Dealing with the Death of a Parent

by Gregory Allen Butler

Eventually, most people have to deal with the death of a parent. My mother died last month. She was 89-years-old. She lived a long and active life, and even enjoyed going out dancing until very recently. Her physical decline came on over the past year.

I remember getting a call 10 days prior to her death informing me of the medical opinion: that she had anywhere from two days to three weeks to live. Although I knew she had not been in good health, the news came as a shock.

I called her room in the hospital where she had recently been admitted and she sounded better than I had heard her in several months. “Oh hi, Greg. I’m trying to follow your advice,” she told me. “I’m eating more and taking in more fluids. I hope I can go home soon.” The combination of hearing that she had only days left to live and then hearing her voice and her determination to recover caused me anguish.

The hospital had inserted a feeding tube, which gave her nourishment and more strength than she had exhibited over the prior month. Testing showed that she was aspirating her food. Her inability to eat and drink had caused her to be very weak and dehydrated and that affected her brain and her lucidity. The feeding tube mitigated this issue. That is why she sounded so much better when I called.

But the next day she was to be transferred to the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida, without the feeding tube, due to stipulations in her living will. My wife and I joined other family members there a couple days later. She was still lucid and was happy to see everyone.

But two days later she was so weak that she could barely talk. She died a week later with my sister sitting at her bedside, saying prayers and singing songs, giving her a loving sendoff from this physical world in which we live.

Like everyone dealing with the death of a parent, decisions had to be made. I selected a crematorium but my brother found one he liked better in St. Petersburg. My sister decided she wanted to have a memorial service in northern Kentucky where our mother lived until just a few months prior. My brother didn't want to come. He felt he had been through enough. And that's true. He had been emotionally drained caring for her over the prior three months.

But before you can have a memorial service, you need to write an obituary for the newspapers. That's hard. How can you process the death of a parent and summarize his or her life in a paragraph? Who was she? What made her special? I also had to write and design a program for the service. It wasn't until I wrote it into the program that I knew I was speaking at the service. I wasn't planning on speaking, but when I wrote it in the program, I understood that that was what I needed to do.

I flew into Kentucky the morning of the service. It was an emotional experience to see people she worked with 25 years ago arrive out of respect and love. Some I knew and some I didn't. There were neighbors there from where I grew up 50 years ago.

My sister had spoken before me and shared an in-depth chronology of our mother’s life, about her career and love of dancing, and her surviving two husbands and her oldest daughter. And also of my mother's recent loss of her dear friend and loving companion of 14 years, Earl. It was an emotional sharing.

I hadn’t been experiencing any grief symptoms but when I stood behind the lectern and looked out at her friends and family, the emotions coming up made it hard to get out my first words. I was remembering what a supportive parent she had been, and how she had loved life.

After regaining my poise, I opened with a quote from Emerson from his essay on Compensation: “It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” I then shared some memories, mostly about how she had grown as a person, from her conservative German upbringing with a definite idea of how things were supposed to be, to being more open to life and to new things, and how she was always helping me with her encouragement, no matter what I was doing, whether it was music or writing or sales.

Friends and former colleagues of her spoke as well, remembering her with love and fondness. It was a healing experience. If my mother’s spirit was present, then surely she felt appreciated and loved. It was a touching memorial service.

That night I was able to enjoy a reunion with a childhood friend. (Interestingly enough, my motel room had a view of my old backyard, where I spent the first 20 plus years of my life--my friend still lived in the house next door.) We went out to an Indian restaurant (my favorite type of food) in Cincinnati, where we met his girlfriend, and then over to Covington, Kentucky, hearing some of the best jazz I have ever heard, with the three of us sharing a bottle of wine.

You might be asking, "How could someone suffer the death of a parent and then go out and have a good time immediately after the memorial service?" I suppose because I knew she was in essence a spiritual being, and she just completed an 89-year physical experience.

Death of a Parent and Acceptance

Coming to terms with the death of a parent is easier with an understanding of consciousness. This understanding of life and death and consciousness manifesting and unmanifesting has allowed me to not cling to her physical form. It is a vision of wholeness. At times, I even feel bliss when thinking of her and her new non-physical state of being. She doesn’t need a physical body for me, or the rest of our family, or her friends, to love her. And she doesn’t need a physical body for me to feel her presence. I feel it right now as I am writing about her.

I told her a week before she died that it was all right if she felt ready to go. A few days later she was calling out to her recently departed friend, Earl, to open up the door. She was finally ready to go and I was accepting of it.

But dealing with the death of a parent is always challenging. I remember the grief from 31-years earlier when I lost my father. He died of a severe heart attack at the age of 62.. I was 20-years-old. It was before I had developed any spiritual understanding of life. I had no foundation and consequently, I was devastated.

To me, it was a loss without any compensation. My consciousness was so hyper-focused on the loss, that when my mother and I returned to Kentucky from Arkansas where we buried him, we discovered even more loss. Our house had been robbed and ransacked.

But that type of focus doesn’t plague me anymore. I've come to know that our source of being is beyond the physical body. If I were to only address the physical body when trying to heal from an illness, I would be practicing a form of fragmentation. We are what we are due to our consciousness, which abides in the unmanifested. The manifested springs from the unmanifested, or as physicist David Bohm tells us, the explicate springs forth from the implicate. The physical form gets its being from consciousness, which is beyond form.

If we can have our roots in the unmanifested, we can be free of clinging to the physical form. Clinging is always a guarantee of suffering, and it is a suffering that is unnecessary.

Some people completely identify themselves and others with the physical body. To them the death of a parent is bound to be more painful and unacceptable. And the same goes for when they sense their own death approaching.

But the death of a parent doesn't have to be unmitigated pain. It can be a joyous time, a time of celebration. Some people, due to their own inner experiences, are able to perceive the divinity in them and in others. And it is the divinity that is beyond the physical. It is eternal and imperishable. It’s our Presence. To the degree of this perception is the degree of acceptance. And it is acceptance that makes it possible to be free of suffering—living life in the present moment instead of being tormented by a clinging to the dead past.

Yes, death of a parent is a crisis. But it is also an opportunity to go deeper in one’s experience in life, and to expand one’s perception from the physical to the non-physical, and to transcend suffering.

Life is more joyful when we become rooted in the impermanence of the physical. It allows our consciousness to make the leap that we are more than our physical bodies—that we are infinite. Or as I like to say, we are more than mere drops, we are the ocean itself. When a drop loses its separate existence, it finds that it is the ocean. It is a freedom from limitation. And that is a metaphor that I use when I am feeling limited. And it is a metaphor that helped me process the passing of my mother.

I know that she is free. She is no longer a frail 89-year-old. Instead she is having the experience of being formless--free of the limitations of old age. Death of a parent is not finality. The connection is still there. It is but a transition from physical form to formlessness -- formlessness from which everything comes and to which everything goes.

Being connected to our infinite and eternal formless nature—our divinity or Presence—makes these transitions easier to make. The transition itself is always a progression, always an expansion—an expansion towards the final realization of consciousness that we are infinite and eternal. With that foundation, the loss or death of a parent is but a reminder that life is transitory. It's importnat to remember that the death of a parent isn't the ending of the relatiohnship. The death of a parent isn't the end of his or her presense in your life. And finally, the death of a parent need not be viewed as a sad event.

If you are dealing with the death of a parent and are interested in further reading on the subject of death and grief, I recommend you read Stephen Levine's book, Who Dies?