Death is just the beginning

Thank you, Mum

This post is not about prostate cancer. As I mentioned in my first post, Life is finite, surgeons are whole humans, too. Or, as Whitman wrote, I contain multitudes. We all do. So I intend to share more of my thoughts here than pertain only to my profession of urology. I have no idea if it will work. But as I’ve said, being trained in science, I must be willing to experiment.

It is one year today since my mother died. I wrote what follows soon afterwards.

Mum inhaled and exhaled her last breath on Thursday. I was there with one of my brothers and we watched her do it. It was just after six on a mid-winter morning, still dark outside. The bedside lamp threw a soft glow over her floral bedclothes, her cream pillow, and on the increasingly angular features of Mum’s face.

Ninety years of breathing and then – stopped. The soothing whirr of the ducted heating the only sound left. The back of my fingers stroked her palm – one simian hand touching another – and felt it still warm. Her rings slid loosely on her long slim fingers, still soft and fleshy. But at her wrist, the bounding pulse we’d admired had now disappeared. Those prominent veins under the loose, crinkled skin of her neck, always rising and falling with every change in pressure, now still. And the muscle-machine that had pounded defiantly against her bony ribcage, now quiet.

We called our other brothers to come in. They’d gone home to sleep after we’d all watched cricket together on Mum’s TV the night before. Now the four of us sat beside her bed, our heads lowered, and wept out loud.

Mum died a natural death. Safe in a warm bed, free of any discernible pain. She’d been surrounded by her four sons around the clock for the last five days.

Although they’d been hard, those five days had also been the most beautiful moments with my brothers and our Mum. Irritations that only siblings can cause each other were shed, leaving only the purity of our abiding love for Mum as she transitioned slowly from her deeply knowing self to a living body, pulling out every last one of its survival tricks, until finally they ran out.

Witnessing not just the full process of a person dying, but of my own mother dying, was a hard gift. Tough love. It was perhaps the closest I can come to experiencing my own death, as my brain, in real-time, made sense of each new step in her deterioration.

This is dying and death. This is real. And it is where every single one of us is headed. From being the most preposterously complex pattern of atoms with the audacity to be the universe’s own consciousness, we return, by the law of entropy, to the disordered atoms we once were, still of that same universe. We will deny it until we can no longer.

But death is where wisdom can begin – it’s true starting point – if we let it. Wasn’t it contemplation of dying and death that turned an entitled prince into the Buddha? Isn’t memento mori the underpinning of Stoic philosophy? We are all, in a sense, moribund – bound for death.

Knowing this, realising this – making it real in your mind – can crisply clarify thought and feeling. Watching Mum die was painful, but also powerful and pure. It distilled my own existence to its bare essence. Knowing, truly comprehending, that this fate, this ultimate vulnerability, befalls us all, leads me to believe that it is only kindness between us that can console us in this shared truth. Just as the infinite miracle of the universe demands of us awe and wonder, so our own certain finitude, when truly appreciated, demands of us kindness.

And the absurdity of all of it – this awareness of our own finite lives in an infinite universe – also invites us to laugh. ‘Don’t ever lose your sense of humour,’ Mum would tell me, more than once.

Being with Mum as she was dying and died was a gift. I hope I can hold this gift close, to guard it and cherish it until the day – there will be a day – when it is my turn.

Thank you, again, Mum. For your blessed life. And for your beautiful death.