COMFORT TIMES THREE
MORE COMFORT
Ask me some innocent question about the recent past, or mention something about yesterday, or even this morning, and I am apt to draw a blank. My short term memory is shot to hell, or so it seems. I know I have said this before. But this morning I riffled through an old diary to see where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, what I have made. A diary can keep you on even ground. I discovered that I had had the same epiphany three separate times. The first was six months ago as I lay in bed wishing I could live to see what the twins make of themselves, both sets of them, Jen’s and Catherine’s; what their lives will be like, feeling sorry that I would miss all that. Aching to know. And my great-granddaughter? great-grandson? What of them?
And my son Ralph’s three daughters? And Sarah’s five children? Who are they becoming, how will they fare? Then came the epiphany. I’m supposed to die! I’ve been here eighty-three years, lucky me, but I’m not meant to hang around forever. I found this very comforting, death, my own, being part of the natural order of things. What a lovely phrase, the natural order of things. A month ago I had the same epiphany, and then again last night! No memory of the previous two until I found them in my diary. Ordinarily, what I have forgotten upsets me, but this was comfort times three, and for comfort, hell, my door is always open.
Welcome to the club. I think it's something that happens to us in our eighties. We get a lot more comfortable with looking ahead to dead, knowing we're closer than ever before. It's a good feeling and a lot of people don't understand that. Maybe it's a sense of finishing well. And then there's that part of looking at those three other generations in our family following us, and being confident that all will go well for them because they are good people, doing good things and helping others. I am contemplating a post about "the kaleidoscope of generational narratives—how they shift, clash, merge—as our society evolves." Inspiration from @Gen123info self description.
my mother thought about what she would miss. She thought about it a lot. I know, because I watched her, and I was somewhat tuned into her thoughts. I was also with her, by the way, when she died. I was in the room. She had been pretty much unconscious for so many days, in the hospital. Just before she died, that night, she suddenly sat straight up, and I saw her look across the room, nodding, as if she were acknowledging who was in the room and it was filled with people, and it wasn't. It was only her and me. But she was seeing the ancestors, her mother, her aunt, her father, with whom she would be, shortly. I am convinced of this and knew it at the time. Then she collapsed, back into her exhaustion, and passed in and at peace