BREATHE : Inspiration in Grief

Loss brings milestones. Each one I face with a certain dread of the upcoming pain. Sometimes with a dread that the upcoming pain will not be ‘enough’. Either not enough to honor, but maybe more not enough for release. There’s a weird hope that the milestone will bring some revelation or release. In the end, it’s another day like all others. As such it’s another day to bring focus to what’s important. Seven years ago today I lost my mom. That timeline seems impossible. Though I have shared this in some circles, for whatever reason, I am choosing to honor my mom by posting this in the ether. This is not exactly a eulogy. I am still unsure what it is. An exploration. And my apologies to all family and friends of my mother who were held captive in the pews as I read this unsuccesfully fighting back emotions.

EULOGY FOR BEVERLY JONES

Before I begin, I ask you to please forgive the seemingly stream-of-conscious ramblings of Beverly Jones’ youngest, grieving son.

Perhaps my favorite memories during my adult life of my mother involved our lengthy discussions that mused on the arts, the sciences, philosophy, and of course… spirituality. It is in honor of that memory that I offer this meandering elegy.

My thoughts have been quite scattered over the last two weeks. Scattered but connected. In one of the earliest things I wrote about mom after her passing, I called her a Titan, that anyone who came within her gravitational pull, was forever included in her orbit, your path still your own, but forever changed, and for the better. When my father passed away (it will be 24 years next month), I felt this similar scattered feeling. I was picking up random things to read to help assist me in my grieving. I can tell you, there are some really bad books on grieving. Pop books that say the same pablum over and over, thirty times within fifteen pages. It was in one of these ridiculously insipid books, in the midst of all of that nonsense, I came across a couple of sentences that finally mattered. Paraphrasing, the author said something along the lines of, “I constantly said to myself ‘I don’t know what I will do without him, once he passes.’ What I learned after his death is this… there is nothing you can do.”

I remember reading that passage and it struck me first because I was reading all of this nonsense because I thought there was something I could do. More, it affected me because I do believe a big part of the grieving process is humility; in giving in to a certain helplessness. When you lose a titan in your life, something that has such gravitational force, your sun is missing. Your course and your environment is changed, sometimes beyond recognition. The changed environment alters the user. I’ve sustained many losses in my life, and I liken this feeling to a phenomenon in physics. I am the same substance, just in a different state; a different form. So instead of being solid, I am now liquid. I have new qualities that I have to figure out, so bear with me.

Music was something very strong in our lives. A little music break here:
(sing) “This is the day the lord hath made. We will rejoice and be glad in it! In it! In it! In it! In it!”

Waking up at the Jones household began with music. If it wasn’t my dad playing a terribly off-note riddled version of “You are My Sunshine”, it was my mother singing that hymn. Throughout our lives, typically in the morning, she would chime in with that song. Not necessarily waking us up. Sometimes she did so in the middle of breakfast. She would sing it rain or shine. She would sing it on Christmas, she would sing it on any given Tuesday. As we grew and became teenagers, or in our early twenties, she would often stick her head into our bedroom and just SAY the words, “this is the day the Lord has made…” and leave it at that. At the time, I thought she realized how much teenagers hate to wake up in the morning and she didn’t want to press her luck. Instead, I came to realize she had planted within us a daily affirmation. She said the first part. She knew, however, that I was singing the rest of it in my head.

Another thing I learned when my father passed was not to leave any major issues unattended. Not to let things that need to be said go unsaid. There’s an old saying that goes, “Always be dressed for the funeral”. I had the blessing of being able to talk with my mom in the hours and minutes before she passed. Upon first chance of being alone with her at the hospital when I arrived, the first thing I said to my mother was:

Mom, I gotta tell you, quite possibly the biggest issue I’ve had in this life as relates to you is that I am often unprepared. I went out into this world not knowing that mothers are different than you. I believed everyone had a mother like you. I have spent a good bit of my life realizing through any number of relationships that there are people out there with enormous issues with their mother.

My mother could not really speak at the time, but the look she gave me was one that was halfway between gratitude and sort of that condescension… like “I feel sorry for you”. The southern phrase equivalent of her look would have been something like “Bless your heart.” I will brag about my mother all day long, but I do not mean to gloat about my lot in life here in being born to such a woman. So you know, I followed that up with her by telling her, as I have in so many Mother’s Day cards over the years, that I am continually learning how blessed I (and my siblings) are because of her.

My mother’s stance on life, and with people, was driven by her understanding of the universe. She had a quote by Ernest Holmes that I would read, but quite frankly it is a bit heady and rambles more than I do. I synopsized it in her obituary as this:

Beverly’s life was about balance. She held a deep understanding that everything in the universe was of the same “substance” and connected. This substance was charged with pushing its own boundaries to a wide variety and diversity of manifestations. She sought to balance these multiplicities, her understanding allowing her to see the unity in the diversity. This understanding drove her philosophy of life. She did not see the world as “self” vs “other”, “them” vs “us”.

Unconditional love… Now I have seen a variety of unconditional love, but I don’t know that I have seen it to the extent that my mother was able to practice it. Abundance was embedded in her, and I think that helped. She never felt there was any end to love, so why constrain it? Why withhold it? This manifest in one of the most guilt-free relationships I have ever been involved in, and we are talking my relationship with my mother, here, mind you. There were no strings attached to her love and support. Ever. My mother’s expectations of me were very simple. She wanted me to evolve. She wanted me to know myself, and to become the best version of me I could become. If I ever even remotely got a whiff of what I thought was guilt from her, I quickly realized that it was actually my mother being disappointed because she knew me better than myself, and that I (for whatever reason) was not allowing myself to shine. She was right. Later in life, she confided in me that this took work for her. That at times she did realize that maybe she was putting guilt out into the universe and then she would work on herself. 

I’m going to take this opportunity to share two things my mother always used to prompt me, when I felt I was running into conflict in my life, i.e. when I had something I needed to work on. One was, when I was faced with conflict, she would ask me, “What is your role in this?” Because we are all the same substance in her mind, pushing our boundaries in different directions… when those different directions come into conflict, she would draw my attention to the fact that I had a role in this conflict that was going on, and to examine it. The other, which I still use to this day, is she would ask, “How are your actions, your emotions, and your thoughts serving you right now in this situation?” This is an amazing powerful tool for me. It allowed me to understand that I, as a person, am not my emotions. I, as a person, am not my thoughts. And I as a person, am not my actions. But that I can look at those thoughts, and those emotions, and actions, and question them and see how they are serving me, and to assess at that point and time. I quite often find they are serving me, but not in a way that I wish to be served. 

These methods spring from the fact that she was an educator of the highest order. As mentioned, she understood education in terms of its Latin origin: to draw forth that which is within. By that she means the origin of the word and thus the entirety of what ‘educate’ or ‘education’ is about. The Latin etymology of educate has been lost from many dictionaries. The closest you will find is in the word “educe” and basically it means exactly that… “educe” means bringing out or developing something that is latent. I believe this understanding of education is why she was such a good one, but also why she enjoyed it so much. We’ve all had someone try and teach us something by simply telling us what they already know. Boring. Maybe even condescending at times. When you help someone figure it out for themselves? It is a repetition of witnessing “a-ha” moments. I can think of nothing more rewarding. It’s easy to get into a rut, to try and find the easy way and just tell someone the knowledge. Beverly rarely did that. However… 

We moved into our house a block and a half from here in ’72 or so. Not long after moving in (I would have been 4 or 5), I recall walking into the shared bathroom we all used, and my mom was standing at the lavatory. She was taking medication. At my age, I knew medication was for sick people, so I began to cry, asking my mother if she was sick and what with and how bad it was. My mother explained to me that she was not sick, that they were birth control pills. Now what happened after that is a bit of debate between my mom and me. But she’s not here to defend her side, so… I know this… I learned everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, about the birds and the bees at that point. So, the debate between us goes something like this… I would say, “Mom, no five year old wants to hear that, AND know that it’s about your mother and father,” and her response, of course, was, “You kept asking questions.” 

I offer another example of my mother, her generosity, and her unconditional love, and me trying to be sure that I’m not leaving something unspoken. I just spent a glorious two and a half weeks in Japan. When I came back, after telling her about how bad she was for being such a good mother, I said, “Mom, I want you to know, that I am feeling a little regret that I went to Japan while you were in this state.” My mother, through a Bi-PAP mask, and those eyes… looked at me as though I had said the most preposterous thing I could have ever dreamed of saying. She wanted me out there. She wanted me out there exploring the world, she wanted me out there, and the idea of me not evolving myself was not what she wanted. Her response was so visceral and so real, that I also know it was genuine and sincere. Again… no guilt given. 

As far as an educator, I believe her talent there lies also in her role as a student. As I have mentioned, my mother had one of the most voracious curiosities I have witnessed. She did deep research into anything that interested her, and just about everything interested her. I used to look at it as her not taking things at face value. Besides investigating the etymology of every word she came across (like ‘educate’), this is a woman who took classes in ancient Hebrew and Greek so that she could read the Bible in the language in which it was written. Now I say I used to think this was her not taking things at face value. That is the person in me that likes to question authority. For her, it may have been somewhat about questioning authority. Make no mistake that is a valuable exercise in becoming the best “you” you can be. But I think more so for her it was about not taking anything for granted. These things were sacred to her and learning more about them, showed she valued them so much and enough that she went to great lengths to try and understand its origins. 

We’ve lost an enormous resource in the passing of Beverly Jones. She was a seamstress enough that in teaching me a lesson about having to earn money for extravagances, she offered to (and successfully) copied a designer suit I had saved summer earnings to purchase. She could identify just about any plant by random photos I would send her. But I offer a couple of instances that personalize this for me even more. 

As a freshman in college I returned home once and engaged with my mother in one of our deep discussions. I had struggled with how to tell her, and finally just blurted out to her,:

“Mom, I’m an atheist.” 

For any of you out there who are or have dabbled in atheism, you know that this can be a very dangerous pronouncement. Often met with, “you are probably just agnostic”. After this pronouncement there was a bit of silence. I waited. Braced myself for the response. My mother’s response to me was… “Oh, yeah, ok, I went through that phase too.” I was stunned, a bit disheartened. I don’t know if I was expecting more of an outrage from her. It seemed like maybe she was being, well, condescending, or that the brush off was her way of ignoring or stalling her own emotion at hearing this. She then began discussing various treatises by atheists. As she asked me questions about my beliefs, she started recommending books for me to read. Not to change my mind, but to help me explore my new-found atheism. When I tell you she believed everything was from the same source pushing at the boundaries and her work was to understand the variety of forms, I speak the truth. 

Atheism was a fun exploration for me, and I still look into it every now and then. Several years later my mom began asking me about my architectural ideas and if I had ever thought of designing a church or a spiritual space. My response, off the cuff, was that every space I designed was spiritual. We both smiled our self-satisfying smug smiles. I then decided I would confide in her an idea I had had regarding the nature of the “spirit”. I told her that everything I have read discusses the soul as being inside the body, giving the body life. The body is a container for the soul. I told her that I had been thinking and if the soul is about the spirit and if everything is of the same substance and connected, that this idea of the body being a container for the soul seemed backwards. “I am formulating an idea,” I said, “where the spirit is a continuous connected entity, a net… breath… wind… if you will. The spirit, when it chooses, decides to surround and envelop some form (a body), or that it densifies in itself, and animates it. A slight distinction, but I am thinking the spirit is a container of the body, not the other way around.” This, to me… was groundbreaking stuff I had come up with. She listened patiently as I described ways I could illustrate this concept through form and architecture. Again, a slight pause after I told her all of this. I waited to hear her praise at what I had come up with. 

“Spinoza,” she said. 

“Excuse me?” 

“Have you ever read Spinoza? Or how about Neale Donald Walsh? I think, too, you should look into Wordsworth. Didn’t my daddy ever read you Wordsworth?” 

She also went into a launch on relativity and the bent universe, how space becomes mass. That great breakthrough I had was being illuminated by her through the ages of thought. I was both mesmerized and overwhelmed. 

Humbling. 

I have come to realize that my scattered state is about processing. I know that even though scattered I am processing all of this to understand its connections. One of the things I have been processing is the way in which my mother passed. As you all know by now, she was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis back in 2015. Pulmonary fibrosis is a scarring and hardening of the lung tissue. 

So I have been piecing together the questions I have had about why my mother, who was about as spiritually driven a person as I’ve ever known, why her demise would be that of the loss of breath. Breath which in just about every spiritual, artistic, philosophical, and scientific tradition is equated with “spirit” or the “soul”. My mother was a meditator. She constantly worked on herself and her understanding of the universe around her. I may be pronouncing this wrong, but the term I came to was “inedia”. Inedia is the belief by many spiritualists that the body can sustain life without food. The modern term for these people is “breatharians”. Inedians /breatharians —who, granted are the laughingstock of the scientific community— believe all they really need to sustain life is breathing. My mother would often tell of her doctor’s visits where the minute he saw her, the doctor would greet her with, “well, whatever it is, you couldn’t meditate this one away, could you?” Don’t get me wrong. My mother was not a breatharian. She, as mentioned, was as devoted to science as she was the spirit. The two were no different to her, not locked in some age-old battle. Many mystics, and many scientists, believe that there is no natural way to die. My wife, Jennifer and I called her once from Japan, and mentioned to her how impressed we were with her determination, her grit. We called her a fighter. She did not like that term. She did not wish to battle the universe. To her, it was about making sense of the universe. She was not one for suffering. She would meditate her cares away, and when she couldn’t, she took care of herself with doctors, or whatever it took. But breathing… Not long ago I took up Transcendental Meditation. My mother has meditated her entire life and knows TM well. Her one bit of advice… breathing. Breathing is one of the only autonomous systems that keep us alive that we have the conscious ability to alter. And in so altering, it affects our other autonomous systems. 

Her last hours on this planet were not free from suffering. Her breathing was belabored. Her mind was unable to control her body, and thus her breathing. She was ready to release her body. I am sure of this. She was not releasing her spirit. Her body was no longer of use to her spirit. 

I’m going to skip my diatribe about resurrection versus reincarnation. Buddhists and Brahmanists and Abrahamic thought. Remember me mentioning that she learned Hebrew to read the bible. When she was studying Hebrew, she learned that there is no distinction between the words “the” and “a” in ancient Hebrew. 

She said to me, “This means that the bible also begins with, ‘In A beginning.’ Isn’t that something?” 

After so much struggle with breathing, her last ten to fifteen minutes were as peaceful and beautiful as anything I have witnessed. 

My brother and I, when we recounted these last minutes to various family and friends, would always say “Did you tell them about the ‘balk’?” A ‘balk’ is a baseball term for when a pitcher is about to make a pitch, but then he fouls and doesn’t actually throw the ball. My mother, in those last peaceful minutes, was breathing fairly peacefully, but the breaths were slowly becoming more and more separate. At one point, the breathing gently ceased. To my brother and I it felt like two minutes; it was probably thirty seconds. My brother and I were staring at her; we stared at each other. We were both holding our breaths. And then of course … she took another breath. And my brother and I both could not resist. “Oh my GOD.” I think the reason that moment stuck with my brother and why it stuck with me is because it was a necessary thing for us to witness. In that gap -during that balk- all of our sorrow had turned to hope for her. In that thirty seconds that felt like two minutes, there was hope and love and care to deliver her. And I think my brother and I both needed that. 

In one of her favorite songs, “Both Sides Now” Judy Collins sings Joni Mitchell’s words. I am often plagued by earworms and this song has been fairly incessant these last few weeks. Most people have latched onto the duality of life in the song, how there are two contrasting sides to everything and how the singer has seen both sides. But I believe the passage too often overlooked, the punchline of the song, is where she brings it home: clouds, love, life… she sings, “It’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all.” I don’t know where Beverly’s spirit is now. Like all of you, I want to firmly believe that she is with my father, that she is with her father, that she is here in this room right now, that she is in the great hereafter, attending the greatest reunion known. I want to believe, but I do not know… The Law of Conservation of Energy states something to the effect that “energy cannot be created or destroyed but only transformed from one form to another.” My understanding from being there with her in those final moments, is that the comparatives to a birth are unmistakable. The belabored breathing. The struggle. For hours on end. The asking for morphine. The discussions of help… how to make this process speed up. And then, in the last ten to fifteen minutes, there was a beauty that I have not witnessed. And I believe that it is not without… actually, I don’t know. I don’t know the meanings of it. But I believe there could be a reason why her two childless sons were there at the end: To deliver her. 

Breathe. 

She passed at 2:57 in the morning on a Tuesday. I finally woke up that morning around 7:30. I was in her room. There was that hollow sting through the middle of my being. This had been a tough two days, and the coming days were going to be tougher. As I mustered the courage to pull back the covers, on this given Tuesday, a familiar song breathed into me: “In it! in it! in it!”