Reply to Something bothering me about my mom's death.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I haven't really talked about this IRL with people, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to put this out here.

My mom's atheism at the end of her life bothered me. A little background: she died this past fall in in-home hospice from cancer, and I was helping care for her. My family is a collection of spiritual folks, agnostics, secular Jews, and a few atheists. I fall into the "spiritual agnostic-ish secular Jew " category, I suppose. I talk to God a lot, and I decided I don't particularly care if it's all in my head. I think we go somewhere after we die. I hope we do.

My mom's atheism hurts because sometimes in quiet moments, I'll talk, if you will, to my grandparents, other relatives and loved ones that have come and gone. But my mom's insistence that she was really and truly just going back to dust hurts because it's as if permission to talk to her and hope she hears me somewhere out there was taken away. I did not challenge her on this. These were her beliefs. I loved her very much. This was not her intention. But it still hurts. [/quote]

Talk to the dust. My parents sit atop my refrigerator, as ashes. They share the velvet bag my Dad's ashes were placed in after he died. My mother followed him a month later. I have plans to eventually place them in our family cemetery in another State, but for now they sit in the kitchen and watch over us. I imagine they're too busy with each other most of the time. Inseparable in life and death.

The people we love live within our psyches. You heard your mother's voice when you were a child, even when she wasn't there. The reminders, the moments when you knew she'd be proud, even the admonishments----you carried this with you through your life, even while she was alive. Speak to that voice now, just as you did before her passing.

Besides, it may not matter what she believed. If there's an afterlife, she's there. And she's probably surprised to have found it considering all her talk of dust.

Be kind to yourself. Continue to cherish your mother as you see fit, and know that she lives within you which is all that matters.
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