III…Expect the Unexpected

Death is both expected and unexpected.

“Why did you leave so early?” 

I beg the question to those who have, knowing that the answer will never come. It feels like the ultimate betrayal and it pains me to think about what they were experiencing in those last remaining moments. I project my own discomfort. I yearn for meaning and understanding. My resistance to acceptance keeps me bound up, logic petitioning for a waltz. Piece by piece, step by step, figure it out. 

Intuition pulls me aside, offering surrender in place of knowing. Death’s timeline has no rules, no bounds. It is the living who keep the shackles on; the living who are taught to fear her kiss.

Buddhist practices illuminate that death is a continuum and can be an opportunity for liberation. It is a cycle that veers far from the linear, allowing for softness and acceptance. Betrayal can transition into love. A ritual of heartache.

I wonder, did my Grandmother, Claudia, expect something like this to happen? To give up the life she had created so soon?

She was 35 years old. A young mother, wife, daughter, sister. There were warnings. She was strongly encouraged to not have any more children after her first born.

She had four more. 

The doctors who tried to save her with their premonitions and sound advice are the same ones who brought her to her untimely end. “A botched hysterectomy,” is the description that was used. It was unexpected and yet they knew. They let her bleed. They failed her. As did her tired, broken body. Her womb, an admonition; her womb, a giver of life.

My mother was only four years old, she doesn’t remember much. Visions of the funeral home trail her memories but sadly and truthfully, she was far too young to grasp what had actually happened. So she was left to carry on, her innocence buried alongside her loss.

I both mourn and celebrate my grandmother’s decisions and her sacrifice. She left too early but she gave me my mother, my lineage. I look forward to when she visits me in my dreams and I get to look into her kind eyes. Her southern cadence lulls me in and holds me close as we dance in celebration for both what could have been and for what is, embracing the cycles.