The Mom & Me Journals dot Net
The definitive, eccentric journal of an unlikely caregiver, continued.

Apologia for these journals:
    They are not about taking care of a relative with moderate to severe Alzheimer's/senile dementia.
    For an explanation of what these journals are about, click the link above.
    For internet sources that are about caring for relatives with moderate to severe
        Alzheimer's/senile dementia, click through the Honorable Alzheimer's Blogs in my
        links section to the right.

7 minute Audio Introduction to The Mom & Me Journals [a bit dated, at the moment]

Saturday, January 03, 2009
 
Correspondences
    As those of you who are regular readers of these journals know, I'm firmly agnostic about "things unseen"...I acknowledge lack of explanation, simultaneously delight in coincidences that seem more than coincidental, all the while being careful to continue to salute the "coincidental" as much as the "seem more than". You also know that my mother had two periods, before her death in which she expressed a great deal of interest in John Edward Cross Country, so I'd tape the shows for her (they were always broadcast in the wee hours of the morning). John Edward promotes himself as a psychic and medium. His claim to veracity is a simple and humorously entertaining pre-script that he voices at the end of the introduction to his shows: "How do I know? Because I do." His television shows are primarily tapings of his reading for audiences in which he purports to receive messages from the dead related (by blood or life circumstance) to people who are attending his readings. When I started recording and playing these shows for my mother I did some research about mediums, especially critiques of mediumship, and became fairly familiar with techniques that "so called" mediums use to convince their clients that they are, indeed, communicating with relatives and friends. Despite the evidence that it isn't that hard to trick people into thinking they are hearing from their dead, I enjoyed watching the shows with my mother, especially since John Edward was careful to repeat, in a variety of contexts, that members of his audience didn't need him, that it was more important for them to "communicate, appreciate, validate" while the people to whom they are connected are still here.
    One of my sisters reminded me, last night, that another piece of advice Mr. Edwards dispenses is that one doesn't need a medium to receive messages from the spirits of the dead since, if so inclined, those spirits often attempt contact through techniques that are easy to understand if one is paying attention. I mentioned to her that this probably leaves me out of the loop because I've been adamant, since my mother's death, not to pay attention, simply because I don't want to be misinterpreting simple coincidences as communications from what may or may not be the spirit of my dead mother.
    That being said, this sister told me, last night, of a series of coincidences that, if nothing else, is curious, if not singular, in its correspondences, which are connected to a coincidence surrounding my father's death and continue through today. The father of my sister's children is in the Merchant Marine; thus, he is assigned to a variety of ships throughout the year. He's been in dry dock for some months (not sure how many). He called her yesterday to report that the next ship he'll be sailing was christened by the full and exact first and last names of my mother. This alone, seems, well, noteworthy. There are a couple other correspondences that raise it to the level of more than interesting:    This could be enough to spook "believers", but, there's more. A few days after my mother died, one of my sisters talked with the pastor of her Unitarian church. The pastor told her an oft repeated (during times of death) story which my sister hadn't heard, a version of which is linked, here and quoted below, exactly as it is written in the immediately previously linked blog:
    When our loved one dies, it’s as if they are on a ship, leaving port and disappearing over the horizon. And those of us left on the dock watch sadly and say, “There she goes.” And when the ship goes over the horizon we mourn because our loved one seems to be gone completely, because we can’t see her any more.
    But, when the ship disappears over the horizon to us, it is just appearing to those at another port. And there are loved ones and fellow believers standing on the dock there who have already made the same journey. They are watching expectantly, and when the ship comes over the horizon and approaches, they cheer and say joyously, “Here she comes!”
    My sister told me this story after she'd talked to her pastor. It was good to be reminded of it because one of the subjects about which all of us who were here through the week after my mother's death talked was that, now, my mother no longer had to be satisfied with mere visits from her Dead Zone, she was there, reunited with her faithful family and friends who had continued to keep her company, as they could and as she was able to intuit, courtesy of what I call her Dementia-Lite, throughout the last several years of her life.
    This is not, though, the end of the coincidences. When I decided, this morning, to write this post I searched for examples of this story to which to refer. My search terms were: death horizon "here she comes"; as these were the terms that I thought would be most successful. Of the 14,700 incidents pulled from the web, the very first reported the story (quoted above) as having been told to the blogger by a pastor. In addition, the most prominent commenter on the post shares her first name with the sister to whom the story had been told by her pastor.
    The mystery of death is overwhelming, whether it swallows someone we know, someone we don't, or is about to swallow us. There is always room for comfort when contemplating a death that sets up tremors in the foundation of one's life. I think it is human nature to find comfort in correspondences, as well as explanations and analogies that, at the very least, confirm for us that the mystery of death, while it remains a mystery for all of us despite our beliefs, the reports of those who have been brought back to life after having been pronounced clinically dead and meditative experiences, remains a mystery as long as we are alive; a mystery that causes all of us to mourn and wonder in the wake of deaths that affect us. I formed an analogy some time ago that helps me live relatively comfortably with the fact that we simply can't know, on a global scale, the personal nature of death. It occurred to me, some years ago, that talking about death is very much like talking about gestation before birth. We all know we spent time in the womb but few of us (taking a bow, here, to advocates of Primal Scream Therapy) remember anything about that time. It seems obvious why we don't remember it: There is nothing about that pre-birth existence that can help us learn how to live once we are born. As well, when we are gestating, we have no way of knowing that there is life beyond the womb or wondering about what that life might be like. In the womb we most likely live in ignorance of any possible post-birth state. This ignorance suits us, keeps us focused on what we are doing at the time. Once out of the womb we, typically, live in personal ignorance of our pre-birth state. We develop enough intelligence, while we are alive (assuming we live long enough to understand the concepts of gestation, birth and death) to speculate about our pre-birth and post-death states. As post-birth humans many of us are also convinced that we communicate with, even influence, in rudimentary ways, the fetuses we carry in our wombs. As a species, though, we are not at all close to coming to agreement about the nature of our pre-birth and post-death states. Maybe, then, passing through death is rather like passing through birth into life. If existence continues, it certainly continues in a state with which few of us can claim to be familiar and those who claim familiarity can't also claim universal believability; which, frankly, figures, considering that the mainstay of life, here, in this system, is our connection to our bodies and physical separation from the bodies of others. Death requires that we leave those bodies. They transform, immediately upon death, from the state of "subject" to that of "object". Thus, considering our framework for this life, the one accurate statement we can make about death is that it is radically different than the life with which we are familiar. We can also speculate that, if anything of each of our existences continues after death, knowledge of our pre-death existence probably isn't particularly helpful (apologies to those who stake their souls in theories of reincarnation and/or a continuation of perceptions of a pre-death spiritual life).
    Still, it is, hmmm..., well, helpful for me to consider the above correspondences involving ships and names and pastors and circumstances when I think about my mother's death. For all my careful stepping around absolute belief in the story above and this story as being some sort of indication that my mother remains connected, of her volition, not mine, to the lives of her family and friends, contemplating these stories allows me to feel safely and squarely alive in wonderment, which is, without doubt, one of the primary aspects of what it is to be human and alive while surrounded by the implacable and still mysterious fact of death.
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