Circle of life

Time to update regular readers on EBL family affairs.

You may recall from earlier posts this month that my mother was not doing too well. Unfortunately she died on 17 December. The chest infection was not a chest infection at all; it was simply lung disease and stress and old age. It was life fading and slipping away. It was, in the raw, the circle of life.

Sigoth, two Offspringses and I were with her for her last hours and watched her through to her last breath on earth. She was not really conscious. We held her hand and smoothed her forehead and moistened her lips. Then we said goodbye.

She believed in life after death and probably reincarnation. Her beliefs were different from mine. Possibly she was right and somewhere a squalling infant is her new home. I’m pretty sure, from a Buddhist perspective, she will make it back as a human. She did little harm overall and meant none at all. She was a nice person.

If that sounds like faint praise I suppose it’s because her ups and downs, her achievements and failures, her light and her darkness are not really for public consumption. Her generation did not live its life publicly, as people do now. Family is family. The rest can mind their own business.

What I felt during those last hours was love around me. I have been humbled by the way people have mourned her loss. Carers at the residential home and nurses on the ward were tearful and genuinely sad at her passing; they had known her only for a few months, or even days. She touched their lives in positive ways, which is a great achievement. Her friends have shared their memories with me, as have my friends, some of whom have known her almost as long as I have.  Universally they remember her as kindly and welcoming and caring. There are worse legacies.

This picture is of her and me around my first Christmas. I apologise for the gratuitous nudity. Obviously in those days colour had not yet been invented although later it transpired the tub was pink, as am I although a slightly different shade.

To life, my dears, and what we make of it, and all we leave behind!

Namaste.