Don't Forget to Call Your Mamma: Elul and Death-Bed-Side Musings

Don't Forget to Call Your Mamma... *
NOTE: This entry was written Saturday, 29 August 2015. In the wee hours of Monday morning, 31 August 2015, my mother died peacefully. I am so grateful for all of the readers - friends and those who don't know us - who honor her and my family by reading this.


My mother has been one of my greatest teachers throughout my entire life. For years, since I got my first email account, twenty-five years ago as a college freshman, my mother and I had a nearly daily (and sometimes multiple times a day) email correspondence. In time, this became a sharing of struggles and mutual support. Always, she shared insights -- about her life, the lives of people we know, and life in general -- that helped me to grow and change inside. Nearly three years ago, that correspondence, and our ability to talk on the phone (we definitely needed bulk long distance in the days before cell phones), disappeared in an instant. She was in the hospital, I called to talk and comfort her, she picked up the phone, and -- with my dad and the doctor in the room there, she suddenly couldn't speak.

Since then, despite her inability to speak, my mother has continued to teach me, day in and day out, about the strength and will to continue to live, to always strive to move forward, to get back up on one's feet literally and figuratively.

And so it breaks my heart that this past Thursday my dad and I finally had to be the ones to say "it's time to let go." She knew, too. I'm sure she did. In her last conscious moments, she looked deeply at each of us gathered in the room. My dad**, my brother, my husband, me.

We continue to watch vigilantly, as her body pulses on.

"If I have done anything to harm you in the past year, please forgive me." My mother taught me to always ask these words out loud, each year in season of Awe. We have usually asked between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

"Repent one day before you die," taught Rabbi Eliezer (Avot). There is no time like the present. I don't expect my mother to live to see Rosh Hashanah, two weeks from now. Right now it is Elul, the month preceding these days -- and a time of preparation for those upcoming days of awe.

Last night I sat by my mother's bed and asked her forgiveness. This is the hardest year, yet. Did I imagine the slight raise of eyebrows, or a minute squeeze from her hand?

I sang to her from Psalms:
עשה עיני אל ההרים מעין יבוא עזרי
I will lift my eyes to the mountains from whence my help comes.
(among others)

 and also from the prayers of forgiveness:

 סלח לנו מחל לנו כפר לנו
Forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.
(among others)

My mother has taught me to live tradition, not just to know it, by living it herself.

Any sins I commit, by omission, by neglect, or by intent, are my own. And I have plenty.

It occurred to me last night when I returned home, and was trying to find sleep, that there is another way in which my mother has lived that I have not fully lived up to.

I have never once heard my mother say "I don't want to...."
(There is one exception, and it is only in the past year when she has been entirely dependent on other people for nearly every aspect of her life from access to food and entertainment to personal hygiene, and I do not count this as a lapse, but rather as a part of her ongoing desire to have some control and sense of safety in her fragile life during this time.)

I know that I regularly feel that "I don't want to." When I would express this as a kid, my mother would make me do things anyway -- but she always stood behind me, sometimes literally, as I did them. A silly memory of this is when I went to get my driver's permit. I was nervous, it was a new thing, I didn't know what to ask or how. She coached me, but she wouldn't go up to the desk for me and ask for the paperwork -- she made me do it. Nearly thirty years later, I still remember that moment, and am grateful for it. Her coaching from way back continues to guide me when I encounter new things.

But I can be stubborn, and sometimes it takes me a long time to go up to that desk, to step up to the plate as it were.

As my mother lies unconscious, as we watch her body wither, I cannot help but think how I have already missed in the past few years since she lost her ability to speak and write, and how greatly I will miss, her coaching, her conversation, her stamina.

In my mother's honor, I want to strive harder against the "I don't wanna" feeling in my life.

Don't forget to call, talk with, write to, connect with your loved ones. Don't forget to call your Mamma! I'll be sitting by my mother's side as long as I can. I love her more than anything in the world!



Notes:
* Don't Forget to Call Your Mamma...I Wish I Could Call Mine is the title of a book by Lewis Grizzard.I once had all of Grizzard's books, collections of his syndicated newspaper humor column. I laughed heartily through my late teens and my twenties to his work. This is the only book I have kept through the years, though I haven't reread it in at least a dozen.
** For family, and others who wonder or know, he is my step-dad. See my father's day post from this year.

Wake Up, Elul is Here! -- with Writing Prompts

רבי אליעזר אומר, יהי כבוד חברך חביב עליך כשלך, ואל תהי נוח לכעוס, ושוב יום אחד לפני מיתתך

Rabbi Eliezer would say: The honor of your fellow should be as precious to you as your own, and do not be easy to anger. Repent one day before your death. (Sayings of the Fathers (Avot) ch.2)

Asked his disciples: Does a man know on which day he will die? Said he to them: So being the case, he should repent today, for perhaps tomorrow he will die; hence, all his days are passed in a state of repentance. (bShabbat 153a)

Mindfulness is a hot ticket word in contemporary American culture. It goes along with meditation, yoga, contemplative practices. Some of us may roll our eyes at the term, others may say, "yeah, I do that!" and still others — perhaps most of us — have a desire to increase our mindfulness.

In the ancient wisdom of Rabbi Eliezer we find the call to be first of all mindful in our relationships. Hold the honor of our fellows high, and try not to get angry. And, knowing we will err, as surely all humans do, Rabbi Eliezer offers a way out: repent. Now.

But don't we all get caught up in the rush of daily life? Don't we sometimes rush to grumble about the person in front of us on the road, or in a grocery store? Don't we sometimes yell at our children out of exasperation even when we know it won't help anything (I did that the other day at the park, and I'm still thinking how ridiculous I must have looked to all those — one of my less pretty parenting moments)? Aren't we all sometimes selfish, sometimes abrupt, sometimes hot, sometimes judgmental? Haven't we all acted before thinking?

The blasts of the shofar, from this first day of Elul into the coming new year, call us to wake up, to check in with ourselves and see, just how mindful are we? Just how aware are we in our daily lives? 

Even if we have a daily practice of self-reflection and self-improvement — even if that practice has us turning to those we have been angry at, or have judged poorly, in the process of our daily lives — even so, very few of us don't need a reminder.

Elul gives us a month to reflect on the last year and to renew our mindfulness in preparation for the new year, and another ten days to seek forgiveness before we rehearse our death at Yom Kippur. 

Wake Up! shouts the shofar. Pay attention. How are you being in the world?

One of my spiritual teachers regularly asks the question How be you? Sometimes this sets my inner grammar police wriggling uncomfortably. But just now, I'm hearing it differently. "How are you feeling" is not the question she is asking me. Rather, I am sure, she is asking How are you being in the world? How be you?


And this is the question I offer to you. How are you being in the world?


WRITING PROMPT: If you don't have a journal, find some blank paper. Write down the question, How am I being in the world? How was I in my interactions with people today? Now spend 18 minutes (my timer is set there, but chose your amount of time) reflecting on one or more encounters you had with other people today. Focus on how you were in those interactions; let go of how they were, only judging them with honor. 

Repeat this exercise throughout the week. If there are days when you feel like you don't have much to say, reflect backward; is there an experience from the last week, month, year that you are still thinking about, that is still bothering you in some way? Reflect!

Re'eh: Reaping Blessing Through Letting Go

When you do set [your slave] free, do not feel aggrieved; for in the six years s/he has given you double the service of a hired man. Moreover, the Lord your God will bless you in all you do. 
(Deut. 15:18)

I don't keep human slaves, and I don't believe in such keeping, but I do keep material slaves. Beyond the things I have in my life that I put to good use on a daily, weekly, or even annual basis, I keep things far beyond their function to me.

When we moved across the country last summer, I gave away an incredible amount of what my mother taught me to call "junque" when I was a kid, a term she placed on the box of things that didn't fit in any good category but which I refused to part with. Apparently, I have accumulated a lot of junque. Last year I finally got rid of piles of books about topics I have no longer study or work with, furniture and clothing that I rarely or never used, tchatchkes (trinkets - pick your word) that my inner child had forced me to hold onto, and many broken things I kept promising myself I would fix.

I kept a desk. It's a perfectly good desk - a solid top over four sturdy legs, with a single small drawer big enough for a few pencils, a small stapler, and a packet of stamps.

I acquired this desk one summer when someone paid me to clean out and paint their basement. "Get rid of the desk." I brought it home. After all, I was a poor college student, applying at the time for graduate school, and sure to both be poverty stricken and in need of a desk for years to come. 

The irony -- which came to me as an epiphany the other day when I read Stephen King's words On Writing, "It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room" -- is that I don't use a desk.  King uses a desk, and his belongs in the corner, not the middle or the room (he also had an epiphany). My writing space, my working space, is a chair or a couch or often enough sitting up in bed. I use a desk when I have to - at work - but not on my own time.

I didn't know this, though, and I moved the desk from my Ohio undergraduate apartment to my Indiana grad student house, then on to Pennsylvania for rabbinical school. I cannot remember where the desk was in our Philly apartment -- it's possible I stored it those years, because there I acquired an IKEA desk with more drawer space. I took both desks with me to New Hampshire, and the old one had an honored spot in our sunroom, where it rarely accumulated too many stacks, and where my husband frequently sat. I sat next to it in the chaise, as I had the other desk in Philly. And then I moved both desks to Connecticut, where the newer one became a desk I sat at a handful of times, and the old one became my son's changing table. When we moved to Seattle, the IKEA desk went to the curb in the great purge, but this old desk came with, still sturdy and, I thought, functional.

Currently, this desk sits in my living room gathering stacks of things. I have sat at it maybe twice in the year we have been here. At Hanukkah it held our various menorahs. But mostly it has stacks of things that get put there, then buried, deeper and deeper until I am forced into an archaeological dig either by avalanche or by a need to find something.

Still, I haven't decided if or how to get it out of my house. We don't have storage space, and besides, storing it for some theoretical use in some unknown time in the future feels absurd. I know if I put it out on the curb or put a note up on my local "buy-nothing" page, it will be gone in short order, and to someone who will surely put it to good use.

Why is it so hard? This week's Parasha reminds us that the difficulty of letting go is common, but that to do so honors the place that thing, idea, or yes, person, has had in our lives. I am also convinced that letting go makes room in our lives for things, ideas, and people we can't anticipate. 

Yep, the desk I have held onto for more than twenty years, still with names and phone numbers penned on it by the previous owner, is all but gone.