Almost twelve years ago, in 1999, my mom died of a heart attack in a nursing home in Cedartown, GA. I went to the funeral home which was handling her "arrangements". My cousin Jimmy and his young son were the only other people there. Jimmy was always close to his "Aunt Bessie" too.
I looked at her dead body lying in the casket. She looked like ma, only too white. I touched her face and it felt exactly like a wooden mannequin. She was wearing a very pretty dress, which kind of pissed me off, since she could never afford to wear nice dresses in life. It was always what she called "housecoats" and mumu, tent type dresses, mostly of several years vintage. Jimmy cried.
I knew ma for just over 40 years. To me, she was the finest example of being a human that I have ever known. She was short and dumpy, not very attractive as women go. She was not really bright, only got to the fourth grade in school. She was very kind and enjoyed laughing. I saw her genuinely angry maybe five or six times in those forty years. You could tell when she was really mad because she would likely say something like, "I'm about ready to spit red and cuss dammit!" I never saw her with teeth. She always called black people niggers but that was what they had been to her all her life. There as no malice or disklike and certainly no hatred, it was simply a descriptive word. She had worked with black folks all her life too...far as I know she never hated a single person ever, for anything.
That day in the funeral home, I sat in a chair in the front row of chairs next to ma's casket. It was as though everything around me just melted away, and the only thing existing were snapshots and clips of my ma, playing in my head, hearing her laugh, feeling her love...and knowing it was all gone forever. I screamed, mostly silently, though probably a couple of loud moans escaped me too.
As the only child, the funeral and arrangements fell to me. I thought about this, about the southern funerals I have attended, many of them. I knew what was expected, what was wanted, maybe needed by most of her relatives. Only about two years earlier, I had been to the funeral of my half sister Marie (Jimmy's ma). I loved her dearly too and felt the pain of her absence, even though it had taken many years for me to get old enough to relate to her on an adult level. I knew she had come to see me as brother, not just little kid, when she confided in me that none of her children were fathered by her husband.
I sat in the front row at her funeral and it required all the strength I had to force myself to remain sitting quietly throughout the ordeal. The lies...coming one after the other, slamming into my head like being assaulted with stones, yet embraced by most others there as soothing balm. It genuinely made me nauseous. I highly doubted my ability to sit through such, involving my own mother. I made the decision that I had seen my ma for the last time, had said my goodbyes, had felt the world drop from beneath my feet and float in the endless void alone, until my brain could regain some equilibrium. I would not subject myself to the lies. It might well be disastrous.
My intentions were to give the other relatives their chance to play in la-la land as they wished, but to avoid the muck myself. So it was that after that goodbye in the funeral home, I would have nothing further to do with any funeral or arrangements. Her nieces could do whatever they wanted in that regard. Apparently they did, though I still remain ignorant of what that was.
Twelve years later, two in-person visits to that funeral home, phone calls, letters, emails, to them, to the newspapers, online searches, visits to all the cemeteries in the surrounding area...and I have no clue where my ma is buried...or, for that matter, IF she was buried. It is not a huge deal for me, I don't lie awake wondering. It just crosses my mind sometimes, my own personal little mystery that I doubt I will ever have answered. I do wonder why... did some of the relatives who were aware that I had become atheist so hate and/or fear me that they gave orders to the funeral home to not divulge information to me about my ma's burial? Did some of them think I might go dig her up and do unspeakable things to her remains, because I was atheist? Quite possibly, I just don't know.
Also makes me think of the fact that, if Melinda dies before me, I can't think of more than maybe three people in the world who would have the slightest care where my remains might be. I find it a little depressing to have so little importance. Then again, one rotting chunk of meat is pretty much like another. Funerals...the one time in life where you should be totally free to be completely honest about the dead person; zero fear of any recriminations from them, that they might be pissed about something you said, etc. Yet it's strangely the one time when most people go to extraordinary lengths to avoid any truths they might find unpleasant.
Why do people always say, "they live on, in our memories, in the works they may have left behind"? Why is it so hard to say they do not live on, period? There is no small ma running about in my head. I have mental images of her that my brain still sometimes reproduces. I do not have a single photograph of her. Frank Lloyd Wright does not live on in his buildings or designs. He is just as dead as anyone else who has died. Elvis does not live on in his music. Woody Allen said, "I don't want to "live on" through my work...I want to live on through not dying." Some might say that my ma "lives on" in the genes she passed on to me. Does Plato live on because some atom that was once a part of his body may now be part of one of us? But this is not true either. If she does not live on as the conscious entity I knew as ma, then she does not live on. Nor will you or I. Whether or not we may like or approve of this, is quite a different matter from the truthfulness of this.
It is not life per se that has any real meaning in a human sense, but consciousness. Many living things live shorter time spans than humans. Some live only a day. Others live far longer... a Bristlecone Pine might watch the centuries pass as we watch months pass...if it could watch anything. It is alive. But it has no more conscious awareness than the rock beside it.
The dog is much more alive than the Pine, is it not? It is both abundantly obvious and proven by science that the dog experiences the same kinds of physical sensations that humans do, and also experiences emotions such as joy, anger and fear. The dog's brain does not have the capacity for it to philosophically contemplate it's existence in the world, relative to elephants or ants or humans. Does the fact that we can do this make us more alive than the dog? Suppose that someone, somewhere in the universe, thinks thoughts as far "above" humans as ours are above dogs? Suppose that we met them...what could we understand about them?
Perhaps Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is the beginning of what will eventually be Pierre de Chardin's and Frank Tipler's Omega Point? Perhaps I'll see you there. Near the end of Kurzweil's movie Transcendent Man, he says, "Does God exist? No...not yet". Perhaps whatever evolves from humans will one day truthfully say, "I am the Alpha and the Omega".
TRB
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