Love and Loss
She was dying now, her consciousness was scattered and it seemed as if she were travelling through time, speaking to the people of her past for a final time in a place I couldn’t be with her.
Suddenly, she became lucid to the reality of the room where I am sat beside her. I’m holding her hand and she turns to me. She says, “I love you, my child” and I begin to weep. It is almost uncontrollable, but a gentle, weak, yet sharp squeeze of my hand brings me back to her and out of the throws of a loss not yet present.
My eyes meet hers and then I am gone from the room and transported. I am watching a nurse cut the umbilical cord of a newly born baby in the hands of a doctor. Allowing my gaze to turn, I see a red-faced, exhausted looking woman who has clearly just gone through labour. Standing next to her, holding her hand, is my father. I look back to the woman’s face again and I see my dying mother. The child has been wrapped in a blanket and the doctor now gently places me, in my mothers arms. My parents look at each other and they are both crying tears. I feel their joy. The miracle of life, a creation undeniably their own that promises an entirely different life for the both of them. In this moment, I see that they have both died in themselves so that they might be parents to myself, and that they could not be happier. A creation in which lives a part of themselves will now go on to live a life of it’s own, but to which they will always be existentially tethered. They would have to learn to let go over and over again. And fall in love over and over again, as I grew and changed over and over again from the child I was to the person I was to become.
At death, to protect from destruction in the pain of losing a mother, some of the deepest love ever experienced, they were placed at a beginning in the midst of an end. They found themselves again at the moment of their own birth, an unbridled joy, and the realisation was made then that life was no longer only for themselves. That in a way, both mother and father had died long ago for them, and now the child who had needed the physical presence of it’s mother would die too, and to lose her today was to find her in a different way, inside them and who they may go on to be, for her, with her carried in the heart, always.
