Lifetimes Ago

Some time ago, I went through a personal experience that was very painful.  Perhaps this is not the forum in which to delve into specifics, but it was one of those experiences that is not uncommon to the human condition; something undoubtedly that many others have been through.  Along with other upheavals that had gone on at that time, this experience involved love, loss, and pain — the building blocks of life as we know it.  Around this time I had a tarot card reading and the Tower card was pulled, accurately foretelling the events unfolding all around me at the time, and all that which would collapse in the near future.  If you are familiar with the tarot, you know that Tower life experiences can involve events like divorce, death of a loved one, health problems — anything that shakes you to the core of your being.  Essentially, some part of your life, if not multiple parts of your life, go up in flames.

For the rest of this entry I will refer to this experience and this point in my life as the “collapsing towers.”  In the throes and the aftermath of the collapsing towers, I was left much like a wounded animal who could barely move from one place to another.  I was feeling like an abandoned child, all alone, and the pain felt ancient, as if I had felt this pain before.  At first I thought it might have been in another lifetime, and then I realized that in fact it had happened in this lifetime, a lifetime ago.

When I was three and a half years old, my parents divorced.  My mother, who suffered with very dangerous and violent mental illness, moved back overseas, to barely be heard from ever again.  My father, and my sister, who was a decade older than me, basked in relief at her departure.  Being so young and hardly cognizant, there was this aching in me that I could not put into words, partly because I was too young to fully process everything that had happened, and partly because I knew in my young mind that these feelings were not shared by my father and sister.  I longed for my mother’s return, and they, understandably, reveled in her departure.  As I would describe to my therapist many years later, it was as if my father, sister, and I were all on an island, and the land broke, leaving me on one piece, my sister and father on the other, the now two separate islands to continuously drift further away from each other for the rest of our lives.

As you grow older, certain pain stays with you like insidious clouds always at your back — but the pain — like clouds in the sky, is nebulous, and you struggle to identify its origin.  Eckhart Tolle talks about the “pain body,” and I believe the pain body accurately defines the clouds and the darkness that we grapple with.  But sometimes it takes a long time, if ever, to identify the cause of these pain bodies; the source of these stormfronts.

It took this experience of the collapsing towers to really figure out that I was carrying this heavy weight with me on my shoulders for such a long time.  I went back into my three-year-old self and was met again with abandonment and a painful loneliness.  When I, my therapist, and a few astute friends solved the puzzle — the collapsing towers had a lot to do with my missing mother — my therapist asked me if I would ever be interested in contacting her again, as so many people asked me throughout my life.  My answer was always the same, a lukewarm “maybe” that really translated to a “not at all.”  I didn’t know if she was alive or dead, but I guess because I never heard any news that she had passed, I assumed she was still alive.

Then, I received the message.  From a faceless man in a boat with a child in a river.  I opened the message a month after it was delivered to me.  My mother had died.  Two days ago, and she was buried yesterday.  Only I was reading this message more than a month after its harbinger hit the send button.  The harbinger — the faceless man in the river — a social worker at the mental institution where my mother had been living for the past twenty years, after her own mother had died.

For months after the collapsing towers I crawled on my knees in pain. Not only had that upheaval brought me pain, but it thrust me back to the foremost pain in my life, the great-grandfather that reigned over all the pain in my life.  It forced me to examine that part of my life again, to revisit my phantom mother in my mind, and possibly my biological mother in real life.

But to re-establish any connection with my mother in this lifetime was never again meant to be.

I received this message the day before Thanksgiving.  There had been an interlude in communication with my sister, as there sometimes is with family.  But my sister’s birthday is in November, and birthdays offer invitations for both soirees and olive branches.  Fatefully, I began speaking with her just a week before opening the message.  The timing was serendipitous, as it is probably better to break prolonged silence with birthday greetings rather than news of an estranged mother’s passing.  I also figured the news would impact my sister more significantly, since she was much older than me when our mother left.  This is made more complicated by the fact that my mother’s role in our lives was a perilous one; there is no minimizing that.  My sister (and my father) inevitably bore the brunt of her abuse, since she was only in my life for a mere three years.

After the initial absorption of the news, my sister’s response was surprisingly enlightened, especially considering everything she endured at my mother’s hands.  She thanked her for the gift of life, said she felt sorry that she could not fulfill the role of mother, but that there is not much that could be done for severe schizophrenia.  She was sad for her, but also felt as though our mother was finally at peace.  She reminded both herself and myself that life is short, and we should be kind and enjoy the moment.

I was not raised in a religious family; for all intents and purposes, my father was an Atheist, as he rejected the fanatic religious dogma innate to his own upbringing.  I remember being a little girl and asking him what happens after we die, and he told me there was no heaven or hell, and that our bodies go into a ground and decompose.  That’s it, the end.  Eternal darkness.  Not only was I frightened and scarred by his description; I just didn’t believe it.  In my cells I felt there was more to this existence than merely that which can be seen.  Nevertheless, I cannot deny that my first conversation about death impacted me in such a way that made me ask questions for many years.  For a long time I harbored fears of the unknown.

But for any of us who feel unsure about what happens after we die, perhaps when someone very close to us dies, we find perspective.  My mother and I were not close emotionally or in terms of proximity, but since she is the woman who gave me life, now that she has died, I do believe that a part of me has died as well.  

My family line and my mother’s family line spent lifetimes shrouded in darkness.  But now that my mother has gone back to source, I can focus on nothing but the light.  For when she gave me life, she also gave me light.  She may have been the courier of some of those dark clouds that loomed in the background of my life, but she also gave me light.  And in turn, I send all my light to her, and I ask that she be bathed in brilliant, illuminating light wherever she may be at this moment in time and space.