71 Memories
I’m having a great deal of trouble keeping warm after nightfall. Last night my bedding, made up of many parts, became dishevelled and I lay on the edge of sleep for a long time, not wanting to get colder by getting up to fix it. Eventually though I was just too uncomfortable and decided to do something about remaking the whole bed. After rearranging I lay down again and was at once warmer and more comfortable. I rolled over, snug once more and... the alarm went off. I got up and had a cold wash and nothing I did could warm up my hands again afterwards. Walking down through the forest even the leaves seemed to be shivering.
As I sit in meditation
so many, many lives crowd in:
names and faces,
times and places,
are there with uncanny clarity.
Snatches of song fill the air
with words still full of significance;
a sound, or a vision,
a tender emotion,
of those memories I thought myself free.
In many of these lives
a pilgrim I have been,
seeking the true
as I passed through,
on the long path to eternity.
These days I rest my staff
and go wander no more,
but what I find
is that in my mind
all the world now comes to me.
Deep they lie, so very deep,
these memories of yesterday
it must be said
I thought them dead,
but they live on as I now see.
Maybe mercy is no more
than a forgetting,
but we only forget
what we truly have met,
what has been seen so very clearly.
A memory: there was a time when I had sat with my mother and there had been a great stillness in the house; we often sat together like this in the evenings, my mother knitting, and I reading or just sitting quietly. After a lifetime of conflict we had finally learned to be peaceful in each other’s company. That evening we had come down off the chairs so as to be closer to the fire. It was still cold in the house even though it was close to the end of winter. The season itself had been mild that year, and I remember it had only snowed once in our village – I had climbed the hill and walked through the churchyard that day, and all things were white and clean and beautiful.
As we sat together I had the feeling that there was nowhere else I wanted to be but at my mother’s side. She was ill and her face was drawn, but the confusion of the past months had passed. When she had first been told about her illness she had been angry, first with the surgeon whom she was convinced had made a mistake; and then also with life, which had picked her and not another. I remember as we were leaving the hospital after convalescence, she had spoken with the surgeon in the office, and as we went slowly down the stairs, one at a time, I had asked her what he had said, and she replied that the operation had been a success, but there might be something more... but she didn’t say what.
That was several months ago, and she had never spoken about her illness since, but as we talked together that night somehow the subject had come up and she had asked: ‘Why are they giving no treatment?’ She was taking painkillers, but there had been no chemotherapy, no radiotherapy, nothing giving hope of a cure. Very gently I had replied: ‘There is nothing they can do.’ She had cried then, and I had held her in my arms and she had let me. That is the only time I remember seeing my mother in tears. There’s no need to cry, I had whispered, but of course there was.
That moment of tenderness, born in the silence, had etched itself deep in my memory, a whole relationship summed up: all the bitterness and pain, all the need and alienation – and towards the end all the reconciliation. All that was contained in that moment and there was a totality about it, and a finality.
She never spoke about her illness again, neither to the doctor, the nurses, or the visitor from the hospice; not to her friends or to her family; but she had started to put things in order, clearing up any unfinished business. Those days were long days, and we often spent the evenings together just being with each other, nothing much to say, nothing much to do, nowhere to go any more, I remember that time as one that was full of grace and blessings as I saw so much forgiveness, so much letting be, and so much openness come to fruition in a strong old lady who was growing weaker day by day.
Towards the end, with her health ever failing, my mother had decided that enough was enough and had started to refuse to take food. After a few days she was taken to hospital with severe abdominal pains. On admittance the doctor had said that she had only an hour or two to live, and had given her a shot of morphine to ease the pain. An hour or two came and went, and then the morning and the afternoon, and it became clear that the drug had sapped her will to die, though of course by now it was only a matter of time till her passing. I stayed with her during those days too, sleeping on the floor alongside her bed.
Ten days went by like this and still her life dragged on, and then one night the nurse had asked if I’d like to give my mother her sleeping tablets – it was the first time I had been asked to give her anything like this, and I knew this would be a sleep she could not be expected to wake up from. I took the tablets from the nurse and helped my mother to sit up, and with the aid of a glass of water she took them and lay back down. It wasn’t long before her breathing, which had been so laboured in the last few days, became easier as she fell asleep. I had lain down on the floor and the only sound I was conscious of was my mother’s breathing. Just after midnight it stopped.
Back in my village
walking up the road
where I had been born
so many, many lives before.
At long last I had
returned to my home,
but those I met there
were from another time and place.
Quietly we talked,
and as I looked up
though it was full day
all the stars in the sky shone forth.
I was asked to name
the constellations,
but now I could not
I had been away for far too long.