death-and-dying

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away.

My mother, Delle Hunter, was a physically small woman, yet she was the biggest person I__e ever known. She had total focus, an attribute that deeply impressed me. She taught me by example that how we live impacts how we die. She lived a life of courage, beauty, and integrity; she died in the same manner.

You have never seen such animals as these who without a sound or a sign carry you off. You race with them across the long familiar ground that in that moment seems so glorious, so charged with beauty, strange. In their jaws you are carried so effortlessly, with such great care that you think it will never end, you long for it not to end, and then you wake and know that, indeed, they have not brought you back.

Pain, unless it is physical, was sold to you (by your culture).

Heaven is a place where all the dogs you've ever loved come to greet you.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

Let the pain & suffering of all that appears to be lost, be soothed, healed & comforted.

May you find the strength and resolve today, to allow a deeper sense of healing to begin.

Help me to understand, what my grief has prevented me from seeing - within.

What is it that dies? A log of wood dies to become a few planks. The planks die to become a chair. The chair dies to become a piece of firewood, and the firewood dies to become ash. You give different names to the different shapes the wood takes, but the basic substance is there always. If we could always remember this, we would never worry about the loss of anything. We never lose anything; we never gain anything. By such discrimination we put an end to unhappiness. (118-119)

I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.

They sat quietly together for a few minutes, Joe holding Fiona's hand, Fiona sniffling. No flowery words, no platitudes passed between them. Joe would have done anything to ease her suffering, but he knew nothing he might do, or say, could. Her grief would run its course, like a fever, and release her when it was spent. He would not shush her or tell her it was God's will and that her da was better off. That was rubbish and they both knew it. When something hurt as bad as this, you had to let it hurt. There were no shortcuts.

Sometimes it took death for me to see life, don't live with regrets keep your head high. In a world filled with beauty I don't want to blink twice; soak up every moment because you can't stop time.

It's a harrowing experience to see death approaching in haste towards you, what is hell but confronting your own mortality