like I can express things I don’t wish to share on FB or other social media. I try to keep those posts mostly about my art, sometimes about my music, and once in a while about my cats. I keep my personal life off those as much as possible.
So my plan, then, is to write in more detail about my life and art here. The art stuff may get shared to FB; I’ll see how that goes. The life stuff will stay here.
This post is about my mother. Really, about me. She died last month at the age of 90. It’s taking me a while to process this. We didn’t have a close relationship, especially since I got divorced (17 years ago) and she took my ex’s side. And continued to through the ensuing decade and seven. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I managed to let go of most of the negative stuff years ago, and chose a long time ago to maintain a relationship that was amicable if not close. What matters, though, is even with all that, she was still my mother and the connection was always there, even if frayed and fragile.
What we thought was a small tumor in the breast turned out to be a metastasis of a widespread stage 4 bone cancer. She found this out when she went in for staging on the breast tumor. That back pain she had been dealing with for a few months was not what she thought. (She had back pain most of her adult life, sciatica and disc problems.) That pain had been steadily increasing and had become almost unbearable.
She also found out that she had mere days to live, because her systems were shutting down.
How she told me…well that was pure Cleo.
I knew she was going for the staging, and was waiting to hear from her on that. On a Thursday morning, she called me and started with “I have good news!”
Well of course I figured that meant the breast tumor was operable.
“Great, tell me your news!”
“I have three days to live!”
Well fuck me all to hell, I thought.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
And so she did. She was going into hospice care that very evening, and would be on a morphine drip to keep her from the horrific pain she had been experiencing.
She was glad that her end time was going to be short and free of pain. She had every arrangement you can think of already in place. She was always an organized person.
We got to say our goodbyes, and I have absolutely no regrets that anything loving and positive was left unsaid.
She spent the next couple of hours connecting with all her friends and family, and how wonderful is that?
When I got off the phone with her, I booked a flight from Seattle for later that day and arrived in New Jersey at 6 am the next morning. My first redeye flight, and I sincerely hope never to have to do that again. But hurrah! My brother had coffee and hugs waiting for me at the airport.
I spent that day and the next at the hospice and with my brother and his family. Mom was not conscious but we were told she could hear us, so we talked to her.
Never one to follow ANYONE’S expectations about how she should do things (a trait I inherited, for good or ill), and defying her Jewish friends’ express wishes that she not die during Rosh Hashanah, she passed on the 4th day in the wee hours of September 26. I really don’t know what to make of that.
Since she passed, I’ve been dreaming of her, fairly often. Nothing negative or weird, she’s just…there. My brother says the same thing. We don’t really know why, except it might be as simple as we know she ISN’T there, and so we’re including her.
The picture I included as the main one for this post is probably one of the first ever taken of her. She is the baby in white, seated upon her mother’s lap. That was my Yaya, Stavroula. This is my mother’s baptism, being christened Cleopatra Zacharopulos, in I think, 1931, in the Greek Orthodox Church. Her father, Petros, my Papou, is the man with the white boutonniere standing behind them. Her older brother Christos is the little boy seated on her godfather’s lap. I believe that was her Uncle Takis. I recognize a few other people in the photograph, relatives I grew up knowing, but most of the people in the photo were just members of the congregation.
I especially love the pile of kids in the front.
How weird to realize that it is highly unlikely that even any of those children is still alive.
Anyway, while I was in New Jersey, my brother took me over to Mom’s apartment and asked me to pick a few things I’d like to have. I asked for this photograph.
Alan Milner
10/30/2022 @ 10:58 pm
Belated condolences but, if I didn’t know, how could I console?
I lived with my parents from 2005 until they passed away, my father in 2008 and my mother in 2011 so, for five years taking care of my parents became my life. I was still working, but most of my time was spent driving them to and from appointments, shopping expeditions and living life together.
I was very glad that things worked out that way. I was basically dead broken when I arrived in Florida, having been through all kinds of hell beginning with my cancer episode in 2003, when everything fell apart for me.
Today, living in a house that I was able to buy with the residual assets of their estate, surrounded by their furniture, they are always present. I keep their ashes on a bookshelf in the living room.
We never really escape from our parents. They become part of the background music in the soundtrack of our lives.
Rose
10/31/2022 @ 1:04 am
No condolences necessary. It sounds like you had a good working relationship with your folks, and that’s lovely!
My Dad passed 5 years ago. I miss him something awful, but then I was very close to him.
Suzanne
10/31/2022 @ 2:56 pm
I’m sorry about your mom. No matter how old or estranged or quick of a death, I don’t know if we ever get over losing them. I still miss mine every day.
My dad died of covid, during the first year when we were all confined, extraordinarily fast, three days. He was 90, but in fairly good shape, and enjoying life until about a week before. His hospital would not let us come to see him. We had to say goodbye over facetime on our phones, and he was too sick and confused to understand. It was weird and awful, yet he didn’t linger and suffer. Like you, I’m grateful for that.
Rose Guastella
10/31/2022 @ 3:55 pm
Covid is a monster. I’m sorry about your dad.
Bitey
10/31/2022 @ 3:22 pm
Rose, I am sorry to read of your mother’s passing. We have not met, but I have met those circumstances, to a degree. My parents have both passed away now. I have over 40 years now of the meetings in dreams with my parents individually, and can track how they have changed over time. Dad was first to die, so the first dream was with him. We met somewhere and he was dressed up in a tweed coat, looking very English. While it was not discussed in the dream, I knew that our meeting was temporary. It was great to see him, but he was going somewhere that I could not follow. When I woke up, I thought I needed to call him. I continued to have dreams like that for several years. Now, the dreams with both parents are like casual conversations. For years, they seemed to trick me into feeling they were not gone. I see it differently now. Something inside of me just shares my life with them as always. It is the daytime that tricks me into thinking they are gone. In the full experience, they are still very much with me.
But, enough about me. I wish you all the peace, and every drop of love that a family can grow. I think the relationship is still there. It grows.
Rose Guastella
10/31/2022 @ 4:01 pm
Thank you Bitey. Every death affects us differently, I think. It was interesting to read about your experiences. I had a wonderful relationship with my father but have never dreamed about him. I think about him all the time and so yes, he is always with me. My stepfather was one of my dearest and closest people; after he passed 30 years ago, I began seeing him in life – a glimpse on a street corner, driving by in a car. When I turn to get a better look- nope, he’s not there. I don’t believe in an afterlife or anything that goes with it, so I don’t have any explanation for why I see him. I don’t really need one, either. It’s just kind of nice when it happens. It does still happen once in a while. I think I’m still processing about my mother. That was the difficult relationship, and will take more time apparently.
Bitey
10/31/2022 @ 4:19 pm
However difficult the relationship may have been, that part is over now. I do not really believe in an after-life, because if one exists, we are not meant to know. I just go on the evidence, and so far, I have not seen any. I will say that I am a fan of how some thinkers have described it, though. I like Emerson’s description of the “Over-Soul”, and how every living thing is an inlet on that giant lake. With that, I like the Pink Floyd reference to “suspended animation in a state of bliss”, from “Learning to Fly.” I imagine a place with no conflict, no stress…and bliss. I hope your mom is there, I hope for my mom, and my little league coach, Mr Coyle…and Napoleon, and Mr. Rogers, and anyone else you can think of.
Rose Guastella
10/31/2022 @ 4:42 pm
I like Alan Watts’ ideas about being dead, how we have no knowledge of anything before we existed, and we return to that because our consious, our self, no longer exists. We are just stuff- stardust, if you will. I think that’s kind of neat. We were always a part of the stuff of the universe and we always will be. The state-change is all.
koshersalaami
10/31/2022 @ 6:28 pm
My condolences.
If there’s a good way to go, I guess she did, for what it’s worth.
Afterlife? I’ve dreamt of my late father a whole lot of times, but they’re dreams. The stuff with my son is considerably weirder, even the dreams after he died. He was happy and grateful and that’s not how I normally dream at all. Then there are the odd events like the smoke alarm in the house going off from a low battery on the anniversary of his death, and it was the alarm in his bedroom; or the time my wife and I went to his favorite restaurant a few years after his death and the hostess asks us if we need a table for someone with a disability though there’s no wheelchair or anything like that in evidence. So I don’t have faith in absolutely nothing, I just don’t know what and I don’t suppose I’ll know until I can’t tell anyone.
Rose Guastella
10/31/2022 @ 7:13 pm
Hi Kosh. Yes, I think she had some opportunities many never get at the end.
I do remember you writing about some of these events after your son’s passing. The inexplicable makes like interesting, doesn’t it?
JP Hart
10/31/2022 @ 10:37 pm
My mom passed on this day one year ago to the moment blessed with loved ones surrounding her sunlit bed.
Again reading this beautiful homage to your mother, my sound system spun ‘Summer Wind’ and I sang with it.
Now I’ll cry a little bit, dream a good while. Upon sunrise I’ll walk the surf — another stranger on the shore {…}
Rose Guastella
11/01/2022 @ 11:59 am
Thanks for your comments, JP. It sounds like your own mom’s passing was peaceful. Endings are hard.
Bitey
11/01/2022 @ 7:24 am
Kosh, when you do find out, try to find a way to tell us. You are so good at explanations.
Ron Powell
11/06/2022 @ 5:17 am
My mother left us thirty-two years ago on Thanksgiving Day.
The passing of a parent is something we get through but never get over…
No matter how strained the relationship or how estranged we become, for better or worse, the legacy of their parenthood.
We are the after-life of those who brought us into this world and then leave us in it to make an effort to supercede our personal histories with legacies of our own.
Shakespeare tells us that the evil we do lives after us and that “…the good is oft interred with our bones…”
And, re an after-life, Omar Khayyam warns us:
“I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d: ‘I Myself am Heav’n and Hell answer’d: ‘I Myself am Heav’n and Hell.”
My condolences and best wishes!!!