Goodbye Mimi |
Monday Aug 10 2009
This has been a sad week. My partner’s mother died at the age of 94. Even when the end is expected (and perhaps even welcomed after a long period of decline), it nonetheless has a powerful impact on those who cared. All of the clichés aside, there just isn’t much to say to the bereaved other than “I am sorry for your loss.” As we get older, death and dying becomes a larger part of our day-to-day reality as we lose friends and loved ones. For “Mimi”, there weren’t many left. She outlived almost everyone of her generation.
My interest in age and the emerging idea of ‘Eldering’ cannot be separated from an appreciation of how death affects us—not simply as ‘the end of life’, but in terms of how our relationship with death affects how we live. The Eldering workshop I have been leading called “Learning to Die” provides an opportunity to see that we are all dying from the time we are born: the question is how will we live until the inevitable moment when we no longer have a choice.
I did not know Mimi well. She was the mother of someone I care about and, by extension, I learned a bit of her life in her later years. Until the end, she lived in her own apartment in what seemed to be an excellent seniors residence that offered support services, common facilities and some meals, but which allowed for more or less independent living. Her mind and memory remained sharp to the very end. She had been a widow for more than 40 years and survived on her husband’s small pension with support and daily care from her daughter. Her son lived far away and visited from time to time. She lived a long and honest life.
I don’t think any of us can adequately judge another’s life at the end. After the fact, we can always tell their story and highlight the ‘wins’ and downplay the ‘losses’, but the fact is that it is never more obvious than when someone dies that our lives are just that—only stories. When we are alive, the story seems so real. Once we are gone, most of it doesn’t matter and what does matter lives in the memories of people who cared. The only difference between the most famous and accomplished of us and the billions long forgotten is whether their story lives on. History is only our collective story. And, as with our individual stories, it is no more true or false than the memories of those who write it. Even the facts of our past can be interpreted in many ways depending upon who is the observer—who is writing the story.
In a world where ‘gigabytes’ of digital storage cost pennies, it is not inconceivable that each of us could write our own story and leave it in a “family folder” for posterity. We could even include audio and video records, along with photographs of various artifacts we’ve become attached to. It seems to me it would take up less space than a cemetery plot and be a richer and fuller way of memorializing our lives and what we valued and accomplished during this brief journey called life. Mimi’s grandson had recorded a two-hour interview with his grandmother in 2004 that he presented to his mother yesterday. It provided a wonderful opportunity to experience who Mimi was, her recollections of a life well lived and, most importantly, to complete the experience of loss and say “Goodbye” once more in the sacred space of our relationship with that person who gave us life.
Socrates said that we can never have wisdom until we’ve learned to die. Learning to die is about learning to live without denial or fear of death, but with full acceptance of the finite nature of our existence and awareness of what an extraordinary gift it is to be alive.
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