The death of one's parents

 

I began keeping a diary on Facebook when the Covid isolation began, at the same time posts in the blog space were running. 

Because the blog publishes every three days, the publishing schedule runs out into November right now, and I usually don’t insert posts between scheduled publication dates. This has inadvertently resulted in my failure to mention the fact that my mother died on August 3 to the blog readership.

The Facebook community, which some blog readers may not be members of, is aware of this.

Of course various Gurdjieff advisories were sent to me by my friends in the work. Gurdjieff said this about one’s parents dying. Gurdjieff said that. 

In a certain sense, I don’t want to know what Gurdjieff said about my parents dying. I want to know how I feel about my mother dying. I need to discover this experience in my own way, and speak about it in my own words. Not immediately be shoved into a niche where I have to meet Gurdjieff’s— or his follower's — expectations. This is the danger of form. I’m told, for example, “Gurdjieff said when your parents die, it leaves a hole through which God can enter.” This from one of the few people, a very close friend, still stubbornly alive, who knew Gurdjieff personally as a child. Well meant, of course; and perhaps true.

Yet I already have a hole in me through which God enters. 

So why do I need to know this?

My mother and I had a very complex relationship. We were extremely close when I was a young teenager, before she sent me off to the United States from Germany to go to a US preparatory school. I didn’t live with my parents after that until I turned 21; and then, only for a year during which they traveled for most of the time and I was left to care for their two dogs, in Manhattan. During that time, I developed full-blown alcoholism, and their own alcoholism went, as the German say, Berg ab, which means it fell off the mountain. Over the years, the alcoholism and the familial dysfunction that accompanied it put an emotional barrier between my mother and I that never fully healed. I don’t blame her for it; but these are the facts, and I have to absorb them in the wake of her death.

There are many more personal details I could pass on. Anyone who wants personal details is welcome to visit my Facebook page, where the posts boast much on the matter. 

The real question, in regard to the terms of this space and the question it raises, is how I feel in this moment of loss.

The social forms we've developed deliver the platitudes; and there are many of them most of them familiar. I want to meet the condolences that are offered with more than habit; and this means I have to have an intention to be intelligent, attentive, compassionate towards those who offer me there condolences. It helps each time to stop for a moment and give a response that comes a bit more from the heart.

Hearing the same condolences over and over again feeds right into my greatest weakness, which is my impatience. I’m tired of hearing it, I want to get over it, etc. My impatience causes me to always be on to the next thing, rather than being where I am. There are times when this has been an advantage; I have a high degree of ability to adapt to the next moment. It also causes me to miss opportunities. In the case of the condolences, every condolence offered is an opportunity for me to stop for a moment and discover that thin thread that connects me to the inner parts that actually care about life and relationship.

I need to discover my wish to receive life in this moment. 

To feel life is a duty. 

If I pass on to the next moment without attention, I have failed in the basic duty.

I pause, and I attempt to actually pay attention to those who offer condolences. I’ve done this many times over the last 10 days. It’s a form of what Gurdjieff called outer considering; but forget about what he called it. I need to discover my own intelligent attitude towards it, my own words. Things that are described in forms right away look familiar and I think I understand them; in doing so, I forget to attend to the form that I have been given primary and essential responsibility for, that is, my own form.

This rediscovery of one’s own form is in some way enhanced by the death of one’s parents. They're gone; one is no longer of their form. In the solitude that follows, one senses one’s own form as a unique thing that has always been here, that one propped up with a few toothpicks here or there, relying on the mortal forms of one’s own parents and what they imparted to create the idea of family within oneself. Now one is alone; and family, the original nuclear family one was born in, only exists within. 

I have to assume full responsibility for that family now. It is a real and living thing within me that only I can be responsible for. Whether good or bad, this is a whole thing that I now take on full adult responsibility for. I have to receive the impressions of the memories, receive my life as it is, discover the new feelings that arise as a consequence of this solitude.

Yet I am never alone. There is, after all, this hole that God flows into. 

The divine flows into us in direct proportion to how we concentrate the intelligence of our Being, and how much we respect it. It is a functional and objective fact that we are inferior and do a poor job of these two things; yet even seeing that can be helpful, because the intelligent and active acknowledgment of one’s servitude actually opens one more to a higher influence.

Go deep in your heart, and be well-

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.