It's been one month since Mom passed, and I'm still trying to grasp this reality called death. I've seen it played out thousands of times on movies and television-- real and fiction, and I've read about it in books, and I've even written about it, but I still don't understand it.
Everywhere I look around the house I see evidence of Mom's every day life, and yet she isn't here. If I stay busy enough, I can keep that new reality at bay, until something-- a clothing item I missed taking to the clothes closet, one of her handwritten recipes, the unopened yogurt in the refrigerator I bought for her, the empty wheelchair, her comb, mail still arriving with her name on it, her eyeglasses, or a hundred other things-- pulls me back to remembering she's gone. But I can't let myself live in perpetual sadness. She wouldn't want that.
In each of us, two realities live congruently with each other, but most of us don't recognize it until something shakes them apart-- sometimes it's just a momentary awareness, but what most flagrantly separates the two is death. The physical reality-- the seen remains, but the invisible reality-- the unseen-- the soul and the spirit-- the eternal part that enables thought and reason and movement in these tangible bodies-- leaves. That recognizable body instantly becomes a lifeless shell, confirmed by touch. As soon as my mother's last breath was breathed, she wasn't there anymore. What remained was what we recognized by sight, but what left the body, the room, and the house was what we truly knew-- not by sight, but the soul and spirit relationship we had with Mom. We're left with the love and memories of that relationship, thank heavens, but it's severed for now, and that hurts.
I'm sitting here looking at my computer through physical eyes, but it's my soul and spirit that are doing the seeing and thinking and reasoning. It's hard to let that awareness truly sink in. It's like I've possessed this particular body and I'm controlling it to do my bidding-- typing these letters on the keyboard, breathing in and out, taking a drink of my tea, shedding tears, leaning back in my chair when the words refuse to come. This body does what I tell it to do... until something interferes with that. Like disease.
Mom had a disease that gradually took away her control over her own body. Her soul (mind, will, and emotion) and spirit were fully functioning, trapped in a physical body that mostly refused to do her bidding. But the essence of who she was still there; it just wasn't as easily accessible.
I was so shocked to see the last pictures of my mother at my nephew's wedding ten days before she passed. She looked so ill and frail. But I don't remember her that way at all. I remember her beautiful and strong and so brave. I think that up until the end, I was seeing the essence of who she was-- her soul and spirit, which were quite different from the physical reality of her body. And that is what I want to remember about her. And I will.
I wonder what we'll look like in heaven? I don't believe this ol' body comes close to what I'll look like there. I believe our spiritual eyes will be completely opened in heaven, and we'll be able to see all of the unseen, the essence of who we are. I believe we get glimpses of that occasionally. I have to confess that the best part of me in this life is Christ, whose spirit lives in me because I asked him to. Otherwise, I'm nothing but an occupied shell-- still moving and breathing and physically alive with an eternal soul, but existing only for myself-- my wants, my needs, and my stuff.
And life is meant to be so much more than that.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. I Corinthians 13:12 KJV
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