Death

and life.

I remember when I fell back in love with my mother.

I was 32, and Soulmate and I had just returned to the area, two-year-old daughter in tow, as I had transferred from Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary to Colgate-Rochester Divinity School.

On a crisp Fall Saturday morning I had packed up the kid and driven out of the city to visit my folks, leaving Soulmate to catch up on some much-needed sleep. When I entered my parents’ house, I found my mother in tears and my father shaking his head in frustration. I looked back and forth between the two of them, somewhat accusingly at my father. He made a motion to silently say “it wasn’t me,” and turned to my mother.

“Dan, tell him why you’re crying,” he said.

She took a sharp intake of breath and turned to me as I set my daughter down to toddle.

“I was just looking out the window,” she began shakily. “I had watched these two squirrels playing in the yard all morning. Then they ran across the road, and the second one got hit…”

She paused and steeled herself.

“The first one came back around the tree looking for her friend, then just stood over the body like…like…”

My mom turned her hands in toward her, curled them into fists and lifted them to her chest.

photo credit: Teresa Keyes

“I know it’s silly,” she sniffed. “But…”

And she looked up at me, half appealingly, with her hands still curled in front of her chest.

The spell was broken by my daughter’s tilted dash to hug her grandma around both knees.

It wasn’t silly. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful.

My mother was an ICU nurse who had been the first visiting nurse employed in her county, and then the pioneer home hospice nurse. She was better acquainted with Death than anyone else I knew. And those squirrels had touched a gorgeous heart that had refused to grow calloused.

Ah, Death. Where is thy victory? Where is thy sting?

Actually, Death wins a lot. And the sting for those left behind can be cruel and debilitating. Most of us expend a great deal of energy not thinking about it when it is not imminent, but death’s inevitability demands attention at regular, perhaps annual, intervals. So we find a way to not exactly confront it, but to flirt with it, dance around it and engage in a macabre veiled dialogue.

Three years almost to the day prior to meeting my mother’s tears in her dining room, I had been hunched over, chilled to the bone, in a subterranean central chamber of a neolithic monument in the Boyne Valley region north of Dublin, Ireland. Newgrange is a 5200 year old passage tomb 279 feet in diameter and 43 feet high. It is older than Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids, and was designed to guide the spirits of the year’s dead from the place where their ash and bone lay in that room, along a path of light that shown perfectly through a notch in the top of the outer doorway, down the long passage to that central spot precisely at sunrise exclusively on the shortest day of the year, Grianstad an Gheimhridh, the Winter Solstice.

photo credit: Robert and Cathy Ardill

Newgrange is an earthy marvel of both engineering and faith on a scale grander than any other I have experienced; a total commitment to a comforting, poetic story to tell oneself when suddenly breathing alone, hands curled to your heart.

Without.

In solitary process.

You and I have just passed Samhain, summer’s end, when the veil is thin, the dead might travel, and the dark days arrive; as well as the Christian super-imposition: All Hallows Eve and All Saint’s Day.

We had a grand total of two sets of two trick-or-treaters this year on a blustery, rain-soaked Halloween. Soulmate is our little city’s primary school librarian, so she handles the greetings. The little goblins and princesses inevitably squeal in excitement to see their rockstar Booklady answer the door, stunned to learn she lives in an actual house beyond the school campus. It is great fun to watch.

All but two or three of the adult neighbors who dropped tootsie pops, caramel popcorn balls and apples in my bag when I was that age have slipped to the other side of the veil; as have my parents, a sibling, a few of my fellow trick-or-treaters, my elementary school librarian, and so much else woven through the nurturing community cocoon of golden memories. It was a place that found playful ways to remind me of its impermanence. And, subtly, it of course implied my own transient nature.

I’ve been thinking about my parents and my brother a lot of late. So I created some sacred space for them as I approached and then experienced Samhain, Halloween, All Saints Day and Día de los Muertos.

Halloween evening I cooked a special dinner for two of our dearest friends, and we played cards, told stories and laughed through the ominous night. November 1^st began with the Westminster Choir singing For All the Saints, then some quiet outdoor ritual commemoration and finally a listen to a playlist I had assembled. (It’s almost always music with me.)

Then I dug for a very special piece of writing. My late brother Kendall was born on Summer Solstice, 1956. Every year he wrote a birthday missive. I can think of no better way to close my open-ended ruminations than the thoughts he wove together just after midnight in the first moments of June 21^st, 2017, seventeen days before a freak fall off a ladder would end his life.

My dear gentle giant wrote:

Sometimes I feel the weight of the world. Sometimes I just feel trapped in a routine life of day to day sameness. It feels pointless. Insurmountable. But when I am in the throes during these times, I sometimes reflect on the illusion of solidity. I contemplate the illusory effects of accepting things on face value. I remember the smallness of and the facade that is accepted reality.

FACT: the distance between the nucleus of an atom, any atom, and its electrons is many times greater than the diameter of the nucleus. Think of it the same way as the distance from the sun to its orbiting planets is vastly greater than the diameter of the sun. So within an atom, there is more space, or vacuum, than matter or substance.

Since atoms connect at their orbits to form molecules, matter is mostly vacuum or space, save for the occasional subatomic particles passing through.

We are, and everything is, mostly empty space.

It’s like being two miles from the woods. You see green, browns and grays. The woods appear as one mass on your horizon. Only when you’re near do you notice that the woods are mostly open spaces between the trees.

What we see and accept is an illusion. It is all mostly vacuum. (insert “reality sucks” joke here.)

So what, we still have to move our personal cosmos through the daily grind to make a buck to stay warm, well and fed. Ah, but it isn’t, at the most basic level, what it appears. And when you get down to the subatomic level where whole electrons flash in and out of existence, where last I’d heard 3 kinds of “strings” determine the very nature of all things, it gets weird. And weird serves us well while trudging through the humdrum.

I can lie in bed and wonder if I could push my atoms through the barriers of the world, nudge them through apparent reality, “shoulder to shoulder” so to speak to make their way up and outward, hanging a little less together as they funnel through the air in my room, push through rafter and roof outward to travel not only WHERE no man has gone before, but AS no man has gone before.

Maybe even not outward, but folding inward to experience those spaces, the traffic of subatomic particles whizzing past, perhaps to swing on theoretical strings at the theorized end of my existence- the end that all reality springs from, the subatomic bottom of the quantum physical barrel, where I expect there’d be no real end, since something surely must lie beyond...

And the weirdness of it all revives me, knowing that my tedium dwells within the truly fantastic. You are, and I am, our own private cosmos, except we aren’t our own or private. That, too, is an illusion. We are the dust that exists everywhere in the infinite. We are made of the same stuff as everything else, only arranged differently. We are matter AND energy, and sometimes the lines between the two are blurred.

We are fantastic, but are too big and too busy to see.

We are stardust. We are golden. We are caught in the devil’s bargain.

And now it is time to sleep. My midnight musings must cease. In approximately 7 and a half hours I will have been out of the womb for almost exactly 61 years.

Today is the Summer Solstice. I was born on the day of the year with the most light. That was not my doing, or at least I think it wasn’t. But that is a musing for another time. Later, there will be an illusion of a ballgame with illusory foot long hotdog w/mustard and kraut, and beer.

And later, ice cream with a grandson far too cute to be an illusion. And I will be more than content to leave the illusion of solidity on a shelf to breath the air, feel the sun, taste the soft chocolate ice cream and let the day of the year with the most sunlight shine on me.

May it also be shining on you.

I am a pastured pastor and current Executive Director of The Haden Institute, which trains individuals in spiritual direction and Jungian dream work. I am also a practicing spiritual director who helps individuals and groups discover their deeper Selves toward healing, inspiration and a fuller life. I particularly enjoy helping people unpack and find profound meaning in their night-time dreams. I am also available to listen and speak with groups from pulpit, folding chair or Zoom square. Contact me if you’re intrigued.