Everybody has a mother and they all die

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This is excerpt #6 from, " Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith"


Jeff Sharlet says, "Mine did; your will too. When she does - if she hasn't already - you'll be sorely tempted to make sense of what has happened."

Jeff speaks from experience. He asked the doctors for her medical records. They told him that they would do him no good and that if it was a lawsuit he was after that he'd lose because they knew how to handle these things.

He asked his grandmother for some of his mother's letters and it was in these letters and poems that he received some understanding of who she was. She developed a faith out of many faiths. In one letter she wrote to a doctor, she said, "For some reason I don't find it necessary to be exclusive. I concentrate on Buddhist meditation and Christian prayer. And sometimes a phrase comes to me that seems addressed to the Great Spirit."

But I like best her poems, such as this one from three months before she died,

"This body, bound in skin and downy hair
Is shuddering, weeping.
It breathes and whispers a thank you with each breath.
It likes to be giddy.
It likes the mysterious warm tingle of red wine on a dark winter night,
The startle of fragrance when an orange is cut.
It likes the smack of cold winter air..
It like to dance until it is the music."


Peter