It Took Death To Make Me See

When I learned my mother had cancer with zero time to live I went into shock. Like being thrown into another dimension. All seemed surreal --like when the desktop changes setting and display switches to high contrast with the colors more vivid-- similar to euphoria without the happiness so not on the same plane, since the poles were not happiness vs. sadness with degrees of happiness down to an abyss or void. I was flipped to a mode amplifying emotional effects outside the boundary we normally dwell. Like a message doesn't fit into your concepts already known. While i was suddenly confronting a self I could barely recognize, later i realized that this self of responsiveness isn't always aligned with best self but so far away from the recognition of ideals, like a disconnect from the spiritual --the thing addressed by religion-- while I was displaced by my love for science and technology. A realm defined only by logic, so now it was incomprehensible that this person I've always known and could not know life without, would soon to be in the unreal or nonexistence. I watched my mothers entire life passing before me. I could feel the essence of earlier times, the sounds slowing down with each passing decade, playing like a movie in my mind with impressions of my mother thru the stages of her life. Those influences reflected upon her. I saw much more than I could glean from old photos or by events described to me or even seen on TV, which now I scrutinize. Like being in a cocoon i'm just now growing out of. A long time after absorbing the truth that my mother is not just gone, but she's actually dead, i come to recognize that I had been preoccupied by the presence of an unidentified woman, standing off to the side of my mind, silently waiting for me to notice. Then it became clear that this image was my mother, just the self I had not known. It's like she was waiting patiently for me to acknowledge her so she could say goodby. That's when I realized that the years I had spent seeking to find my "True Self" --a self better than the sum of others effects on me-- i now see an answer to a question not yet realized. Our true self is our spiritual self, the total essence of us with our ideals intact, untainted by the toll life takes on us and the purpose others impose.