Delete Mom?

As I grew up, there were several aspects of life that really bothered me. Why was it that most living things had to struggle interminably to achieve a fleeting existence? I found the food-chain concept of ‘bigger fish eating smaller fish’ who in turn eat even smaller fish appallingly cruel and unfair. Where did this invention of a predator-prey system come from? Another time I saw an old photo of a crowd in some town and it occurred to me that everyone in the picture was dead. The ‘circle of life’ made me question the purpose of a finite life; what was the point if it was only to end? Was my consciousness a mere biochemical side effect as I performed my main purpose of living my life in a bucket brigade with the primary goal to pass my genetic code down through time? That led me to question various concepts of an afterlife. The Christian passage to an eternal existence in Heaven or Hell seemed to be either an incomprehensibly boring appointment or a fiendishly cruel punishment. Ultimately, I decided the entire notion to be a particularly grandiose shovel of hogwash. In fact, these considerations seemed to indicate an awfully flawed existential basis that pissed me off because there was no alternative, no way to fix the thing. In addition, it was dawning on me that there existed a profound distinction between the familiar world of my ‘inner’ perceptions and the ‘real’ world. The external world appeared as a stark place where its various exhibitions were only composed of the aggregate motion of matter; sights and sounds, joy and suffering, life and death were just interpretations, not a priori attributes of the jostling atoms that make up the world. I guess that dichotomy pissed me off as well because we seemed consigned to a life experienced as a sequence of delusions. These conclusions, reached during the self-discovery pondering of my early youth, became an inextricable basis for my perceptions and interpretations of all the experiences I would later encounter throughout my life.

I used to call my mother every Saturday. I’d usually ask what had gone on during the past week and she’d invariably say “oh nothing much.” But, after a few questions, she’d mention some things she had done and we’d end up talking and laughing for close to an hour. During the past year she had periodically mentioned some digestion issues and was going to go to her doctor to have it checked out. That never sounded very important and I just let the comment float by during our conversations. One day she answered my call with a curiously mixed tone of expectancy and wariness, as though admitting a secret, and told me simply: “I have a tumor.” The admission shocked me. I instantly tore through the statement to recombine its fragments in trying to comprehend its full meaning: ‘Tumor … have … I … a … tumor … I … tumor … have … a … tumor.’ But there was nothing hidden in her humble statement and it answered the dreaded, unspoken question that had spun in the background hum of my mind: What was to be my Mother’s fate, what was going to determine when her life would come to an end.

It was colon cancer and it had spread. The disease was unrelenting, inoperable, and untreatable other than some chemotherapy that would simply slow the velocity of the cellular implosion. It was a perverse twist of the predator-prey scheme: Here a malignant cell had started multiplying, sending out its spores to destroy other organs; stalking and chasing and gnawing and, ultimately, the predator would absurdly claim its host as prey. I knew her life would soon be over and assumed I had prepared myself emotionally for her eventual demise through the recognition of the unsettling and unalterable fact of life’s finitude that I had long since accepted. Perhaps, in preparation, that acceptance was also one reason I called her every weekend so there would be nothing left unsaid.

I saw her in the hospital. Jaundice had developed due to the cancer having spread to include her liver, and her normally intense blue eyes were replaced by a yellow discoloration. She was heavily sedated and I wondered to what degree she could perceive my presence – but, then, I also hoped that she wasn’t aware of being intubated in a hospital bed situated in her final waiting room. On the final day of my scheduled visit, I whispered a goodbye and she passed away later that same night. If a higher authority did not ordain the timing of the event, I could only be grateful for a gentle exit. The funeral was held shortly thereafter but it held little meaning for me; she was gone and that was it. I had bouts of tears at unexpected moments but each time the sadness quickly abated; it was simply the end of her life cycle and nothing could be achieved by damning the universe to be different from the unalterable thing that it was. I came home numb from the experience of being with her at the very end of her life. She had been and now she was not, and I would miss her.

There were many things to attend to after her passing; we are normally strongly connected to our world through friends, services, etc., all of which need to be informed or cancelled when we leave. In keeping with these actions, after some time, I mechanically acted on the obligation to remove – of all things – my mother’s entry from my cell phone. Unexpectedly the phone responded to the reduction of its stored entries by displaying an automated request for confirmation: “Delete Mom?” Up to then, in the steady jumble of thoughts cascading through my mind during her passing and its aftermath, I felt I was still in some kind of control to sculpt my thoughts based on feelings and recollections by minimizing some, enhancing others, and burying the rest. But seeing that query, shockingly formatted in a crisp LED display, thrust the question unequivocally into my thoughts that precluded any reclarification. It demanded a response that enraged me: “YES, God Damn It, DELETE MY MOTHER! Because She is DEAD! SHE is no more and I’m still ALIVE to suffer the LOSS!”

However, despite my unexpected anger, I had no power to change anything and she would continue to be gone. I was agitated in part because, while the question had the impartial objectivity I had associated with the ‘real’ world, I had subconsciously hoped that there was something more, something that could explain the maddening paradox of life that I was unable to accept. I had wished for an expansive universe with magical galaxies of stars that drifted through a salubrious ether composed of a God’s love that took care of us both on Earth and in a Heaven. I even tried to glimpse the work of our purported God by seeking out the night’s sky to uncover some kind of decipherable answer to my plaintive questions. Before this event, the heaven-bound constellations had suggested a hint of answers to the mysteries of the celestial spheres in relation to our lives, but now they appeared only as curious defects in the otherwise black uncaring vacuum of empty space. The universe simply stared back unblinkingly with no hint of meaning or purpose that juxtaposed starkly with the desperate need for me to know the truth behind our existence and our desire for the emotional bonds of love and friendship that are developed during our brief passage through our life.

While I had once again been numbed by my sense of loss, after a period of time I felt my ongoing anxiety slightly lessened by a strange sense of inner consent. That little query, from an insensible mechanical device, had forced me to discern some kind of meaningful perspective of life by collapsing the incongruous dichotomy of our inner world and external reality into a well-defined paradox, a complementarity of irreconcilable states – such as the particle-wave duality in atomic physics. Perhaps it was this ‘clarity’ that yielded to me a false satisfaction of a delusional understanding of some secret knowledge. Many issues of life that had always pissed me off were addressed in that wretched question posed to me: “Delete Mom?“ At that moment, I was compelled to reach across the chasm separating dual realities and accept the emptiness of the other world. In that acceptance, I succumbed to the miserable truth of superposed universes by offering a resigned response to the formerly unanswerable question: ‘Yeah, sure, why not’ as I pressed the Delete button. And, at that instant, I was aware that my Mother was truly gone and I was left diminished.