Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Rev. K’s Kwerys

January 25, 2008
Rev. Kurt Kuhwald

Here is an edited post that I offered on the internet for friends and colleagues on January 8. I offer it to you, here, as a way to share, and as a memorial to my mother, Isabelle “Belle” Russell Kuhwald who died on January 6, 2008.

Folks,

I have received so many wise and compassionate words from so many of you … how grateful I am at this moment for the power of the internet and its capacity to move large numbers of messages quickly! Gasho. Gasho.

My mother was one of the great cloud of wounded children of the depression, an upheaval that branded her spirit with an intense drive to work very hard to acquire a deep nest of material goods and an intense fear of losing it all. Having a plan to protect her finances and possessions was an act both of conscious self-preservation and of an astute knowledge about the fragility of all things economic (if not human). I am grateful even while my gratitude is underscored with sorrow.

I have been reflecting some, and I will do so more into the future I am sure, on the moment that I turned and saw that she was dead. I was in the middle of composing an e-mail to a member of one of the two congregations I serve, commenting on my mother in the bed next to me, and on the quality of raw, yet somehow soothing light that flooded the window of her room, light that was the issue of a great storm-filled sky wild above the wide river canyon where the hospital is sited.

I had just a quarter hour earlier reminded the nurses that Hospice had ordered a Deladin drip (a sedative drip), and they entered the room bearing the equipment with all the cheeriness so characteristic of sensate and extraverted folk on a mission. I acknowledged their entry … they turned to my mother … and both of them released a small “Oh.” I reflexively turned to look at her as well and all three of us registered the last micro-second of her spirit … what is the true phrase? Flitting away? Escaping at last? Shrinking into and through some radical still point? Blasting free in a great moment of utter silence? Sucking forth into a compassionate void? Pealing away like some muted and invisible bell, a bell that had been poised for this ring from the very moment of her birth? … what can describe the emptiness I felt, as if with her last breath all the oxygen had been instantly been sucked from the room, from my own lungs? … what words can at all capture the sense of silence, emptiness, joy, bereft-ness and a clanging declaration of loss unequaled by any other human event? … what string of phrases or images can accurately relate the sensation I felt in my heart (a wind-torn hole in its very center) when I saw the utter stillness of her face? … what language, dependent upon living tongues, can mark that lowering of the hood of death with all its radical absence of life?

And … now the difficult learning-work begins. The learning-work of coming to the full realization that her body is indeed dead and that her being is no longer visible to my eyes — now that work commences. Being numb, I am a poor student. I am hopeful that as time passes, and as I have witnessed in so many others who have lost their mothers, I will experience some growth and grounding of insight as time passes.

At this time let me just say to you: We know so very little. The texture, itself, of death is a complexity, and infinite cavern, that we have only ever barely touched, but each such touch is worth a lifetime of struggle on the path to authentic maturity.

May you be touched. May you be deepened.
And … may you know peace.

— Kurt