X-Message-Number: 24359 Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 22:29:31 -0700 (PDT) From: William O'Rights <> Subject: Mother = Dead, (Ms. Klien 1954- 2004) http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?s=&act=ST&f=67&t=3924&st=0 With Sympathy Bruce, Whether it comes suddenly or slowly, early or late, violently or serenely, the death of a person we love changes our world and ourselves. When you lose a loved one, suddenly you become part of a club you never wanted membership in but one that marks you for life. Anyone who has lost someone to death feels robbed and cheated, but sometimes the price of life is loss. From the moment of birth when we leave the womb forever, we face loss in many ways. We may move and never see our childhood home again, friendships fade, we may lose money, possessions, hope, we change jobs, we graduate, we marry and divorce. Every change, desired or not, large or small, involves loss. Losses shape our lives. And of these, the most universal, inevitable, and serious loss is the death of someone we love. Yet death is the loss for which most of us are least prepared. Once, when most people lived in small communities and closely knit family groups, death was woven into the fabric of our lives. Babies died in infancy; children were swept away by disease, mothers died in child-birth, and dead bodies were displayed in the parlor. For most of human existence, young people died with a frequency hard for us to imagine. As late as the turn of the century, more than half the people who died in the United States were under fifteen years old. Only 17 percent were over the age of sixty-five. By the late 1960s, more than two thirds of recorded deaths were of people over the age of sixty-five. As a result, many people today are well into middle age before they experience the death of a loved one. Our difficulty in dealing with death is compounded by the fact that we live in a death-denying society. To deny its existence, we use a symphony of euphemisms. Instead of admitting that people we love have actually died, we say they are no longer with us, that they have de-parted, expired, passed away, gone. We say we have lost them as if they might be found. And rather than using the word dead, we say they are late -of all euphemisms, surely the one of greatest denial, since it seems to imply that any moment now the late person might show up-tardy again. Each year millions of people suffer the death of a close family member. The list of high visibility disasters, human suffering and sudden loss is long and will continue to grow. Many include families and individuals we don t see. They are suffering behind closed doors in our neighborhoods, in our own homes, in hospital waiting rooms. They are pacing ICU hallways, watching as life support is discontinued, sitting numb in hard chairs. They are torn apart by an unexpected phone call. They are grappling with sudden death, a sudden ending, a sudden tragedy. None of them were ready to say goodbye . In a split-second with the news of a loved one s sudden death, the world changes forever. We are slam-dunked into an abyss, no time for finished business or goodbyes. Physically, we may be made up of cells and genes and skin and bones, but emotionally, we are composed of thoughts and feelings and memories and pieces of the people we have touched, and who have touched us. After the news of sudden death, we awake less whole with a gaping hole left by the death of the person we knew. Grief brings that moment where you awake and look into the mirror, and no longer recognize the eyes staring back at you. Though the sun still rises and sets as it always has, everything looks just a bit different, a bit distorted. The shadows cast by grief stretch far and wide. May you see light where there is only darkness, hope where there seems nothing but despair, may your anger be replaced with insight, may you feel some victory in this defeat and a sense of the sacred web into which we are all woven. Most of all may you stay in tune with your capacity to love and seek life even as you are engulfed by death. Your Eternal Friend... ===== William Constitution O'Rights The First Immortal __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24359