Mariana Caplan's Articles on Lions Roar

Mariana Caplan's moving memoir of her mother's death, a rare account of death looked straight in the face and a powerful lesson in the pain of holding on. Well Death will go in any family in this land Well Death will go in every family in this land Well he’ll come to your house and he won’t stay long Well you’ll look in the bed and one of your family will be gone Death will go in any family in this land From “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” by Rev. Gary Davis Not many of us have seen another person receive a death sentence. Fewer still have been present to watch their own mother be given the final verdict. I had returned just days before from Asia. Ironically, the intention of the trip was to sit at the famous cremation grounds of Varanasi in India and in Pashpatinath in Nepal, where funeral pyres have burned for thousands of years. I was trying to face death as intimately as possible, to take the next step in a lifetime struggle to come to terms with my ultimate fate. A Jew by birth, I had been practicing for a decade under the guidance of Lee Lozowick in the Western Baul tradition, a rare synthesis that combines Vajrayana Buddhism with the devotional ecstasy of Vaisnava Hinduism, adapted to the needs of the contemporary Western practitioner. I engaged my experiment well, bearing witness to the death and decomposition of the body. I had contemplated death nearly every day of my life since the age of four, and such close exposure was somehow comforting—until it was my own mother who was about to disappear forever from my life. My mother had not been feeling well while I was in India, and I knew I must visit her. The day after I arrived we went to the hospital: my mother, my father, and I, a combination that hadn’t occurred in at least a decade. The doctor came in with my mother’s test results. He told her that while they had hoped her cancer had stemmed from the ovaries, in fact it was sourced in the pancreas. In that moment, I saw something dreadful flash across my mother’s face, something that even a woman who had mastered the art of concealing pain could not hide. I did not know what or where the pancreas was, or that cancer stemming from that part of the body represented almost certain death, but the look told all. I was watching my mother sentenced to death, which would come much sooner for her than for those sentenced to death by any court. It was a death she did not want and was not prepared for, and it was coming far too quickly to bring with it , any reasonable chance of acceptance. "What is the average life expectancy for pancreatic cancer?” she stuttered, her training in pseudo-strength regrouping itself with amazing rapidity. “We think in terms of months rather than years,” the doctor replied. There were moments when I couldn’t help feeling it was unfair that I would be motherless by the age of thirty-one. By the time you lost a parent you were supposed to have a family of your own—a husband to support you through it and the demands of children to fill the empty space. You were supposed to have matured into adulthood. You were supposed to be better prepared somehow. Your parents were supposed to have felt they had lived a full life, had drunk deeply from experience. Death was supposed to be a natural and expected consequence of a life fully lived. Intellectually, I knew there were many who had it worse than I did—who had lost one or both parents at a young age to accidents or early cancer. My mother herself had lost a mother, a sister, and a brother by the time she was twenty-seven. My circumstance was hardly unique, and yet it was not the norm. People my age who had lost a parent were the exception. Everyone else seemed to have a mother. Day by day, the inventory of loss surprised me with its accumulating detail. My mother would not be at my wedding when I finally married, the fantasy we had shared since I was six. There would be no mother to call and tell that I was pregnant. No grandma. No too-many-gifts for the baby. No one I could go to later to say, “Now I understand what you went through with me. I am so sorry.” Yet she had kept a sacred vow she had made to me many years earlier. Because of it I trusted I would have the strength to carry me through. She had promised me she would not die until I was old enough to be able to understand, to be okay with it. Twenty-seven years earlier, when I had first found out about death, when I had been told that I and everyone I loved would eventually die, I sobbed through endless nights, first for my own death, then for my mother’s, and then for everyone else’s. It was then she had promised me she would not die before I was ready. I did not feel, as my brother did, that we had been wronged in some way. I could not allow myself the indulgence of thinking, If there is a God, how could he do this? I knew the Lord of Death was the same as the Lord of Birth. Still, there is something indescribably personal and intimate when the most common thing that ever happens in the universe happens to you. I didn’t know that hell had so many doors, so many rooms, so many details, so many different people in it. My brother arrived at the hospital shortly after the doctor had pronounced the verdict—my cherished big brother, my childhood hero, who loved his mother so—and there in the sterile white hall outside the elevator I told him his mother would die and we held each other and cried, without consolation. Later we tracked down my estranged brother in Cambodia, and still later watched my mother, half-dazed, bravely pick up the telephone and call her younger brother and sister-in-law and her closest girlfriends. We watched her see her young grandchildren for the first time after receiving such news, watched her trying to comprehend that she was not going to see these young people who were the light of her life grow up. There is no story more universal than this one, nor one more unique and singular. Just when I thought it could not get worse, an uninvited guest arrived: the demon of denial. The first round of phone calls had been completed, the first shock waves passed, and my mother was puttering around the house. She had recouped some of her energy and we were acting as though nothing had happened. We were living in a fictional world where ideas of how we were supposed to feel replaced real feelings, and a logical understanding about the inevitability of death replaced the human sorrow of impending parting. We were all playing a make-believe game called “Let’s Pretend Mom Isn’t Dying.” People who study death from a spiritual and psychological perspective know that to respect another’s dignity we must allow them to die the way they choose to, and not how we believe they should. While this philosophy is easy to adopt theoretically, the righteous meditator and psychotherapist in me wanted to insist, “But this is your final chance to lift the dark veils of denial. To finally face all that is repressed and say ‘yes’ to everything within you. To forgive yourself and everyone you imagine has wronged you. To use the last great opportunity while alive to understand life itself.” But I knew I must remain silent. Finally, as I prepared to return to my own home in the Bay Area, I sat down to spend the last few minutes with her, not knowing if these would be the last. Instead of sitting down with me, my mother took out her comb, fixed her hair, and used her small bit of remaining energy to put away some things in the kitchen. I could not blame her for choosing distracting activity to numb the pain and sorrow of yet another goodbye. How many times can you bear it? It is agonizing to do even once. For how do you say a final goodbye to your mother? The many times you rejected her, pushing her away to gain your independence, you knew she was still there keeping the hearth warm. But now you have to say goodbye forever. Each time I left to return to California I was sure it was the last time I would see her alive. Each time I left I bore witness to the degree of pain it is possible for the human heart to feel. On trips to see her as the months progressed, I watched my mother lose one aspect of herself after another. All spiritual tradition tells us that we are not our bodies and that suffering is caused by an illusory misidentification with the body. Yet, in the face of death, such teachings are likely to yield only a vague intellectual consolation at best. Within seven months, my mother lost one freedom after another: first, the freedom to drive, then to participate in creative action to affect the world, then to go out at all. She soon lost the ability to walk, and shortly after, the gift of hunger disappeared. I remember the two of us standing in front of the bathroom mirror as she commented, with a mix of irony and humor, that after thirty years of dieting she had finally achieved her desired weight. I watched her measure each bit of remaining energy and determine its best use, relinquishing the attachment first to old friends, then to relatives, then to the dog, and finally even to the grandchildren, until only husband, children, and her own body remained. I lay by her side and watched these gifts being taken from my mother day by day, sometimes hour by hour, asking myself, where was God’s mercy? I knew it must be there, only I could not fathom its logic. Sometime before she died she was lying on the couch one afternoon while I kneeled on the floor beside her, holding her hand. I cannot say exactly when it was, because measuring time is not important when you are hanging out with death so intimately. The only reason to keep track of time at all is to ensure that enough morphine is provided. Weather doesn’t matter. Missed meetings don’t matter. Parties and new furniture and computer problems—all the things we normally obsess over—don’t matter. All that matters is the love that exists between people, the capacity to bear the physical and emotional weight of death, and the nature of one’s...

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