Comment 3 of 4, added on April 24th, 2009 at 1:20 PM.

The Gift of Time


I read Lisel Mueller’s poem, “Monet Refuses The Operation,” aloud, over and over, day after day, as my mother slowly slipped away. I found comfort here but also strength. At first it seemed about a different way of seeing – a way quantum physics also suggests, as I understand it. The solid objects we think we see actually consist of rapidly moving particles with lots of space in between. Cells that have been separated by thousands of miles still long for each other. In other words, reality is not necessarily what we see.

As I thought more about it, the central issue seems to be one of time. Will we have time to mature into a different way of seeing the world? To experience aging not as just a series of losses but also as an opportunity for an expanding perspective and capacity to empathize and love. In 1996, when Mother was 90 years old, she had a quadruple heart bypass operation. As she regained her strength after that shock to her system, I realized we had all been given an amazing gift.

Now, looking back, I find myself considering how Mother used that gift of time. For her children and grandchildren, she had been ambitious and demanding, but by the time she became a great grandmother, she was playful and loving and always enthusiastically supportive. Each of her great grandchildren became one of her “shafts of sun.” She left her need to be judgmental far behind. When given a choice, she chose to participate rather than to observe – eager to go and do. Once she dropped her need to be proper, she could be hysterically funny when playing charades (her routine for the word, Kilimanjaro, is still a family legend) or setting up her grandson, Eric, to be straight man for her one-liners.

Her ability to savor and truly enjoy things she had loved all her life seemed to deepen: praying and attending church services, playing the piano, reading or listening to poetry and her Bible, enjoying the beauty around her, watering her garden, surrounding herself with flowers, and spending time with family and friends. Somehow she managed “to soften and blur and finally banish” the sharp elbows and edges of earlier coping and achieving, and was left with a seemingly endless capacity to express love, gratitude and joy. For someone who in her younger years had emphasized intellectual abilities, she became much more interested in matters of the heart

Her last years seemed to be a lesson in how to emulate the Chinese sage or the Zen search for the essence, the heart of the matter. And in this era when age is to be disguised at all costs, it’s heartening to think, instead, of the opportunities aging can bring: the softening and welcoming, the loving and grateful heart and, most of all, the joy. She used her gift of time well until “heaven pull[ed her] into its arms.”

Margaret Harrell



Margaret Harrell from United States