Death

I died last week. Not actually because that would meant that my ghost is writing this essay. That would be kind of cool though…

I died in a metaphorical sense. I died in the way I was living my life previously.

See I was living previously under the delusion that I knew things. Particularly, how to be a good mother to my son. I thought that I was doing a good job. Thought that I was showing up for him in the ways he needed, even though he protested and argued his own best interest to the contrary.

Last week as I journeyed to the far reaches of Alaska, I died with every step. Every step I took towards my son and my destination required, in fact demanded, that I, the person who had been his mother for almost sixteen years, die off so that a new mother could be reborn in her stead.

I look upon the remnants of the mother I used to be as a fallen tree whose carcass decays into food for new life. I laid across the path in my own demise with the strident hope that my death as that mom, the one who had gotten us this far, would be fodder for the growth of a new and stronger mother who could guide her son towards a more solid ground. Ground that he could begin anew to rebuild his life that he has been so afraid to live.

I had to die you see. Because the mother I was did not have the skills or ability to do what I did last week. She was a coddler, a fixer, a pusher, a hinderer. That mother I was, was the kind of mother who was in the fucking way. She stood tall for moments but then shrank in despair each time she was asked to give more, stretch more, provide more. That mother I was failed. And that mother called it success every time. Each new day, she began with the idea that she was doing her best. That she was helping her son. That she had answers. That this time it would be different. That she could “fix” him.

She had to go because that mother was killing him. She stood between him and his life. She interfered with love and empathy to his detriment. She worked so hard at forcing him to live that she almost killed them both.

So that mother had to go.

I didn’t know when I left for the fireweed paths of Alaska that I would be walking toward my own death. I didn’t know that it was my own demise that I was moving toward. I thought I was taking my son to treatment. I thought it was like the first three times. I was wrong. Dead wrong.

But dying was what I needed. I needed to get out of my own way, out of his way. I needed to die as the mother I was so that I could show up in some new form, as the mother who could leave her child alone in the Alaskan wilderness and step onto a ferry and sail away.

Before you think I am making too much of this, think about what I did. I took my child to remote Alaska and I left him there. The fact that I didn’t leave him alone without care and shelter might allow you to believe that it was easier. It wasn’t. The fact that he was going to be well cared for by strangers required almost more courage than I could muster. You try being a parent for almost sixteen years and then having to admit that you have no idea what you are doing and that all of your efforts, every single fucking one of them, failed.

That is a very hard place to meet yourself. The pinnacle of your own mothering sufficiency and abject failure. I pray that you never have to meet yourself on that path because it is life alteringly painful.

But, if you get there, you will see that there is nothing left to do at the top of this particular peak except leap into the wide openness that surrounds you and trust that whatever happens, your best failed you and him. And there you die a million deaths, all the ways that you told yourself that you were doing ok, he was doing ok, he was better, you were better. It was all fucking better. It wasn’t. Not ever. And as you sail through the rainforesty air and free fall towards the lush landscape below, you are granted passage from the mother you were by dying as you fall. Your shell of grandiosity hitting the ground first and shattering into tiny pieces of wood, splintering your soul and heart. There is no way to recover from a fall like that. So you lie dying on the understory while gazing upwards to the overstory. So many stories, all of them never quite false, enough truth told so that you fooled yourself, but always and forever shrouded in lies that you really believed.

And as you lie dying, life leaking out of you like a mountain stream, you allow yourself to sink into your own morass. You allow yourself to bleed out without the thought of a tourniquet or call for help. You die because it is all there is left to do.

So I died on a hillside in Alaska. I watched the mother I was fall and decompose before myself. Spirit circling my own denigration, content to now be fodder for newer life. Life that is free from the tenancies of the past, life that is granted new passage and purchase. I lie there watching a tiny new mother grow out of the wreck that laid waste upon the ground. I watched myself sprout up from my own ashes and rise again a phoenix to my son who watched my departure from a distant shore. I was reborn into newness within myself, granted skills and capabilities my former self did not possess. I died as the mother I was so that a new one, a more capable one, could take my place.

This new mother delivered her son to the wild landscape, hugged him hard, kissed his cheek and walked away. Her tears silent as she left him behind. This new mother had the skills to move her feet even as her heart broke. The new mother knowing things that the former one couldn’t even dream.

And just like that new life was created from the death of the one just passed. The circle and cycle repeating even as life marched on. I marched on carrying forever the knowledge of a dead mother walking, but with a new gait and stride that belong only to younger mothers who are not burden by shame and guilt.

I welcomed my nascent self and allowed her to walk forward in my shoes as if I didn’t still occupy them. I allowed this new version of mother to be unknown and a wee bit frightening. I just allowed her to move on, in her way, knowing that my own death had to happen if there was ever to be salvation for any of us.

Death comes in many forms. If you ask someone the opposite of death, they will almost always tell you life. But that is not true. The opposite of death is birth…life is what happens in between. And in my new embodiment, mother is reborn and with that rebirth begins to live free as she is no longer chained to her own fear of death. I know now, living like you are dying, is the best worst expression of living one can ever do.