Diamond-Cut Life

My next post will be Part II of Making The Ocean Drinkable, my short series on desalination (see here for Part I). This weekend I am in Southern California, where I grew up, visiting family and friends, but particularly my elderly parents. Today’s post is more personal and inspired by my mother, who is in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease.

I visited my mother Jean today, holding her hand as she lay in her bed. We reminisced happily about the long, pretty dresses she made as Halloween costumes for me when I was a girl. After Halloween she always shortened them so I could wear them as school dresses, in an artful form of economy natural to people who grew up during the Great Depression.

We agreed on the years I was Little Miss Muffet and Mary Poppins, but I was positive that one year I had been Betsy Ross. “No, no, you were never Betsy Ross,” Mom declared, equally positive, and we broke into laughter. At 78 her memory remains agile and legendary in our family; she nails the details every time, leaving us kids in our 40′s flatfooted in these conversations about the past, but delighted.

That my mother still laughs amazes me. The Parkinson’s disease has advanced so that she is so rigid she cannot move. Mom long ago decided against any lifesaving measures or even any further trips to the hospital. She will die in the bed she is now lying in. And she is no longer able to read, the last pleasure she had had left to her.

I look around at our culture and I see many people grasping after more, and much complaining when they can’t have it. People tend to assume that whatever they have is not sufficient, and that they’re entitled to more.The sense of insufficiency seems like a poison to our souls.

But I watch my mother’s high-cheekboned face in the quiet, private home in Brea where she lives, and I see serenity. She never complains. I do not see her grasping for more. Even with no pleasures left to her except conversations, she appears to find her life sufficient.

I have always believed that our souls outlive our bodies. And while I have shed many tears over my mother, I keep remembering she is not defined by her gaunt, rigid body. The shining endurance of her soul is a higher level of reality.

I’ll surely cry more when Mom’s body passes — but that is largely my mortal eyes seeing through the glass darkly. On the other side, all souls abide, and thrive. In a great sufficiency.

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