Passing

It is again November. The fourth November since Maxx's death. I say death because I don't believe he "passed" anywhere. He died.

When I was 32 , a year before Maxx was born, Steve, Megan, then 3, and I lived in a cramped two bedroom duplex in Alhambra. One afternoon in late May of 1985, my mother, who had been gravely ill for almost four years with metastasized breast cancer, had collapsed on the kitchen floor of her apartment about 40 minutes away in San Pedro. The 62 year old divorcee who lived directly beneath my parents in a two bedroom carbon copy flat, heard the sudden dull thud of her fall as my mother stood at the counter pouring hot water for a cup of tea. The neighbor rushed upstairs. Later, that same woman who, by the way, ended up marrying my father not quite two years after my mother died, liked to "thank god" that she had been at home and not out as she usually was at that time of day performing her rigorous roster of pastoral duties as an ordained minister of the Unity Church. Wasn't it lucky that she hadn't yet left and so could be with my mother while she "transitioned?"

Sitting on the kitchen floor, in a puddle of Earl Gray holding my mother's hand, waiting for the ambulance that would take her to the hospital where she died several days later.

"What luck that I was there with her, or she would have been entirely alone," she would comment at every opportunity eying me like a scrappy nasty tempered plucked parrot.

"You know, Lis, (she liked to use my family nickname without ever asking me) sometimes your mom would just sit there in the kitchen and bang on the floor to have me come up and help her put on her bra when your father was gone." My mother would never have done such a thing. Like some kind of caged chimpanzee.

I never stopped hating this woman even though she took good care of my father for the next 20 years, until he "transitioned" a year ago from Alzheimer's. She also assisted him in "transitioning" through his comfortable pension and is now living on whatever he left her in his will. Honestly, he was a bastard and she did me a favor.

Before she used the word in this context--to somehow soften the gut-wrenching details associated with the slow disintegration of the physical and emotional body--I had never heard this phrase and so was both aghast and horrified at the banality of the statement. "Transitioned?" Into what? Where? Having had no prior experience with death, or those who hovered at its edges, I had no idea at the time what the term meant, Apparently, this is what was (maybe still is) said when someone loses consciousness and "passes over."

In any case, Maxx did not pass. He died. Four Thanksgiving's ago. Four Halloween's. Four Christmas's. This week I have come apart. Megan spoke of cellular memory. I have heard the phrase and I understand it's meaning. This does not stop the shock that I register at the force with which it takes me down.

It is the change in seasons. The color of the light in the sky. The early chill in the evening. The darkness at 5:00 pm. The need to dress more warmly. A time when I used to begin buying warm socks and sweatshirts, hats and another umbrella. Now, these are just the days I crawl through to get to December 6th.

They are vaguely defined "people," and I used to be a nameless one among them. Accepting and accepted, they live with one another beneath that light, and whether it lasts forever or for a moment, there must be a kind of closeness while they are enveloped in the light. I am no longer one of them, however. They are up there, on the face of the earth; I am down here, in the bottom of a well. They possess the light, while I am in the process of losing it. Sometimes I feel that I may never find my way back to that world, that I may never again be able to feel the peace of being enveloped in the light, that I may never again be able to hold the cat's soft body in my arms. and then I feel a dull ache in the chest, as if something inside there is being squeezed to death."
Haruki Murakami
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle