A Day for Mum

   Here in the U.S. the day just passed was a marketing bonanza, a time of $7.99 greeting cards (all thrown into the dumpster by today) and endless batches of flowers, also now on sale in cart after cart at the grocery stores.  The upside of all of this was that it pointed out to many that today was a day to stop and both thank and celebrate your mother (other countries have similar days but celebrate it at a different time of year); it was Mother's Day.  My brother texted me that morning, surprised that for the first time there was no one to call.  Another friend graciously wished me well and offered support at getting through my first such remembrance without a mother.  Oddly, I didn't know what to feel.  Perhaps because I had spent so much time with her, or perhaps because I felt that she had lived a long life, or perhaps a thousand other reasons entered the picture and I wasn't aware of the blast of confusion.  I went to bed early.

   We've all lost someone, no matter our ages.  Those younger lose a grandparent and yet life is still so full ahead of them that it often makes little impact (and I generalize here).  A family pet goes, and before long another arrives to capture your heart.  You witness an accident, you go to war, or it gets worse...a sibling or a child of yours dies.  Certain facts of life are difficult for me to imagine.  The late Paul Fussel was more cynical in his essay originally written for The New Republic in 1981 on the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Here's what the recent issue of Esquire chose to quote from it:  Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can't have your own way; that if you do get what you want, it turns out to be not the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and that the world will go on as if you had never existed.  Another is that to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else's expense or do and undergo things it's not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And not just the bombings.  It's also an unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets, or knives, if not in Germany, Italy, or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam.  You have connived at murder, and you thrive in it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely.

    To read that excerpt, one would think that the author might be a bit depressed or perhaps angry, that there's no "skin in the game today," as one person put it.  But read Fussel's entire piece (please).  It's quite eloquent and tries to balance the cost of life overall.  Decisions made (ignoring the fact of why war exists at all, but then this was 1945 and all-out war was truly a fact of life and death),  Part of Fussel words, on the war on the Japanese front, wrote: In general, the principle is, the farther from the scene of horror the easier the talk.  One young combat naval officer close to the action wrote home in the fall of 1943, just before the marines underwent the agony of Tarawa: “When I read that we will fight the Japs for years if necessary and will sacrifice hundreds of thousands if we must, I always like to check from where he’s talking: it’s seldom out here.” That was Lieutenant (j.g.) John F. Kennedy.  And Winston Churchill, with an irony perhaps too broad and easy, noted in Parliament that the people who preferred invasion to A-bombing seemed to have “no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves.” ...To observe that from the viewpoint of the war’s victims-to-be the bomb seemed precisely the right thing to drop is to purchase no immunity from horror...As with the Russian Revolution, there are two sides --that’s why it’s a tragedy instead of a disaster-- and unless we are, like Bruce Page, simple-mindedly unimaginative and cruel, we will be painfully aware of both sides at once.

    So here's part of my take, my cynicism that somehow seems to brew in the back of my head despite my optimism.  Some posts ago I wrote about the overfishing of sardines and the resultant decline in Adelie penguins since their food source is now severely depleted.  The results are in: just two chicks survived the season (out of thousands and thousands).  Here's another from Scientific American: The amount of carbon in our planet's oceans has varied slowly over the ages.  But 31 times in the past 542 million years the carbon level has deviated either much more than normal or much faster than usual (dots in main graph).  Each of the five great mass extinctions occurred during the same time as the most extreme carbon events (pink dots).  In each case, more than 75 percent of marine animal species vanished.  Earth may enter a similar danger zone soon.  In 1850 the modern oceans contained about 38,000 gigatons of carbon, and a new study by geophysics professor Daniel H. Rothman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicates that if 310 gigatons or more are added, the deviation will again become acute.  Humans have already contributed about 155 gigatons since then, and the world is on course to reach 400 gigatons by 2100 (small graph).  Does that raise the chance for a mass extinction? “Yes, by a lot,” Rothman says.

    And then came this opening from the editor of Popular Science on time: You probably won't remember this page tomorrow.  Don't worry; I'm not offended.  See, these 313 words will take you less than two minutes to read.  If you live as long as an average American --78.8 years-- my carefully crafted editor's letter (which took me forever to write) will comprise just 1/29796163 of your life.  Or, rounding to the nearest sensible number, zero percent of your dance through this mortal coil...But what if you were a mayfly?  Stay with me -- I am sober and I have a point, I promise.  Forget that mayflies don't so much think as obey instincts hot-stamped into their DNA, and ignore their lack of literacy.  If you were a bookish mayfly --specifically a female of the species Dolania Americana-- those 83 seconds would represent almost a third of your adult life.  That'd be life spending decades pondering this page...My point is that though time feels like an inescapable fact of the universe, it means something different to all of us -- even to members of the same species.  Time isn't even fixed within the confines of your own mind: When you were a little kid, didn't summer vacation last a blissful eternity?  And now, do you find yourself wondering, How is it already September?...The full span of your life and all that you've experienced within it shapes your perception of time.  And so do your memories, emotions, and preferences.  An hour melted away in the pages of a great book is no shorter than one slogged through while pouring over your taxes.  But it still feels different.  That's just the way your brain works...

    For me, four months have passed since my mother died.  The reminder of a national day telling everyone "don't forget your mother" is a mixed one for me, the "time" being so close.  It's a bit like a version of Goldilocks, not too sad, not too happy, just right.  To be truthful, it almost seems just a fact of life, its wonder mixed with its shortness, its joys mixed with its sadness, its realities mixed with its imagination.  I recognize that all of my life --every thought, every strained muscle, every glance, every experience-- would not be possible without two people deciding to have a baby.  Me.  Without my mother (and father), I simply would not be here; somewhere in the ether I'd be just another atom, another piece of something waiting to happen.  And on this mother's day, I hope that that is exactly where my mother is, recycled and returned to atoms, somewhere "out there," still here in my mind but physically now just a part of life, as those before us and those after us, fading but not forgotten.  Soon I will follow...it's inevitable.  But think of how fortunate all of us are to still be here, to enjoy life, to have come this far.  My mother was just shy of 93...and the comfort for me is that perhaps she took her last breath with those same feelings, a life well-lived, a life well-loved.