What Death Reveals To A Child’s Eyes-A Love Story

So when it comes to Truth, we all have a central experience that calibrates the lens through which we observe the world.  Our “first supposition”to be technical, as we are each truly philosophers at the center of our own unique human-experience we call Life.
This is mine, and though we all have our stories...I'm choosing to write it now as my first contact precisely because I believe it holds the very heart of what it is we're all trying to collectively discover, assess, and find value here. I truly believe that if you take the time to read this...you will know the nature of my soul.
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“God….I promise…with all my heart…if you save my mother….I’ll learn about you and give my entire life to you.” The same prayer night after night, as I hear my sweet momma’s cyclical-death-cries play out through the thin walls in our shabby midwest home.  
When I was 7..the news of her breast cancer was scary… but after a surgery I didn’t fully understand, and a few difficult months of my mom being kinda distant and sad, somehow the cancer was in "remission"....which I kept trying to clarify meant "gone" and was told, "Yes Logan, basically..yes."

And for a few beautiful years....we lived a basic, boring, love-infused life. Struggling single mother raising her only son...summers with dad a state away...loyal English Bulldog... 30ft swing on one giant tree outside our tiny home and giant rented plot in Noble, Oklahoma where I tested my courage and found the optimal jump off point is never at the pinnacle...but rather..always at the growing upswing.

 It was the pinnacle of my child's heart.

And then, when I was 9, almost 10,  "remission" meant something different.  And we moved to the larger town of Norman, OK (go Sooners!) right around the time "The Bozz" was big. And there were new kids...new styles...new elementary school, new groups, things, places....but for me...mostly...I knew that the cancer was back...and life started moving around me like a rock jutting out of a slow moving stream. I'd gone interior. Contemplating death. And meaning. And God.

So the "Bozz" was cool...and I smiled when peers got the stylized buzz-cut fades....but it just passed by me unexplored.  Didn't matter.  Wasn't of value to my need to understand.  And so those years passed very quickly...dreamlike...with no solid ground upon which the rock solidly holds.

Life passed by me...I occassionally moved when the current was exceptionally strong...and my mother's cancer slowly ravaged her entire body, her organs, her bones and marrow, and finally her brain...so that one day I met my only and last friend at the park on my bike before school and told him I couldn't go anymore....that I had to stay home and take care of my mom...and that I had to say goodbye. Because that morning, when I woke up to tell my mom goodbye for school...there was no recognition from the person looking back...and I knew....deep in my heart...that she was near the end.

And though I'd started truly praying to God weeks before....it was in that last few days I found a fervency still unmatched in my adult practice...sobbing, full-hearted pleading for the life of my suffering, disappearing mother....my sweet momma...my everything. In the way people promise their souls to the devil...I promised mine to God....just please...to save her...heal her...give her life...peace...oh God...pleeaassse...help my momma...

**This is the first time I have written of this in my life, and I find myself grieving even now...some 34 years after this took place.  But I promise...if you stick with me...this is not a story of sadness.  This is not a story of hardship.  This is a story of absolute glory....that the light wins...and I have the proof.  But...as Rumi said " It is the piercing through which the light may enter"...and so I will continue.

(To Myself) Breathe....

Ok.  I was going to go into the details of the mechanical way my mother would sink into her own organs, pull herself up by the triangle over her hospital bed, a failing biological machine with both body and brain consumed by cancer cells and endlessly struggling to find a moment's comfort...how I fell asleep those last two nights, or final night...begging and bawling and wincing to hear her voice low and wailing...but ultimately lulled to sleep by the rythmic, clockwork metronome of her suffering.

The final day was a dreamdaze...Hospice had dropped by for their WEEKLY check-in sometime earlier....my father had been called..he was here to take me, and he was angry.

I was told I had 10 minutes to get my stuff and we're leaving...to go to that summer place...to live forever. To leave my mother behind. And so...at 12 years old...with 10 minutes left...I approached my mother's hospital bed for our final goodbye.

And what follows is that moment:

"I have to go now momma", I said, as I reached out my trembling hand and placed it on one of her arms as it pulled at the hospital triangle in the endless automation to find comfort.

I felt her arm, swollen to my touch from the chemotherapy...and remembered how she'd shown me she could leave finger prints in her arm and had explained that the therapy made her retain water weight. And she had cried saying how ugly she must look to me then...motioning at the headwrap she wore to cover her baldness...and I stood there.....remembering how I told her I thought she looked beautiful....and meant it...because she was my princess...my momma...forever..

"Logan"....I look up from remembering to see my mother looking me squarely in the eyes, her eyes....fully aware and full of radiant love.."my brave little boy.  I love you".

"My beautiful princess....I love you momma....I love you....forever..." I bawled as I looked into the same eyes, the same love, that form my very first memory in this life.  I held her arm delicately under my little boy fingers, and for a few moments....those sacred few moments...our souls merged one final time.

And then, I was roughly pulled away by my father...never to see my mother again in this world.  

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As with any thing of depth...I will leave some space for personal reflection (and invite in comments/discussion)



I simply state that this is my own Truth learned:
1. There is in fact meaning even within the worst of situations (it's not a random/chaotic universe)

2. There is a God/Guiding force...even if perhaps it is not the anthropomorphic version you were taught

3. LOVE is a profound and quantifiable experience directly oriented with the soul.

4. Life continues...we grow...old questions are answered and form new, more evolved questions...we develop.

I only wish to state the most basic and essential tenants of truth from this profound experience..and leave much room for questions, discussion, and hopefully support in the form of trust. I have laid my heart bare for this community in hopes that we start at the most essential...and grow together.

~TruthTeller