Twelfth Night

The decs are coming down today, the mincemeat is all used up, Christmas is over. My question is, does the poinsetta count? Well, I guess it does. Greenery would be brought into the house to trap the bad spirits and then cast out at the end of Yuletide, thus getting rid of them. Guess the poinsetta had to do the job for our household.

So, the world holds its breath while Ariel Sharon lies on what is most likely his death bed. It is worrying how much agitation it is causing. Difficult not to think of learning about Bismark in history, a man who held peace in his hands by juggling so many carefully constructed treaties and agreements, batons that all fell to the ground when he died.

Why am I so sure he won't survive this? Because my father didn't. Only a couple of years younger than Sharon is now, he was hospitalised with a stroke, then suffered a more serious one, same pattern. Amanda, Austen and I went to see him. We were told that he would die, that was a given, but he could be kept alive artificially for perhaps a month. Or they could allow him to pass peacefully.
Amanda and I didn't need much discussion, we knew what he would want. He passed within a few hours, one day before our mother's funeral. I do have a demon that lives with me though, it was hydration that was keeping him alive and the nurse said they would give him something that would make him dream, and I aways worried that his final dreams would have been ones of thirst.
To the rest of the world, our dad was no Ariel Sharon, but to Amanda, Austen and I, he was one of those giants on whose shoulders we stand. No wars broke out when he passed, but the writing stopped in the book of his life that day, though a book that will not be closed for a long time.

A friend in England has lost her mother at New Year. I think of what she has gone through, what she is facing now. When someone has a terminal illness, there can be more than one point of no return. There is the moment when one accepts that the end is inevitable, that hope is gone, then there is the period of helplessness whilst they suffer so that when the end comes it is both a relief that this has ended, but also a finality. No miracle can now occur. There is no going back. Physical contact has ceased. They say that we're a long time dead, but when someone that close to you dies, it's the length of your own life that measures the length of time that they are dead.

There can be surprising outcomes too. I remember my friend Glenda saying to me that when she had finally been able to come to terms with the death of her second parent, she realised that she was an orphan. I had that same thought. Amanda and I had been orphaned, no matter our age at the time. But even later, there is also a feeling of freedom and this was also an experience that Glenda had shared with me. Throughout our lives, our parents are in our heads, watching whatever we do. Whilst we may still do things they disapprove of, we do it in the knowledge of how they would feel, thus guilt accompanies our acts, we have to be accountable to them. When they die, whilst we carry them with us, they no longer seem to judge our actions.

But there has been something else. Since my mother's death, and now that the grief has finally quietened down to an ache, I have been able to know her better. My mother's energy was dynamic, she was the force that drove things forward. Our relationship with her - and I think I it is fair to say we - was immediate, it was conversation, reaction, alive, never quiet, and so the way that I viewed her rarely went beyond that region of interaction.
Now that the conversation has stopped, the emotions of everyday interchange have quietened, I have been able look at her differently, and I think, to understand her more.

The bad spirits may go out with the Christmas greenery, but the good spirits will stay because they help us to grow, we need them still.