Learning Compassion with My Mother in Her Dying
My mother had visited me and my partner a couple of years before anyone knew cancer would take her life. Her death was complicated for me by the friction I frequently felt between us. On that visit, I remember an argument at international air arrivals in Vancouver over where we should have agreed to meet. Her complaint, that she couldn’t instantly find me, erupted before we even had a chance to greet each other. Immediately annoyed at her for not saying hello or thanking me for coming, I snapped at my mom instead of listening. We shared some good time for sure. But gritting my teeth to get along, especially seeing as she was on my turf, left me with a tension headache. My mom flew back to Chicago, and I relaxed.
A year or so later, in autumn, I flew to see her and was somewhat more at ease. Being in her home, somehow I didn’t feel the need to assert my autonomy as much, and she wasn’t as critical of me either. We went to the Art Institute together, something we both enjoyed. Walking through the galleries, I noticed my mom was short of breath. I’d never seen her like that before. All she told me was she’d had a clear x-ray — but I was to learn, some kinds of cancer don’t always show on an x-ray.
Then, in the winter, my mother phoned me to say she finally got a diagnosis — advanced lung cancer. I was thirty-eight, she about to turn sixty-four. I felt numb, stunned, scared. Initially, she told me the doctors said she had six to twelve months to live. Neither of us knew her remaining lifespan would be far less. But I did know, deep down in my bones, that whatever still stood between us didn’t matter in the larger reality of her impending death.
My father had died violently and without warning when I was only a teenager. I hadn’t been nearby and was unable to even attend his funeral, which only added to my grief. His death had haunted me for years, and I felt a profound lack of closure at not having had the chance to say goodbye. From that earlier experience with death, I knew I needed to spend time with my mom. I resolved to myself however difficult that would be for me, I would find a way.
Mother-daughter bonds run deep. Part of me knew that. Part of me fought the bond because I felt somehow alien to my mom for as long as I could remember. Besides our personality clashes — we did share traits and also political leanings — there were certain childhood betrayals that I had not yet forgiven her for.
There was also a growing chasm around faith between us, which really highlighted the disparate nature of our beliefs. As a young adult, I had begun to question the dogma she’d raised me with — that we are no more than physical bodies, irrevocably separate from each other and the cosmos.
My mother called herself an atheist but she also struggled with love. By the time of her terminal cancer diagnosis, I had begun to open to love in ways she didn’t seem interested in or able to. My heart was starting to free up and I sensed the interconnection with all things — through love, intelligence, and the creative dynamism of being. I still felt shy about my new sense of reality and I didn’t want to tackle her belief that when you die, that’s it, finito. I just quietly did my thing.
As I prepared to fly to Chicago to spend some time with my dying mother, I was acutely aware of the gap between my sense of the meaning of life and hers. On a gut level, death and dying scared me even more than our differences and my unresolved feelings toward her. What could I do to prepare for this visit? How could I help her, when so much was still unresolved between us?
Vancouver is home to a large and welcoming metaphysical bookstore called Banyen Books. There, I went in search of reassurance, comfort, and guidance. Browsing the shelves, I came upon The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, now a classic, on the states one experiences approaching death and after. In the book, Rinpoche, with the help of his collaborators, presents some of the central teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in every-day language — including how to calm the mind with meditation, how to accept death with kindness, and that the most important thing one can bring to a dying person is compassion.
I felt soothed as I read. I opened to other possibilities about death and how to hold the dying process with kindness. Rinpoche’s assertion enormously calmed me — that if I could be genuinely present and kind with my mom, that would be lots. Safely in my carry-on, the book also comforted me on the flight. And, never mentioning it to my mother while I was with her, I would open the book and read a section now and then to support me.
I got to my mom’s apartment, in a condo tower just down the street from the house where my brother and I had grown up. My mother was just arriving home from the hospital, from surgery to try and remove some of the cancerous growth. I walked into her apartment. My mother was wheeled in by a medical orderly, oxygen tubes feeding her nostrils. He left quickly, but the wheelchair, oxygen tank, long clear hoses, and the insistent pumping, suctioning sound of the machine stayed. Such sadness, such heaviness I felt, but didn’t voice aloud.
Seeing her suffering was difficult. I felt like a guest sometimes more than a daughter. A lot of the time I felt numb. Even though I didn’t talk about Sogyal Rinpoche’s message of compassion around death and dying with my mother, I was doing my best to embody it.
I wanted to help her. After a couple of days, my mom seemed a little stronger. I encouraged her to clear out any files on her computer, to deal with any business that was important — while she still could. She had so little steam. Watching her get exhausted from just a little effort, I stepped back. Then, observing myself, I realized I was pushing her too hard and felt guilty. “She’s already let go of work,” I told myself, as I reluctantly reconciled with her rapid decline.
Instead, I offered to cook. “Anything you want,” I said to my mom, “I’ll make anything for you the way you would do it.”
She asked for tomato-y eggs — an Italian-inspired recipe. I sautéed garlic in olive oil, and under my mom’s direction, added tomatoes and more oil, along with some basil and oregano. I carefully brought the pan to her so she could decide if the fragrant mixture needed to simmer longer or was ready. When she signaled, I cracked four eggs on top — two for each of us — and let them fry until the whites congealed, but the yolks were still golden-yellow runny. Served on toast, delicious.
Letting go of my own will, I felt the quiet ease of serving another as I followed her wishes. Simply carrying out what she would have been doing if it weren’t for her ill body failing her, moment by moment — I relaxed a little.
Next I offered to make her a meal we both relished. She liked the idea of a yummy roast chicken dinner. My mother’s peak strength coincided with that supper I made her from scratch one evening shortly after the tomato-y eggs. With surprising gusto, my mom ate far more than I’d seen her do in the days prior. Her strength was at a peak and I was happy to see her feeling a little better.
One day, my mom created a flicker of intimacy between us. She gave me a meaningful look, her eyes vulnerable, perhaps apologetic for all that we’d not shared or perhaps for all that she hadn’t been able to give me. I don’t really know because she didn’t say anything and neither did I. But I accepted her gaze openly, quietly, not wanting to disturb the rare moment we were sharing.
After the roast chicken dinner, my mom declined even faster. I’d been there about ten days, when one afternoon, she began to mumble in Italian, her first language. My mother hammered her fists on her thighs in frustration at her life slipping away so fast. I didn’t try to stop her, but put a pillow on my mother’s lap so she wouldn’t hurt herself. I desperately wanted to phone 911 because I could see she was weakening further, but I knew she’d forbidden me to do so. My mom had made her wishes to die at home without further interference of any medical interventions, quite clear.
Instead, she went to bed. I didn’t sleep much that night and every couple of hours got up to check on her. Around 5:00 am, even though the oxygen was still pumping, the tubes still feeding into her nostrils, I could see she was gone. My partner, who had arrived some days after I did, felt for a pulse. Nothing. I called her doctor to make out the death certificate, called the funeral home to take her body.
Before they arrived, her cleaning lady came to help. She came into the bedroom where my mom lay and suggested we could pray. I was grateful to her and thanked her. We three stood by her bed, held hands and said a blessing. My mom wouldn’t have agreed to such a thing, at least not while she was alive, and I have no way of knowing if she felt our prayer. That we did offer her good wishes in the everlasting, was a way to honor her passage and gave me some closure. In all other respects, my brother and I followed her wishes for her death.
Being with my mom in her dying was a turning point in my own journey. Not only was I motivated to heal my relationship with her more profoundly and honestly than I had before, I began to understand more about death. As I’ve continued to do that healing work around my relationship with her, the remaining hurts and losses have faded. I feel such gratitude for having come to a place of peace in myself and with my mother.
A couple of years ago, almost twenty-five years after my mother’s death, I was at Banyen Books for a talk by a yoga teacher from an ashram in the Kootenays. The woman interspersed visualization exercises within her talk and showed slides of the ashram. At one point, she asked us to imagine someone who had deeply supported us. Often my spiritual teacher would be the first one to pop into my head with such a question, but this time, my mom came into my mind’s eye, along with love and acceptance.
