Bleeding Edge

Chances are that most of you have lost your parents, and as Mother’s day is upon us methinks, it is good to recall her at her prime.

Let’s bring her forth, because as most of you already know — death does not define her anymore than it defines us, as being amongst the living.

Let’s reanimate our Mother, and try to find out what it is that makes us human.

We ought to ask this about what defines the living as amongst us, from all the humans that have gone on before, and are sure to come after.

If you think about it — there is hardly an easy way that you would answer this.

What could you possibly have to say to this?

What is the wise thing that makes the heart beat strong?

What are the words that allow us to close our eyes and wish life would simply ebb away?

It is surely not the awkward silence we choose to skirmish behind the walls, when death comes asking to be the topic of the conversation we at most need to talk about…

It is not even our longing to hear that trusted voice at the end of the line, to chat to them about the small stuff that matters, to tell your mum how much you love her — one last time.

How I long to call her and tell her of this “wisdom-come-lately” that whether we are together or apart, alive or not, here in this place, or another — we still walk together.

Separated but all-joined-up, holding hands like children at play…

One behind the other, yet part of this big circle we call life.

It is just the way we walk forward, hand in hand with those whom we’ve lost, and whom we long love — that makes us most human of all.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

A mother’s passing is monumental to all children in as much as the sun darkened by a murder of crows, or a vast bird migration…

And as we are all children of God, let us not think ourselves orphaned but cared for at a distance…

Funerals always make me sad, and leave me feeling lovelorn like the quaint little apartment I once inhabited, in an ancient building called “Loveless” even though I know that it is funerals that redeem the lives we live when the sun goes out.

Her funeral face lent the color of the land and the face of the earth, which is the bread giver of life and accepts all as the quiet tomb of the family of Man…

Yet for me, it is her lasting memory that gives the color and the heave of the sea, which is the Mother of all tears.