I am more spiritual than tied to a particular dogma, though I suppose I would class myself as a Christian before I'd peg myself as anything else. Nonetheless, I grew impatient with the people who, when my mother died, told me, "At least she's in a better place" and expected me to take comfort in that.
My mother suffered terribly with her short illness. I don't suppose anyone doesn't suffer with cancer. I was grateful that she was no longer suffering – I still occasionally hear, in my mind, that terrible strangled breathing of my mother's the last couple of weeks of her life as first, she slept, and then, slipped into a coma. But it enraged me whenever someone offered up the vision of my mother in heaven, breathing freely, as a reason for me to put aside the suffering I was feeling. I found myself wanting to scream any time anyone pointed out the obvious fact that, with my mother dead, she was no longer suffering. It infuriated me to the point that I literally had to bite my tongue a couple of times to keep myself from sarcastically snotting, "Oh, so you were there by her bedside when her breathing was so ragged and wet it sounded like someone slurping the last bits of milkshake from bottom of the cup? You want to tell me about my mother suffering?"
She lived barely four months past her diagnosis. There were little signs, even before the diagnosis, that something was amiss. She was losing weight without trying. There was a pain in her hip that we all took to be sympathetic sciatica – I was well-along in a pregnancy and experiencing nasty sciatica. The diagnosis was slow in coming – my parents didn't pursue all the scans or look into hooking up with an oncologist until several weeks after the routine annual chest x-ray showed shadows. They didn't want to do anything until after they'd told my brother and me, and they didn't want to tell us until we could all come together from our far-flung corners to talk face-to-face.
After she died, I struggled with the concept of heaven. I found myself having difficulty believing that there was such a thing. I felt ashamed for feeling this way, because my parents are both very openly religious and both very strongly believed in heaven. Right after Mama died, I asked my father if he felt like she could see us from heaven. "No, I don't reckon so," he said. "Because she would look down and see us suffering, and heaven is an absence of suffering." I could not, though, bear to think of my mother being in heaven but not being, in some way, still engaged in our lives. If I was to get over my trouble with heaven, I had to believe that she would still be able to see us, to see how we were doing. Otherwise, why bother having a heaven at all? An empty, heavenless void is just as much a removal from suffering as heaven is, right? So what is the point of a heaven if it doesn't allow the dead to stay in touch, somehow, with the people they have left behind?
I put aside that thinking for a while and grappled with other things related to my mother's death. I don't need to detail them – most of you are quite aware of the many struggles of grief. I had come to a point, before I shelved my heaven crisis, where I chose to believe that if there is a heaven, then my mother was there and was able to see me. Maybe to talk to me in the wind. (I even bought windchimes. Just in case.)
Lately, though, I find myself grappling with it again. While my mother was dealing with the metastatic lung cancer that had spread to her pelvis and hip, the cause of my own hip pain was born. Mama gave birth to a growing cancer and I gave birth to a baby girl who bears my mother's name. I was actually afraid I wouldn't give birth before my mother died, and indeed, by the time my daughter was born, the whole-brain radiation my mother had undergone to treat the cancer that had spread to her brain had begun affecting her memory and cognitive function. Happily, she did have a chance to know her newest grandchild. Three months and two days after the baby was born, Mama died.
I find myself pregnant again, quite by accident. And while it's hard to have had to go off my antidepressant for this first trimester, and to be thoroughly steeped in these wretched hormones that make me a sobbing mess even when I'm not saturated with grief, I think the worst thing for me is the knowledge that my newest child will never know its grandmother, and my mother will never know her seventh grandchild (five of them belong to me – I'm fertile, but not fertile enough to make all seven all on my own). It grieves me even more, on top of the raw wound of grief I'm already experiencing, to consider that these two most important people – my child and my mother – will never know each other.
And here is where I start thinking of heaven again: if there is a heaven, my mother is certainly there. But again, can she see us? Does she know I'm having another child? Will she smile down on us when this child is born? Will she hold my hand with her heart as I'm giving birth to this new life? If my father is right about heaven, then Mama's too busy having fun to concern herself with those of us left behind, and that makes me sad: not that she's in a better place, obviously, but that she will never even know about my new baby. Will never see what I've made. It is this that makes me feel her loss more than anything else, even more than going to my parents' house and finding only my father there.
I'd rather, frankly, believe she simply doesn't exist any more than to think she exists on some plane but can't be bothered with the rest of us left here. To think that she's too wound up in a new heavenly life to know about my new kid. Or to know how much I miss her. Or to glance down and have a look at her namesake, who is now six months old and more beautiful than she was the last time Mama saw her and was able to recognize her.
I don't know that the matter of heaven will ever be settled to my satisfaction, any more than the grief will ever really go away. I might find some way of reconciling what heaven is (or isn't) and what I need to believe it is, but I'll never really know, I'll always wonder. Like the grief, it will always be there, a mark on my heart that changes how I think, what I think; a question that changes, really, everything. Always a sharp bold underscore of just how much I've lost.