Greetings to all,
Last night as I attempted sleep, I found myself reading a pdf on my iPad entitled Death of a Parent. I already drew some of the conclusions that the snippet revealed though the longer reaching insights the research suggested I have not yet bumped up against. Today is a cold Monday morning here in the Hill Country where I live. It was a warm Friday morning just a few days ago when I received the call that my mother had died rather unexpectedly just sitting in her favourite chair. She died 1 year and 4 days after my father did.
For all my flaws and baggage I’ve worked my entire life since I understood the concepts to “Know Thyself”. That task is not always easy because the impulse to self-lie is highly encouraged in our society. Anyway I just want to shoot off a warning flare to those who think they know themselves. Nothing really prepares you for the impact that a parent’s death will have on you. You don’t know that part of yourself until you are truly faced with it. I still have the last voice mail Mother left last week asking me to call her back (which I didn’t) on my business line in my office.
Mother had remarried a third time late in life a few years ago and she is survived by my latest step-father. There will be no funeral. He’s going to have her cremated. I doubt there is a will, so he’ll assume ownership of all her things. They live in an apartment in Houston which was never any kind of home for me. So essentially she was here last week and with the exception of family memories and perhaps a photo album I might beg my step-father for, she has essentially vanished from this world without a trace that will be easy for me to find.
Good-bye Mother, Good-bye Father!
The passing of a parent but especially both parents will reveal to you every part of your life that they touched in the shaping of who you have become. You’ll know this because you likely feel those parts all being tugged out of you at once in different directions. One of the first feelings I had after the initial shock wore off was that there are no more rules, no one to be accountable to that matters. It was a wild crazy feeling that was liberating and disconcerting at the same time. Fortunately for me, the feeling passed and I’m glad to report I’ve had no shoot outs with local law enforcement. I rambled on to Suzanne, my wife last night as I was trying to purge the heaviness of mother’s departure from the world of the living. The insight that I had was that for ever little hunger a child (no matter how old) has for the parent to feed that goes unmet, there is a secret hope inside each of us that someday, somehow that hunger will be sated and the hole in your “self” will be filled with the goodness of parental light.
I admit I had NO IDEA that was inside of me. As a student of Ho’oponopono I believe 100% responsibility is essential to a strong happy life. So as those little black holes in my soul are revealed by the passing of the two giants that brought me into this world, I will attempt to find a new light to fill them with instead of leaving them like suck-holes to drain me of whatever good years I’ve got left on Earth. One of the golden gifts of this recent shake up in my life is to really REALLY appreciate the importance of carpe diem.
One thing I’ve considered is creating a wikipedia page for each of them so that their significance might be revealed a little bit in cyberspace for the duration of cyberspace perhaps!
That’s all for now.
Mahalo
