March 8, 2006 - The Journey Across the River Styx

March 8, 2006 - The Journey Across the River Styx

For the more than half a century I've been on earth, I've known little of death. My earliest recollection was the death of my grandmother in May 1953. She was a mere 48 years old, much younger than I am now. I was nearly eight years old at the time. She had died in William Beaumont General Hospital where my two sisters, my father, and my niece were now. Back then my father had taken my grandmother's body back to where she was born in Brooklyn, Mississippi. The funeral was held in St. John's Baptist Church, not far from the family homestead and she was buried in the cemetery on the church property. The church is gone now and the cemetery is slowly fading away, its graves untended, its dead nearly forgotten, their kin having paid the ferry man to join their relatives. My father wept uncontrollably at the funeral of my grandmother. It was the first time I had seen him weep openly and I felt bad that I wasn't experiencing the same depth of loss.

In the aftermath of my grandmother's passing I was at a loss because she and I had lived together for most of the time I could remember. I was now reunited with my real mother and father, who I knew as relatives who would regularly visit my grandmother and me and leave again after a week or two. I was now leaving with them and the person who had been a constant presence in my life was no where to be seen. I can't remember if I had gone to the casket to see my grandmother lying in repose before her funeral. I can remember seeing her from a distance in her coffin, lying as if asleep.

After we buried my grandmother, from that day in May 1953 onward, death kept his distance from me. I saw him in passing however, during funeral masses at Our Lady of Assumption Catholic Church at the corner of Byron Street and Truman Avenue, where I spent my Sundays as an adolescent. I was quite devout as a kid and the ritual of the mass was a comfort to me grappling with the mysteries of life. I had a morbid fear of death and it would throw me into fits of panic in my pre-teen and teenage years. As a result, I steered clear of death and do not recall attending many funeral masses once I got older.

Now, standing beside my mother's lifeless form in the intensive care unit of William Beaumont General Hospital in El Paso, Texas, death has made its presence known once more. Only this time it's up close and personal, no luxury of being distant and uninvolved. This time, death had come for someone very close. Looking down at her, she appeared to be in a peaceful sleep, her face no different than all the time I had seen her at home in the living room dozing on the small sofa, her lips parted slightly as they are now, in our living room at home a mile down the road from the hospital. The only indication that she wasn't asleep was the absence of the rhythmic rising of her breast and the coolness of her forehead that was chasing the warmth from face and neck. I kept touching her checks and neck treasuring the warmth I felt as the last lingering bit of life that her body held. It was the last of her essence and I wanted to feel it as long as it remained a link to the life that it once signified. As long as I could feel the warmth, the form in repose was still my mother.

Nearby, at the foot of my mother's bed, my grief-engulfed father had been drawn into the practical chores that death demands: signatures on forms; one that granted permission to move my mother out of the world of the living and into the world of the dead-the personification of the Greek myth of Charon requiring a fare of one coin (obol) to ferry the dead across the River Styx. The bed she now lay in belonged to bodies still clinging to life, not to those that life had fled. Those that life had abandoned were transported to the hospital morgue where they were kept refrigerated to preserve against the decay waiting to ravage them. It took a signed form to make that transfer. It took another signature on a form to move her body from the hospital morgue to the funeral home where she would be prepared for her final journey into that good night. When all the forms were signed, we-my two sisters, my young niece-a favorite of my mother, my father, and me each said our last goodbye to my mother and we left to allow the hospital staff to prepare her for the first leg of her final journey. Being at my mother's bedside for how long I had no idea, time seemed to stand still. When we walked outside the curtained area surrounding my mother's bed, time seemed to resume. It was as if the entire hospital staff had left the floor as we sat crying at our mother's bedside. Once we had cried ourselves out the staff reappeared and continued going about their task of trying to keep the other residence of the ICU alive.

Once back at home, the five of us tried our best to console one another but we were each caught up in our own grief. Each felt some sense of guilt that we hadn't done enough. If we had she would still be alive. My guilt was that I had been the son that had left home and hadn't returned as often, nor for as long, as I should. Living over 1200 miles away, I was separated from the problems my aging parents were confronting, as they grew older. My mother had helped me leave home, while my father was away. He was off on maneuvers with his Army unit before I graduated high school and I had enlisted in the Navy on my mother's signature. She knew how much it meant for me to begin making my way in the world.

She had once been hospitalized with a blood infection that my father was afraid might be the death of her, over ten years ago. She had survived the ailment with the help of a clever doctor who finally diagnosed the problem and developed a drug regimen to combat and overcome the threat. In the midst of her ordeal she frantically called me wanting to confess something that she had done when I was a young child. It was nothing of any consequence these many years later I assured her. I told her she was my hero, the woman who had found a way to bring herself and her infant son out of the war-ravaged Philippine Islands to the land of wealth and prosperity. She had left her daughter SY from a previous marriage with her paternal grandmother. It had been her dying husband request that she do so. It had been my mother’s most agonizing decision. She made up for it fifteen years later, when SY wrote to Mom and Dad requesting to come to the U.S. Nearly fully grown, SY lived with us for about a year before she left the nest and moved to San Francisco to make a life of her own. EV had called SY and gave her the terrible news. SY would be arriving on Thursday with her husband BB for the rosary and funeral.

In many ways I hardly knew my mother. For most of my life I knew little of her early years in the Philippines. I knew little of her family in the Islands and hardly any of her early life with my father other than it was hard-two children to raise by herself on an enlisted man's income in the deep south of the late 1940s-I was living with my grandmother and my youngest sister wasn't yet born. We never discussed those times. In recent years, I had begun to ask both her and my dad about life in the Philippines when the two of them met. She described her recollections of that time, but her memory had lost some of the detail that makes a story compelling. She grew up with her uncle and aunt but couldn't remember the name of the school she attended as a young girl, nor the name of the company where she got her first job. However, what she did remember gave me a better picture of her as a young girl. Each time I would record our conversations and later transcribe the comments. She is captured on micro cassettes and Hi8 video tape, the sound and moving images of her echoing from the past, giving me some lingering sense of her beyond the still pictures and flowing handwriting she left in her letters.

My sisters and niece all drifted off to their homes nearby and my father and I were left to deal with our separate grief alone. My father decided to try to fall asleep and I retired to my bedroom upstairs directly above his. I lay in bed listening to the sounds of El Paso at night. You can hear the distant sound of train whistles that are a good five miles away on the southern edge of the city near the border with Mexico and you can hear the sound of the wind gusting outside, not uncommon for late January. Before I dozed off I had hoped that my mother's spirit would visit me in the night and say goodbye. My wife IM was visited in dreams by both her father and mother after their passing though it was some time after their deaths. A visit was not meant for me though and I fell into a dreamless sleep.