Love

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At a meditation retreat years ago, I experienced some resolution of unacknowledged grief around my mother’s death. I grew up knowing my mother was dead, but there was always a sense of secrecy and shame about it. Things like suicide are kept from children. Everyone around me knew this secret. It was strange way to grow up. On the other hand, death isn’t a big scary thing for me; it’s a familiar one.

At the retreat, there was a soon-to-be mom. It was joyous to see someone so young with a meditation practice. And it was fun to think that child was having a retreat experience before they were born! Before noble silence began, I learned also that another mom was learning to navigate the sudden and severe progression of her son’s disability. From joy and optimism to heartbreaking challenges, it felt like a range of motherhood experiences were present at the retreat. I found it very moving and in the end also cathartic.

A lot of things happen that are simply beyond our human understanding. Looking closely enough, maybe all things are. This blog is about the Love that makes sense of these mysteries and also about mother’s love. Mystery comes in all manner of circumstances. From moonlight casting shadows of pine trees across a lake rippling in the rose glow of a fading sunset to long and painful family histories rippling across time, traumatic patterns on repeat. How many causes and conditions have come together right now, so that I’m writing this and you’re reading it? In Buddhism, we examine this inherent emptiness of all things, how a thing arises in relation to everything else, is made up of many things. At the retreat, we discussed just that — the immeasurable causes and conditions that had brought each of us there (rather than having made a choice to attend). For me, something began to surface, and my mind was objecting, but, but, but… what about the tragedy of my mother’s death. I asked the teacher through inexplicable tears, “Where, in all this empty phenomena, was love? I mean, I hope that the meat of it all is love.”

With great compassion and a direct gaze, the teacher replied that it was. I carried on with sitting and walking, walking and sitting, doing Tonglen, then I saw, without doubt, that I was love. We all are. That unresolved grief, then, started to pour out of me. In the months prior I had been writing about Sheila, about things like learning to call her Sheila instead of Mom. That writing was part therapy and re-parenting, part self-teaching, and part sharing what might inspire others. It had been percolating it seemed and waiting for the ideal conditions to surface. In the teacher conference, in the supportive group of my friends, we were talking about causes and conditions again and I blurted out, “How about when my mother ran from the psychiatric hospital onto the highway to end her life? How was that just causes and conditions?”

Again, with great compassion and with gentleness, the teacher asked, “Is it better to think that it was her choice?” A huge weight lifted, tectonic plates moved, and there was suddenly ground under my feet, but I was light and tall. A big cathartic release followed. An ocean of tears just poured and poured, while I ate, while I walked, while I meditated. It was such a heavy burden to have carried — the question “Why?” When Sheila died, she was a mother, a wife, a daughter, and a niece. She was a dear friend to many. Her death and everyone’s grief changed lives. It shaped our lives even though I was only two-and-a-half years old and Rebecca was just turning one. We felt the pain and overwhelm our dad endured and suppressed in order to carry on. I am ever grateful that he kept our little family together and kept our memory of her alive. I do not know what happened, but these are some of the causes and conditions that I have pieced together from letters, journals, and stories about my mother’s life: she suffered complications at her own birth; her father died when she was two; she and her overly critical and disapproving mother then had to live with her domineering grandfather; she struggled with what now might be diagnosed as bi-polar disorder and endured the painful treatments of those decades; she had attempted suicide before; she wanted nothing more than to have children; her and David’s first child died at birth; she was in and out of the psychiatric hospital in the years after Rebecca and I were born.

She didn’t choose to end her life. It was the culmination of all that was beyond her control. Actually, she had no choice. The question I was really asking was, where is the love in such intense tragedies? I knew it was in the love Sheila and my dad had for each other, the love my dad has for Bec and I, and that we have for him. There was the light and love that Sheila shared in the world that made her a beloved friend to many people; her own struggle had tenderized and sensitized her to the pain of others. Her drawings and paintings captured her love of nature and people and life. Actually, love was in the vast and gaping grief that was her absence from the world. We grew up in that absence and I could suddenly see that we grew up in love. Perhaps the tears were in part for all those years of not knowing that. She loved us.

Sheila kept first-year diaries for Bec and I. Her last entry was “Mommy’s coming home.” Here is where I had found the greatest sadness. Now I could see that this was also the greatest love. We were her world. But all she knew in that moment was the absence of her girls and overwhelming grief. The two moms at the retreat, their very real experiences, brought all this to life for me.

In meditation circles, we sometimes talk about putting our hands on our hearts or cheeks to feel cared for when practising loving-kindness meditation. That never worked for me. But that day, I spontaneously hugged myself while I sobbed. I’ve felt at some times in my life that Sheila was looking after me. In that moment it was as though she was tightly hugging me and stroking my shoulders. I’d never felt that before; I didn’t know what it was to be held so tightly with a mother’s love: unconditional, unfailing, gentle, yet fierce. I felt so safe and comforted.

They weren’t my arms for a while. They were Sheila’s and then they were also the hands of the Beloved, the primal mother, the Love that sages teach is our true nature. There had been a block in my practice that cleared; the weight of grief and veil of self-doubt lifted. Fully feeling my mother’s love opened the big Love. I knew about it, I could talk about it and write about it, and then, everything shone and still shines with it. It is ultimate happiness to feel this Love, to be it. It lives in and makes sense of even looming tragedy.