It was/has been a surreal experience.  Mom was still warm to the touch when I arrived.  She passed peacefully this morning and the nurse called me to tell me that she had passed when they checked on her at 11:40 a.m.   When I arrived at her bedside, I moved the sheet down to uncover her face.  Somehow it was easier to see her face than have it covered.  I kept thinking I saw her chest rise as if she was breathing.  Several times.  Which of course was not the case and it tripped me out.  Curious what our minds can do, no?  I was 17 when my Dad died and I did not see any of the specifics insofar as when he died and was transported.  Somehow, today, witnessing this seemed to be helpful.  I don’t know how. I just had to see and know every detail.  I had to sit with Mom’s body for almost 3 hours until the mortuary arrived.  In that time, within an hour, she had started to become cooler to the touch (I stroked her head).  It didn’t freak me out, it somehow helped me to know she was really gone.  Not that I needed any more proof.  Dead is dead, right?  

One thing I noticed since this morning is that I can’t get rid of the ‘death smell.’  It’s this sickening sweet, somewhat acrid smell.  It’s the one thing that is unsettling to me.   I wonder how folks in hospitals can handle this on a daily basis.  I guess they just somehow get used to it.  

I felt terrible for Mom’s roommate at the nursing home as she knew that Mom was gone.  They had pulled the curtains around Mom’s bed but she still had to go past Mom’s bed as her bed was the farthest one from the door.  Her roommate is a woman who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Still very lucid.  She uses a walker.  At one point, she paged the nurse and when the nurse came in, she said she was going to go to some activity as “This is too much.”  (I took her comment to mean it was too much for her to be there with a deceased person in the next bed.  Understandable.)  She was sweet to Mom, telling me one day that she put her radio on a classical station for Mom as she seemed to like it.  I’m still not sure how she could tell this given Mom’s state, but I won’t argue.  It is sweet.  And kind.  And I am grateful Mom had such a kind and caring roommate.

The guy from the mortuary told me that when folks are distraught (which I wasn’t) he feels like he can help them more.  (Sorry to disappoint.)  It’s not that I do not feel the loss of my mother.  I think it’s just that I feel like I have to keep it together.  Be the good man in a storm.  I think it’s that I cried so much one night 10 days ago that it reminded me of how when I cry, I cry a river of tears, for a long time.  I was doubled over with tears and actual pain in my gut.  I feel loss on a visceral level.  

Mom was very tiny at the end.  She was always very petite but age shrinkage and the Alzheimer’s all contributed to her becoming this wisp of a woman.  She used to be 5 ft.  In recent years, I towered over her (and I am only 5 ft myself).  She had stopped eating/taking in solid food and in the last week had stopped taking in fluids.  So, she seemed to become even smaller.   

I asked the mortuary guy what was actually going to happen.  He told me he would move Mom onto his gurney.  I was concerned about the other residents at the nursing home but he assured me that they would likely be moved out of the hallways.  I asked him when rigor sets in. He said that it varies but with folks like Mom who are small and thin, often it is sooner.  When he moved her, the rigor was obvious.  Was that jarring?  Somewhat but it helped to remind me that she is really gone.  I guess somehow even though it’s been a long program, when it actually happens, denial mode is strong.  Mine anyway.  I have few saleable skills.

I’m glad Mom finally passed.  That she finally has some peace.  She had a difficult life.  She was bitter and hateful at times.   Okay, most of my life.  She had issues.  Huge issues.  I am not being disrespectful, it’s just how it was.  Despite this, when the Alzheimer’s progressed, she became one of  those Alzheimer’s patients who did a 180. She was always the favorite resident at the home.  Very docile and sweet.  (???)  I think somehow, the Alzheimer’s released some of her torment and suffering.  And for that I am glad.  She grew up very, very poor in the hills of West Virginia.  She was a very bright woman whose goal was to get the hell away from her hillbilly roots.  She grew up having to break the necks of chickens they were going to have for dinner.  (I am of the opinion that killing something with your own bare hands does something to you.  Not in a good way.)   She was the oldest of 7 children.  So, she had to help raise her younger sibs.  She had a very hard life growing up.  There were issues.  She didn’t even attend her own father’s funeral.  There were issues. 

Finally, she has peace.  And for that, I am grateful.

There are so many mysteries at work in our individual lives that it leaves me wondering whether any of us truly has the intelligence to figure it out.  I think sometimes all that is really required is imagination. Given my proclivity for endurance sports, sky diving, hang gliding, surfing, rock climbing, base jumping, etc., I will own my inner sensation junkie.  However, I will argue that sensation is not just a purely physical experience but also a way of imagining.  And I have found it might be better to surrender to this in terms of really living.  That is, being smart about life sometimes tends to keep me from living it.  It can be limiting.  Things happen sometimes (most times?) without intention to make them happen (determinists contact me offline).  Allowing things to happen freely, without trying to control or own them, which in essence is giving up the ego seems a purer way to be.  And I have found I don’t get distracted as much from what could be.  I think it’s better to dwell in possibility.  The good kind. Cuz gawd knows life/living is rife with the other kind.

I have always been fascinated and drawn to discoverers, inventors, and researchers.   And the outright batshit, ballsy, out there adventurer wingnuts.  There is a certain passion and desire I see and connect with in these folks.  I don’t know that I will ever achieve anything grand or heroic in my life, for  me it is sufficient to be here now, to live with an open heart, learn to accept what is offered, and make my contribution at whatever level I can.

To have faith today, it’s necessary to at once affirm it and also ironically observe all that makes faith impossible.  On the one hand it’s all been done before, everything is relative, there is no ground for authenticity and every claim to truth is suspect. On the other hand, you can stake your claim with all your heart.  In a faithless age, irony is the only way to take yourself seriously and the only way to show others that I distrust myself enough for them to trust me.

I’ve never understood it when someone dies and we say they were “lost.”  There is much I don’t understand and likely never will.  But still I ask the questions.  I lost a dear friend this week.  Barbara Warren.  She was phenomenal.  As a friend, a mentor, my ‘mother’.  In those times I stopped believing there is a god, when I thought of Barbara, when I talked to Barbara, when I was in her company, I believed in a god again because she was truly a gift.  One of those people you simply can not believe you have the incredibly great fortune to have in your life.  Even those who only met her in passing at an athletic event and were not close friends with her would will tell you how fortunate they feel to have met her, even if only briefly.  It is rare in our lifetimes that we get to experience what I call a state of ‘grace.’  Those times when we have ease of heart and feel the passion of life to its top.  When I was in Barbara’s company, I always felt that state of grace, or at least a pipeline to it.  It was her.  She was so incredibly kind, and generous with her heart and her courage and her faith.  She believed in me at times when I no longer did and helped bring me back to that faith in myself I had become so disconnected from.  She would tear up when we talked about my own mother, the neglect and abuse I experienced, telling me she felt like a mother to me, and it was the first time I had experienced that, a mother’s love.  I would not have known about my chosen sport (ultrarunning) were it not for Barbara.  She handed me an entry form for a 50 mile race one fall afternoon and told me, “You’re going to do this with me next year!”  I had never run/raced over a half-marathon distance on the roads and yet, I readily agreed.  And so my world expanded both literally and figuratively.  Which is what she was about.  Expanding your world, pushing beyond the self-imposed limits we set to stay in our comfort zone.

I began writing this on August 29th.  I had to stop, take a break for a few days.  It is Sept 10th now, two weeks since she left us and still I cry at times because I miss her terribly.  Because I think of her sister and her daughters and Tom.  I celebrate her every day when I run.  But I miss her terribly.  I celebrate her when I curl up with my dogs at night, as she was so loving.

I remember one time when I went out to her house in the mountains east of San Diego for a training run with her and Angelika and Angelika’s son and others.  It was the first time I had been out to the house which Tom had built.  It overlooks Lake Cuyamaca.  It is beautiful and peaceful.  We were out all day.  At that time, there had been a rash of aggressive  mountain lions in the area.  While we were out on our run,  I still laugh to this day because Barbara piped up and said, “Put Cooper in front, she is the smallest, we will use her as bait!”  And everyone laughed.  As did I.   I was new to ultrarunning and still felt out of my element and by far out of my ‘league’ to be running with Barbara and Angelika and the others.  But, despite their incredible athletic ability and talent, when I ran with them, they made you feel as if you are their peer.

Barbara lived everything.  Expansively.  With love.  With kindness.  

It’s been over a year.  I still miss her terribly at times.  Other times, I simply feel she is with me, keeping me strong and directed.  Which is good, because it is worse when I feel as if she is ‘gone’–and really, she is not.