A Thousand Little White Birds

Photo by thom masat on Unsplash

In the car on the way to dialysis I asked my mother what she wanted her death to look like. “That’s a good question,” she said. “I haven’t thought much about it.” I told her about a death doula I met once on a trip to swim with dolphins in the wild. She had wonderful white hair and green eyes that the sea made greener and one night at dinner she asked everyone at the table how they would want to die if they could plan it.

I thought this was the most marvelous question! I also thought everyone would have the same answer—to die quietly in their sleep.

But no! That was not true!

One woman wanted to die alone in a forest by a tree that loved her, no humans around for miles. Another wanted a violent, fast death—POW! Lights out!—possibly by gunshot. Someone else wanted to be with her horses. Another wanted to be surrounded by her children, the best drug she could get flooding her veins.

“What did you want?” Mom said.

I couldn’t remember what I wanted then, so I told her what I wanted now—a death that was glorious and soaring, like autumn or Beethoven’s 9th. Painless and exciting and so achingly beautiful that I remember— remember!—that this this whole thing is a gift and an adventure and ultimately a return to more love than we can even imagine.

“I’d like that too,” Mom said. “Something like that.”

“Do you want all of us around you singing?” I said. That was what we did for my grandmother.

“Maybe not quite that much singing,” Mom said.

Then she told me what she did want. To be at home in her bed with everyone in the house, but not in the room with her. She wanted all of us in other rooms, doing what we wanted, being alive and together.

That is exactly how she died. We had stopped singing or lying next to her listening to cello music or whale songs and were in various rooms doing things we liked. I was writing, my father was in the kitchen banging things around, one sister was meditating, the other out with her dog, my nieces were drawing and playing cards. The whole house hummed gently with ordinary things, and Mom took her last breath.

It was a lucky, gift of a death, and I am still grateful for this. But I didn’t remember that it was what she’d asked for until I found this conversation in my journal, two years after she’d gone.

When I did, a thousand little white birds of peace flew from my heart.

I am hoping they find their way to yours.