Life Challenges

People Tell Their Stories::
Death and Dying

"The Experience of My Mother Dying." A talk by Joan Boryensko, Ph.D.

Note: You can read the complete transcript of this talk in Fire in the Soul, Parts I and II, under Doorways of Inspiration and Support, Healing Mind, Body and Spirit.

My mother was the worst negative thinker in the world. She had a lot of difficulty because her whole family other than her father had perished in the Holocaust. They lived in a little border town between Poland and Lithuania, and the Nazis came and killed off the whole family. That killed off my mother’s faith. She said if there is a loving God in the universe then Holocausts don’t happen, little babies don’t die, and bad things don’t happen to good people. She just sort of gave up. The way she dealt with her pain is to say, "I won’t examine my life."

She had two things that she taught me as a child. Number one, she said, "Thou shalt not ever study psychology. If you get in touch with your pain, it will swallow you up." That was how she dealt with it, one foot after the other. The other thing she said is, "Whatever you do, don’t study any religions other than Judaism." She didn’t think there was anything interesting in Judaism anyhow, but that it was safe.

Religion, she, like Marx, said, is the opiate of the people. It is some kind of line you feed yourself to give meaning to an existence that’s intrinsically meaningless. You’d think that this kind of thinking would kill her off quickly. She lived until she was 82. This after a lifetime of smoking and drinking, too. This woman had cast-iron genes.

I do want to tell you about the experience I had with her dying. It was most remarkable because we had not gotten along well. The day that she died, we had tried for months to talk about something with substance.

I looked, so many times at my relationship with my mother and father as part of my own healing. I realized that I had so much anger for years about my mother. Her name was Lillian. For years, my chief definition of myself was not as Joan, but as "not Lillian." Whomever she was, I wanted to be different. That’s about the most grievous form of attachment in non-forgiveness that I can think of. It kept me totally out of attachment with my own self and with what my own life meant.

The healing for that has been long. I have to credit it to people just like you. When I came together with a group of people who had cancer, and we would work on forgiveness, I was working on my own issues of forgiveness. I might be the most fortunate and privileged person in the world, because I’ve had so much of an opportunity to do that work. To understand what healing really is. To realize that many people have had tremendously healing deaths. I’ve learned so much from being able to go through that passage with people.

My mother’s death was a really great healing, too. One thing I encourage everyone to do, whether you have a physical illness or not, is get your stuff together. Make sure your wills are in order, that someone has power of attorney and that you have a living will. My mother had done all of those things.

The day that she died, she developed some internal bleeding. They took her for some sort of test in nuclear medicine at nine in the morning. At four in the afternoon she had not come back. The room was filled with her friends and relatives there to say goodbye, and they said, "Joan, she’s going to die alone on a stretcher somewhere out there unless you go get her." I put on my white coat, and I resolutely made my way to nuclear medicine and she was there on a stretcher alone. All day long. Something had happened. There had been an accident. Other people had come in.

You really have to assert yourself. Don’t let them take your loved one’s away. Don’t let them take you away without a second thought. I looked at the doctor and said, "This won’t do. We have to have her back." And the doctor said, "I’m sorry, we need a diagnosis." My mother, always the joker says, "Aahhh! That’s why I’ve been laying here all day? Why didn’t you ask me? The doctor said, "What?" She said, "I’m dying. That’s your diagnosis."

There is a strange irony in that. That at the moment of death, we don’t know when to let go medically. It is a difficult thing, and it is not the fault of the physicians. Everybody is so afraid of litigious people. "You could have kept them alive one day longer if you’d done this." Somehow we all have to help elevate this system in some way. It is a problem for all of us, not just our health care professionals.

I got her out there. They were going to put her in an elevator where there was only room for the stretcher and one person. The orderly said, "You have to meet her in her room." I said, "No I don’t," and kicked him out the elevator. This is against hospital rules. You can’t wheel your own family member around. God forbid, something could happen.

A Deep Healing

She looked at me, and she could see that this might be our last chance ever to say anything. Who knew who would grab her next when the door opened? She said, "I have to complete this with you. I know that I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I know it. And I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?" That was wonderful, but even more wonderful was the fact that I had the chance to acknowledge all the mistakes that I had made. Not by making a list, but just by feeling the feeling. She wasn’t interested in long emotional lists. That wasn’t her style.

I was sorry for the fact that we had never been friends. For the fact that I couldn’t be there for her so often. That I had held her in judgment. That I had kept her out of my heart. Just being able to look her in the eyes and say, "Can you forgive me for the mistakes that I have made?" And she said, "Yes," and had that real meaning through the eyes and through the heart. That was all it took. That was truly the healing of a lifetime. It was truly amazing. Really incredible things happened from that.

I got her back to the room. Everybody had gone off for a cup of coffee. I was still alone with her, so I figured I would press my luck. I looked at her and said, "How about we exchange soul qualities?" This was not the sort of woman with whom one exchanged soul qualities. But she said, "Oh sure, I’d love to." There was this great moment of openness.

I said, "What I’ve always admired about you was your courage. That you had a tremendous fortitude no matter what." I tend to crumble when the going gets tough. She said, "I’ll give you that," and "What I would like from you is compassion." The fact that she could even see that in me, when I could be compassionate to everybody but her, was most amazing. If I had another two hours, I would tell you about the series of dreams that happened after we had exchanged courage and compassion after her death. If you think that somebody is gone just because their body is gone, no way.

One morning I had the most luminous dream about courage. The kind of dream that changes your body. You wake up tingling; you wake up changed. There by the coffee maker is this little thing. It looks likes it says Coca-Cola, with red and white swirls. I look at it and it says courage. It’s the red badge of courage. I ask, "Where did this come from?" Nobody in the house put it there. Nobody knew where it came from. Little miracles happen.

Our science often thinks that we start with the material, that we start from the brain and thought comes from there. No. Everything exists first in mind and consciousness, and filters down into the body. Which means that at a physical level, miracles can always happen. If we are meant to stay in our physical bodies any longer, those miracles will happen for us. The biggest miracle is the miracle of love.

A Vision of Divine Light

Hours later, I was with my mother, and our son, Justin. He had spent a lot of time with my mother--she babysat for him when he was little--and was very close to his grandparents.

Most of the night of her dying, he lay in bed and held her. We said prayers to her and sang, everything you could think of. Finally, about three in the morning, she was asleep, and we were sitting on opposite sides of the bed. I was meditating, and I had a vision. I have only had one vision. It wasn’t a dream. It was very different from a dream. All I can say is that it is much realer than this level of reality. The old Tibetans say that we are dreaming now. This is the substance of a dream. Then we are going to wake up.

In this vision, I was a pregnant woman, giving birth to a baby. My consciousness was present in both places. I was both the pregnant mother and the baby.

Talk about a dark night of the soul. A baby being born is having a terrible dark night of the soul. You are dying. You are dying to the world of the womb, being born to a whole new life. Those of you who are mothers, when you were giving birth, it was a dark night of the soul, too. You definitely die to who you are in that process. When that child comes, you aren’t the person who was somebody else before. You are in relationship. Every time we are in a relationship like that, we change and become something other.

I had this incredible vision, and suddenly I switch just into being the baby. I was being born, coming through the birth canal and out of the darkness, into the most resplendent light.

That was my first of five experiences of divine light. If any of you have had those through near death experiences or something else, you know that the light is not something that there are words to describe. You are seen totally and your soul is pure, regardless of the mistakes that you have made. It’s an experience of the greatest mercy and tenderness and forgiveness.

In that state, you are so bathed in love. It feels like you have just come home. That is the state of coming home. You realize, "My god I have been a stranger in a strange land, and now I am home. You wouldn’t want to leave that state for anything. When we get into that peaceful state here, it’s just a tiny little glimpse of what our heart if. Suddenly I knew everything about my relationship with my mother. All knowledge, right there.

I opened my eyes, and the room was filled with light. It was like I had been at a 10, but was now stepped up 1000%. I could see that there were no barriers between things. Everything was energy. Everything there was light. Everything was interpenetrating with everything else. The idea that we are separated from one another, in Einstein’s words, is an optical delusion. If we could see rightly, everything would be interconnected, and it was.

I looked across the bed and Justin was weeping. His face was luminous, like he had seen the face of God. It was shining. The tears were pouring down his face. He looked at me and said, "The room is filled with light. Can you see it?" I told him that I could see it, and he said, "It’s Grandma’s last gift. She's holding open the door to eternity so that we can have a glimpse."

He looked at me with such tenderness, and said, "You must feel so grateful to her." I realized at this point that he had had a vision, too, and that I did feel grateful. He said, "You know, she was a very great soul. She had tremendous wisdom. She came and took a role much smaller than the wisdom that she had, in order to give you something to resist so that you could become who you are."

He was 20 at that time. He said, "Isn’t there a word for that?" The word he was looking for was Boddhisatva, from the Buddhist tradition. I think we are all Boddhisatvas in a way. That we don’t come for ourselves alone. We come because we grow as a group. We grow through what we share with other people. We grow through difficulties, perhaps more than we grow through the times when things go well. We are part of a greater holy and sacred mystery.

The most important thing for all of you to keep in mind: You are never alone. If you could see, there are more beings of light here sustaining you then there are people in flesh bodies. You are never alone. Any attempt on your part to become quiet inside, to pray, to bring forth a light for yourself makes a difference in this universe. As each one of us heals, we never heal alone. Our own healing always uplifts the whole of which we are a part.

© 1994, Healing Journeys. This is part of a talk given at a San Francisco conference, Cancer as a Turning Point—From Surviving to Thriving™ put on by Healing Journeys, a nonprofit organization. Permission to use this transcript was given by Jan Adrian, Executive Director of Healing Journeys.

Joan Borysenko, Ph.D. is the author of A Woman's Journey to God : Finding the Feminine Path (Riverhead Books) and many other books. She is a well-respected medical researcher, a pioneer of mind-body health, and one of the leading authorities on women's spirituality. She leads dozens of women's retreats every year. Borysenko also is cofounder and former director of the Mind-body clinic at the New England Deaconess Hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. She received her doctorate in anatomy and cellular biology from Harvard Medical School. Borysenko has been seen many times on national media, including appearances on Oprah. She lives in Boulder.

Healing Journeys (www.healingjourneys.org) sponsors a free annual Cancer as a Turning Point, From Surviving to Thriving™ conference in Northern California and other locations. The purpose of the conference is to celebrate, empower, awaken and network all those whose lives are touched by cancer or any life-threatening illness, including people experiencing illness, healthcare providers and people supporting friends or family with cancer. If you would like more information about Healing Journeys and its conferences or to find out about videotapes of past conferences, call 800-423-9882. You can also e-mail Jan Adrian of Healing Journeys at jan@healingjourneys.com

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