---
title: "Protected: What we have to love her with"
description: "My mom is dying. She won’t say it, and my dad won’t say it, and the doctors won’t say it—somehow in the three years of her cancer I’ve never talked to her doctors even once—but she’s..."
url: https://tasshin.com/blog/what-we-have-to-love-her-with/
date: 2023-04-02
modified: 2025-02-21
author: "Tasshin"
image: https://tasshin.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/tasshin-pfp.png
categories: ["Blog 📓"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# Protected: What we have to love her with

My mom is dying. She won’t say it, and my dad won’t say it, and the doctors won’t say it—somehow in the three years of her cancer I’ve never talked to her doctors even once—but she’s dying. We’re all dying, of course, but she is also dying, and she’s on her way out, one foot out the door. 

Her ears are wrinkled and grey, almost burned. She has lost her hair for a second time, just a few long grey strands remaining, spread over her scalp. She fell recently and has bruises on her legs and a cut on her head from where she hit it. She’s always tired, and sore from laying down all the time, because she’s effectively immobile, unable to stand for herself. She’s confused often—did she eat lunch? Has my father visited already today, or is he coming later? 

She grimaces at her food—all food tastes bland, and she doesn’t have much of an appetite, and frankly, the food at the care facility isn’t very good anyway. Elementary school milk cartons and sugary whipped-cream desserts and limp iceberg salads and thin vegetable soup or cardboard cut-out pizza or white-bread grilled cheese. 

She can’t hear very well. She’s agitated, easily frustrated, a pile of strong emotions right under the surface and no way to let them out. She shakes terribly, her left side inexplicably slightly less shaky than her right. She pisses into a catheter and shits herself at irregular intervals and they wipe her body down in lieu of a shower.

When I first arrived a week ago, she was in the hospital, and I visited with my Dad. Old family dynamics spewed up under the surface. I could see so much there, that I don’t think they could see, but they could feel anyway, the impacts were real regardless. The space of our respective awareness’, my mom’s attention jumping from place to place, distracted, feverish; my Dad in his head, seeing only himself and his concept of my mom, not her. Her suffering hitting his body, discomfort—responding with his idea of what would make things better for her, without attunement to her actual presence moment-by-moment—his actions effecting her, a blunt hammer hitting the surface of her heart at an odd angle, pain and frustration, a speech act of pushing away, almost a toddler’s whine, “NO I DON’T WANT THAT”—his confusion, his thoughts on his face, “Why did that happen? I don’t understand? Why is she so upset? Why is she being so difficult?”

He is a very smart man, he has read endless literature and history, he was a statistics programmer in his career, he is capable of navigating the thorniest of bureaucracies, and yet he is not very smart at all, he is developmentally crippled, he doesn’t notice other people. He thinks that everyone else’s experience is his own, he thinks only of himself.

He doesn’t realize that when you’re in tremendous pain and confusion and there are strong emotions weighing on your heart, the mildest of stimulations can be too intense, overwhelming. He doesn’t notice how the smallest of movements or speech acts, seemingly unimportant or normal for him, can be so frustrating or challenging for her. He is not attuned to her, he is not paying attention to her, he is not watching her, he is not listening to her.

It’s easy for me to see all of this, and all of it is there, but I can’t help them to see it. I can’t open my Dad’s eyes for him to watch her, I can’t open his ears for him to hear her. I can’t help my Mom to equanimize her pain and sadness and fear and anger and confusion and guilt, I can’t reach into her body with mine and show her the moves I learned through meditation, they’re so easy, they’re not hard, but you need practice and above all a willingness to do so and she has no interest and so little time left. George Harrison’s words from the Scorcese documentary come to mind, that at a certain point it becomes too late to know God. This sentiment always struck me as brutal, but perhaps he is not wrong, no matter how much I’ve hoped he is.

Above all, it’s hard for me to be there with them, to notice all this and to hold it with patience and equanimity and kindness. It’s hard to witness my mom’s suffering. It’s hard to witness my dad’s ignorance. It’s hard for me to witness these dynamics. It’s hard to participate clearly, kindly—there is no “just witnessing,” I am also acting, even if I am quiet, even if I observe—but I try. I try.

I watch closely what is happening. I relax my body. I practice tonglen, giving and taking, the black filth of my mom’s suffering and our family’s patterns inhaling into my nostrils, transforming into white, healing energy that I send back out into the room and the world. It gives me something to do. I speak kindly when spoken to. When someone—my Dad, a nurse—speaks too quietly, or in a complicated way, I translate, speaking it more clearly, loudly, simply, so that my mom can understand. 

It’s better when I go by myself. Simply being present, above all else. I watch her, and listen to her. I take the cover off her meals when it comes, I open her milk cartons, I pour the milk into her glass at a height that will be harder to spill, I chop her food into bites she can eat with her hands. I bring her her phone when it’s out of reach, or put it back to charge when it needs it. I bring her things from the house, or convey messages to my Dad, or my uncles. 

I ask her for her phone password, so that we can access it when she dies. I try to set myself up as a Facebook Legacy contact so that we can memorialize her account when she dies, but the interface refuses to let me choose my own name, for no reason I can understand and no obvious recourse to fix it. I look at her phone contacts, trying to make a list of who we should invite to the memorial service.

When she sleeps, I draw, or read, or meditate, or nap alongside her. When she’s awake, I share my art, or tell her about my life. My favorite thing to do is to ask her questions. What was her father like, or her brother, who I never met? What was I like as a child? What did she love about my Dad when she met him? Why did she do the service projects she did—volunteering, and donating food to food pantries, and sewing hats and clothes for children in the winter, and bringing books to Little Free Libraries?

She calms down, receiving my curiosity, answering my questions, coming into a bigger sense of her self and her life—and I learn more about her, and myself, things I never knew, or seeing things I did from a new light. Puzzle pieces come together. I want to understand these things while I still can. Curiosity has always been there, the possibility of asking questions, and yet it becomes the obvious thing to do in the stark approach of her death.

Her cancer has opened her up. She used to be afraid of talking about death, it was a taboo topic. Now, it’s okay to talk about it. She’s afraid to notice or admit that she is dying, but the topic is not off limits. 

She told me once that after she dies, she wants to be in the stars, sending us love. This astonished me. I didn’t know she felt that way. And it strikes me as similar to the imagery I have around sending mettā, beams of light and love shooting out of my hands. I realize that I learned love from my mother, she was a teacher of love to me. She is a quiet bodhisattva, not talking about her views incessantly, as I do, but simply demonstrating her love, her kindness, her care.

Death is the ultimate relinquishment, we let go of our bodies and our minds. Dying, and being around someone who is dying, is a tremendous opportunity to let go. This is the spiritual path—letting go. Surrender. Release. Relinquishment. Holding is suffering, release is freedom. 

My mom has not noticed this opportunity, yet, I think, and yet it is there nonetheless, and I attune to it when I am with her. 

One of my questions about my childhood strikes on this. I ask her, why did they send me to the school psychologist in the fourth grade? Her answer surprises me—it was because I was having trouble socializing with the other kids, yes, but because I was more mature than they were, developmentally ahead, and I didn’t know how to relate to them. This brings us to my fourth grade teacher, Ms. Duffy, who I loved so dearly, my favorite teacher in elementary school. I was so sad that, at the end of the school year, she left our school system. My mom tells me our hometown was too expensive for her, she’d had to commute every day back and forth from the Boston area, and she had to find different work.

I had been so sad when she left. I cried, and my mom cried, too, and apparently hid her crying from me. I’d remembered Ms. Duffy, and remembered that I was sad when she left, but suddenly I felt it anew, her leaving, this particular grief that has been so acute for me of late, feminine abandonment, the pending death of my mother, the loss of a partner, and, back then, Ms. Duffy’s unfortunate, untimely departure from our school. I can feel into it, fully, as if for the first time. I have the skills to feel it now, to honor it, to love it, and to let go of it, finally, after all these years. I didn’t know I was holding on to that, and yet suddenly, I am purged of it, I have released it, and all is lighter. I feel happier for the rest of the day, and the next—light, happy, free, confident. And I want more where that came from, or less, as it were.

I love my Mom, and she loves me. I am sure I will grieve when she dies, I am sure I will sob, I am sure I will miss her so much. But I know that I love her, and that she loves me, and that she knows that I love her, and that she knows that I know that she loves me, and I have no lingering resentments or grievances, and I don’t know of any that she has, and that will make it easier to let her go, to move on. 

My heart has learned so much already about how to grieve, the process of feeling into the many layers of the heart and expressing them and feeling through them so that they can be learned from and ultimately released, and yet all the grieving I’ve done has perhaps been preparation for this, the death of my mother. I love her so much. 

In some ways, my Mom is already dead. This woman is not my memory of my mom, younger and skinnier and somehow taller than me, a small boy, thin and blonde and innocent, my head hugging into her, her arms wrapped around me, her love a blanket to my experience. She is long gone. This woman, my mother, is smaller than I am, and heavier than she was, and has the age of an elderly woman and the youth of a toddler. She is not a stable foundation for me to learn of life and love from, she cannot parent me, I must parent her to the best of my ability, a thin torn quilt of love cobbled together from my heart, and my father’s, and the thread-bare nursing care staff, not enough, not good enough, not very good at all, and yet it’s what we have to love her with.

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