The Consolations of Being Alive, 2006, by Stephen Fife-Adams

From MemoryArchive

Who:  Stephen Fife-Adams
What:  Death of mother-in-law
When:  May 9, 2006
Where:  near Cleveland, OH

My mother-in-law, Ruth, died at 2:45 pm on May 9th, 2006. I was there, along with Ruth’s two children, my wife and her older brother, Bob. Ruth, who had been diagnosed with Stage 4 liver cancer in January, had become unable to speak only a few hours before her death. When I arrived, at about 1:00, her eyes were open but already unseeing, yet she was still visibly fighting to stay alive; after four decades of living with the progressive degeneration of multiple sclerosis, survival had become a habit for Ruth. Her pulse was visible in her neck, throbbing at double-speed, and she gulped air as if she had just escaped drowning. Her hands were strangely warm and soft; for as long as my wife and her brother could remember, Ruth had always had hands that felt like cold iron. She had always been thin, but now she looked positively skeletal—with the notable exception of her belly, which rose in a mound under the sheet like the grim facsimile of a pregnancy, roughly seven months along. (Fetuses grow quickly, tumors even more quickly.) The cognitive dissonance of the image was heightened by the sight of my wife, who was 17 weeks along with our second child and just beginning to show.

The dark irony of the visual connection between the spark of life in her own belly and the monstrosity inside her mother must not have been lost on my wife. She is a doula by profession, a person who among many other things gives emotional support to women during labor, helping them to relax and let their bodies take over so that the birthing process can run its natural course. To help Ruth relax, my wife—aware that hearing is the last sense to go—began to talk to her much as she does to her clients. “It’s OK to let go,” she said. “Your body knows what it has to do.” Instead of saying, “It’s time to see your baby,” she said, “It’s time to go see your mother.” (Ruth’s own mother died only a couple of years ago.) As she spoke, Ruth’s heartbeat calmed and her breathing, though still harsh and desperate sounding, became noticeably slower and shallower. There were half a dozen moments where we all thought she might be gone, but then she would take another breath, then another. Finally there came the last breath, then nothing more.

I have never before watched a person die, and what became obvious to me in the two hours I spent in that room, and ever clearer in the days that have followed, is that what I witnessed was something like the beginning of religion. This is how it must have started, with the children by the bedside of their dying mother, murmuring words of comfort, speaking of ancestors who will soon be rejoined, and the mother thinking of her own mother and all the other people who were close to her in life who have preceded her in death, thinking these ties, these rock-hard emotional bonds that have been so meaningful to her, cannot possibly be erased from the world when she is gone. For those gathered around her, there would have been the feeling my wife and I both experienced of being wholly present in the moment, stripped of self-consciousness, devoid of ego, a state of mind that mystics of all the major faiths spend their entire lives trying to attain. When we walked out of the room to begin making phone calls, our voices sounded strange. I could feel the sunlight outside touching every skin cell on my arms and my neck. I felt I had been altered, lifted out of myself so that I could understand the strange peculiarity of everything. Later that day, when we ate dinner, I became hyperconscious of the smells and textures of the food. Religion must have grown out of these sorts of intensely personal feelings and heightened awareness of the world in the face of death.

What a contrast, then, when we attended the funeral mass a week later at the Catholic Church Ruth had attended for much of her life. From beginning to end, the service was the diametric opposite of everything we had seen and felt and thought in that little room in the hospice. Everything about that afternoon of May 9th had been strange and personal, but everything about the mass was intended to draw us away from the personal and particular and to contemplate the universal and familiar. Rather than the obscenity of Ruth’s belly, we were asked to consider the Blood of the Lamb. Rather than carry us out of ourselves, the priest’s homily warned us to be conscious of ourselves as irreparable sinners saved only by the mercy of Christ. Rather than bring us into closer awareness of the splendors and horrors of the material world in which we live out our lives, he chastised us to think of another immaterial world. There was some generalized discussion of love, but there was no acknowledgement of the ferocity, tension and complexity that characterizes the love between a parent and child. The priest’s own father had suffered from and died of multiple sclerosis, and Ruth had asked in her written instructions that he “speak to the children with his special understanding and love.” But even in his brief mention of his own father, there was something fundamentally dispassionate in his tone and manner, as if his father’s ailment and death, like Ruth’s, had no particular meaning for him except as an opportunity to draw an analogy to Christ on the Cross. Even the way he pronounced the “th” at the end of Ruth’s name, as if he were a tire leaking air, was dispiriting.

I can only suppose this lack of emotion and of the personal touch is by design—that the priest’s job, like that of the minister or the rabbi or the imam, is to cool the emotional fires, shake us out of our mystical reveries, put things back into order, allay our fears, and allow us to return to our mundane lives by ascribing the mysteries of life and death to forces beyond our control. This is a valuable service that many, many people seem to need; we can only live on the raw edge of grief and wonder for a very short time before returning to ourselves. The trick for myself has been to find a way to slip back into the moving current of normal life without completely losing the newly sharpened sense of consciousness about the world I had in the hours before and days after Ruth’s death. Overwhelming as it can be, that awareness is not something to squander; call it the consolations of being alive. For those of us on whom the consolations of religion are lost, it’s what makes the difference between merely existing and living.