"When you've said all of the bad things and all of the good things you
haven't been saying, you will find that what you've really been
withholding is
'I love you.'."
...
This essay,
On Offering Condolences,
is the seventh in a septology on
Death And Dying:
A friend of mine's mother died recently. It wasn't unexpected. She'd
lived a long, fruitful life, and her
health
had been declining - not because she had done anything that would cause
her
health
to decline, but just because declining
health
often goeswith (as
Alan Watts
may have said) aging. When she received the news, it wasn't a surprise
... and yet ... with things like the death of a
parent,
it's never not a surprise. I offered my condolences. We spoke for a
while.
I asked her how she was doing, to which she replied "I'm still
processing it, still taking it all in.". I said "If you feel like
talking later, let me know. I've got a few bottles of
Corona in the fridge, that need emptying - which we can
attend to while we talk.". It was the bonus offer of the Corona, even
more than it was my offer to talk, which confirmed
my friendship
for her. Anyone can offer condolences. Very few offer to talk and let
it hang out over a brewski or two.
We did talk again, and when we did, she expressed her relief that by
the time her mother had died, they had resolved their differences.
Still, she regretted (I could tell) that they had had any differences
at all. The model / notion she had for her mother and her, did not
include that they would (or should) have any differences at all. But
maybe the truth is it simply goeswith the package of
being human
that even though we have differences, we have a notion that we don't or
won't or shouldn't have any. And look: it's not the differences that
are hard to resolve. It's the notion that we shouldn't have
differences that's hard to resolve ie it gets in the way. We
all have differences. We call it
"the human condition".
To bemoan "We have differences" is to bemoan the obvious.
Having differences, and being complete with having differences, is
worlds
away from the model / notion that we shouldn't have any differences,
and if we do, then
something's wrong.
I suggested there's the possibility of being complete with her mother's
death in the former, and one of the many ways to get complete with her
mother's death, indeed one of the many ways to get complete with the
death of anyone she's close to, is to leave nothing left unspoken
between them. You can get complete with anyone,
alive,
or dead, and while it may be easier to get complete with someone while
they are still
alive,
it's not impossible to get complete with them after they've died. This
is what I really want you to get: the mother you get complete with when
she's
alive,
and the mother you get complete with after she has died are the same
person for you. You'll be completing with your
experience of her. Gee! I hope you get that.
Getting complete with your mother before or after her death, is
actually really simple, I suggested: ask her everything you haven't
asked her (and get her answers), and tell her everything you haven't
told her (and get her responses); then have her ask you everything she
hasn't asked you (and have her get your answers), and have her tell you
everything she hasn't told you (and have her get your responses). When
all of it's been asked and told, it's complete.
She was still wrestling with the
"something's wrong"
with having differences while her mother was
alive.
The notion was still getting in the way. So I said "In the end, what
there is to
discover,
is long before and way beneath all the differences, you
love
your mother, and your mother
loves
you. End of story.".
