Getting out of your pyjamas - faith questions

There comes a point after a death when you have to get out of your pyjamas. They smell fusty, the room smells fusty, you smell fusty. Life is fusty. And you have to take a deep breath and stand under the shower to cleanse yourself in the waters and look again at this strange new world. The one where, last week, you had a mother and now you don’t. Or at least, you do but we are now talking in the heavenly realm which is all very well and good, but you can’t eat jelly babies together and talk about growing up in Nottingham.

Life has changed. I have changed. She has changed. And this is where faith comes in isn’t it. Faith says that she has passed from death to life from earthly limits into heavenly infinities. She is now with the Lord and – again all very well and good - but I’m not sure he knows how much she likes Cadburys Dairy Milk and just sitting companionably together, passing the time of day and looking at photographs. Which we did a lot of lately.

Death isn’t an unfamiliar landscape to me. I’ve traversed it before and come out the other side. But each death is different and each requires a new set of equipment to carry you through. Some of it, for sure, is the same, but there’s a lot that isn’t.

Someone said to me that I’ve lost the only person I’ve known all my life. And I’d never thought of it like that before. Other people came on the scene fairly quickly after my four-and-a-half-pound frame spluttered its way into the Nightingale Maternity Home, but my mum was the one I knew first. I listened to her heartbeat, I swayed with her walk, I slept when she slept, I hungrily took every nutrient I could from her generous body. She was my god, my life, my all.

And the last few months have been so so very difficult for both of us. Her being asked to traverse the terrifying landscape of real infirmity and sickness, the like of which in all her 98 years she had never encountered before. Some may say she was lucky, but it’s not a competition and she spent her considerable time on this earth to help others less fortunate find a way through. Just saying.

And it was crucifying for me at times to watch my once sturdy and steadfast mother descend into dementia, sickness, and stroke. She thought I was her mum in the end and to all intents and purposes, I was. I soothed and comforted her, held her, laughed with her, wept with her, and advocated fiercely and relentlessly on her behalf when she couldn’t speak for herself.

And now I ask myself – where is she? Where is the life-force that I call mum? Prepared mansions and the like are all very well, but in the end it’s all down to trust, isn’t it? And here’s me, on the cusp of taking lifelong vows to a dispersed religious order admitting to, if not a lack of faith, then certainly a wavering. I’m not certain about anything but the fact that I doubt and, in that doubt, reach out like Thomas for the hand in his side.

 Mum always had a place at our table and I just have to say to the Lord that I hope she has a place at his now too. With her own knife and fork and napkin and glass for water.

But – do you know – I think she does. And whatever that looks like, I want to believe that my mum is home safe, free from pain, free from fear, free from all the wretched limits which sometimes make being human so unbearable. And sometimes you have to work at this, this business of things unseen and accept there are things you just don’t know. Which for me who likes everything sewn up and cut and dried so I know what I'm doing is akin to torture.

But there we go. Faith. And as we enter Holy Week and walk with Jesus to his cross, I think that on that Via Dolorosa, Jesus just had to trust. He knew that the Son of Man would be crucified and three days later, rise from the dead, but he still had to endure the horrors of death before the stone was rolled away. It’s all down to faith.

And I ask for just a mustard seed of that faith to see me through right now.

Beginning with getting out of my pyjamas.