What We Leave Behind

Unfinished business

My mom died 38 years ago, April 20, 1985. She was 49. She wasn’t ready to leave, but the cancer took her against her will and our heartbreak. Mom hadn’t completed much of what she had set out to do, what she needed to do, including rearing and launching my 4 younger siblings. I still ask why she chose to leave us then, with so much undone, one day perhaps she’ll tell me.

 Parents leaving us.

If parents typically die before their children, we - their children - can expect to be left attending to how life is after their departure. It’s been a conversation I’ve increasingly had over the past year with adult children who’ve been left behind, who are asking hard questions to try to make sense of their being in the aftermath of their parents’ departure. Together we’ve toiled over and grapple with questions about life, arriving it seems at the same lack of definitive answers, raising only more questions, important questions about what lies ahead and how to be with the past.

 The questions raised coalesce around an idea regarding their parents’ departure: what now is because they aren’t. In other words, what did they leave behind.

 We won’t live forever.

In fact there are a finite number of days and events in life: 1 birth, 1 death, maybe 85 birthdays, etc. This truth is poignantly underscored in Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Full Moon which I encourage you to listen to (the link is attached and the lyrics are below) and consider the following question prompts either before listening or after.

Our time here is limited.

At some point in your life you’ll likely think forward to consider: what will I leave behind? So start that process by asking yourself the following basic questions about your life now (and any others that arise for you):

·      What do I want to complete and what doesn’t matter?

·      What do I want to try and why haven’t I?

·      What do I need to unsay, and who needs to hear “I’m sorry that I ______”?

·      Am I the way I want to be?

·      Do I love who and how I want to?

·      How am I using my time?

·      What am I keeping myself from that I actually don’t want to?

·      Where’s home for me?

Full Moon by Ryuichi Sakamoto

 “Because we don't know when we will die
We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well
Yet everything happens only a certain number of times
And a very small number, really
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood
Some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive your life without it?
Perhaps four or five times more
Perhaps not even that
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems limitless”