My mother is safe at home with my brother in Mississippi, I am safe at home in Wisconsin. I had to cancel my last trip to go see her in March because of the virus. It was to be a little family reunion.
A couple of days ago I asked her some questions about her siblings, ten of whom have died, she has one living brother. She said to me, Thank God you’re still here.
At first I was taken aback, then we both laughed. I said, Yeah, I’m glad I’m still here, too.
Of course I am glad that I’m still here, for her sake and my own. I’m glad she’s still here as well for both our sakes. I started to think about how when she was a girl, sickness, epidemics, illness and death were part of everyday life. Her young brother in law died from inhaling cotton dust at the mill where he worked. She had a sister with spinal meningitis, a brother with polio, and a little sister, Elizabeth, who died before age two of whooping cough, another horrible disease that attacks the lungs and depletes the victim of oxygen. My mother is not a woman who cries often, but one time I do remember when recounting Elizabeth’s death, she said, crying, That baby died alone. They wouldn’t let us go see her.
Maybe there was a quarantine situation with whooping cough, or maybe because they were poor and had no voice, Charity Hospital in New Orleans would not let the family be with the dying baby girl. My grandmother, who had given birth to her ninth child only days or weeks earlier, would not enter the room where they laid out the tiny coffin, preferring to remember Elizabeth alive and well.
In a recent video, Eckhart Tolle said that we are all infected with a lethal virus: TIME. It will kill us eventually if nothing else does first. He said that in other times and cultures DEATH was and is a constant companion, but we in the modern world tend to be afraid to even say the word, especially in reference to ourselves.
So when my mother reminds me that I am still here, it makes me pause and consider. I am grateful that I was given this time here, by whatever creative power in the universe. I hope to embrace it not as something I was entitled to, but as a gift I humbly accept and celebrate until my time runs out.