A Long Life Ends

There's a woman who has been in my life for a very long time  -- some 50 years now -- who died last night.  She would be my mother-in-law if I had remained married, but happily perhaps for her and for myself, we ceased being related in a family way about 20 years ago.  We rarely found ways to accept one another:  I seldom dedicated myself to the minutiae of being a homemaker, and she wouldn't and couldn't accept my untidy, lawless, eclectic self.  She would have been 100 years old this December if she had weathered all the deterioration of her life -- the blindness, deafness, the growing sense of not belonging in this world ... She leaves behind saddened grandchildren, an embittered daughter, and emotionally limited (but adored) son.  She died alone, which seems sadly appropriate, dying as she had lived for so long...  Not comfortable, but appropriate.  Earlier tonight I was hoping that I would have the chance to pay her a visit, to offer some respect for the long journey traveled, and some comfort in this mysterious passage between life and death. I could bring some of my hospice wisdom and compassion, perhaps, and offer it to a woman who knew so little love in her long life.  I could help heal some of the scars left over from our past...  And then a phone call letting me know that she was gone.  Her daughter took the news bravely at the beginning, but then unleashed her sorrow and bitterness that her mother who had apparently never offered her much kindness through her life had died alone.  For her this felt like the cruelest fact of all.   I sit here now in a quiet living room and remember soberly that we all die alone.  And, does having someone there in the end really make a remarkable difference, or ease the way for us?  This is a question I ponder and turn around in my mind continually as I sit at the bedside of the dying.
Watching someone you love and have a history with die is very painful, and it returns us to our own mortality.  We know where we are all going ...
My youngest daughter sat with her grandmother a few days ago and felt huge discomfort and fear.  She had never seen a person so close to death, pale and immobilized, the breath rasping irregularly in the throat, the chill of the body growing .  This death seemed alien and terrifying in the context of her own vital, warm, loving life ...  I heard this and wished I had been able to be at her side.  But, as we all must die alone, so we must allow those we love dearly to have their pain - alone.  Will you sit with me when I'm dying, I asked?  Will you be able to do that which you find so hard to do now?  Yes, she said.  Good, I said, as though I really believed that we have any control over these things!
I will miss this stark, lonely woman who died tonight, a woman who cut me no slack when we were related, and who often armored herself with views and prejudices I couldn't support.  She had a life, a very long one, and I'm sure it was filled with both the joys and the sorrows that I have no knowledge of;   I wish now that she be free of suffering in her continuing journey.  She might have been an "enemy" of sorts in my younger days, but in being that, she was perhaps one of my best teachers, helping me to conjure up both the worst and best of myself.  I am grateful for this.  I am glad she lived.