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The Gift of Giving
By Leslene Della Madre
I feel I have been blessed with some very important teachings from the dying themselves. I feel preparation for dying needs to become more of an accepted practice. With someone who is slowly dying, and is bedridden, you may still be the only person on the spot who needs to know what is needed. Depending on what that person has chosen regarding her/his death, and if you are a friend or relative, you will need to find out just what is going on and how you can be of service, without your own agenda. So, primarily, one needs to learn to simply show up and be in the moment with what is. You cannot know "what is" until you are in that moment.
This requires a simplicity of being, not of doing. This skill requires you to know how to be present - not by what you say, but by who you are. If you are ambitious about being the wonderful care-giver and "s/he who knows," you will only get in the way. I feel that a person's actions can have a strong psychic affect on the dying - even if they are not able to say so. I feel that dying people are exceptionally sensitive, and an inappropriate behavior can cause anger and fear in them. Once when a hospice assistant came to bathe my mother the day before she died, the woman washed my mother's face and my mother quietly spoke from a deep place of wisdom "she has hurt someone." I noticed the woman had a roughness about her, and reported her to hospice. My mother, in having her face washed by this energy, could feel the harm in it.
The image of a loving mother who gently tends and nurtures her child is a most powerful image to hold in working with the dying. Loving mothers just know what to do, how to be and what to give to the needs in the moment. There is no thinking or intellectualizing - there is only giving and caring. Loving mothers do not have selfish agendas nor are they judgmental. They are present with their love as an offering - as a gift. I see loving mothers as free - they are not controlled by a fear-based male religion telling them how to behave. They are grounded in the spirituality of the Great Mother, the Goddess, who informs their true nature. Where are these mothers?
I think these mothers are remembering ourselves and our ways. The mother culture is a far different culture than this patriarchal one in which we are all trying to survive. The mother culture is free from violence, domination and control. It is rooted in the earth, and is governed by the magical rhythms of the moon-mind. To remember these ways is to bring back the wisdom of our foremothers who did, indeed, midwife the dying and tended their journeys as they left this world and passed into the next. These ancestral mothers understood the secrets of life, death and rebirth and their rituals were woven with this sacred knowledge.
Midwifing someone in motherly love in their death means just that - loving them from a pure heart. You cannot go wrong with this kind of attention. Kind and loving words, soothing silent presence, gentle singing, tender touch, creation of beauty in the environment, acceptance of the process, the offering of non-invasive support, protecting their dignity, affirming their precious worthiness, giving permission to them to let go, using compassionate prayer, whatever can be given in the spirit of love and kindness are all the offerings of motherly love. While motherly love fights fiercely for life, it also knows when to let go. Motherly love trusts the entire process of life on its journey and helps it to pass gently and peacefully. In this manner, this kind of love assists the dying person to meet death with a sense of surrender instead of paralyzing fear.
Perhaps in this, death then, can be a kind of celebration/initiation that can only be experienced at the time - a passage through a portal into the next world. It seems to me that if we can die without fear, we are creating for ourselves an opportunity to be open and conscious to what is as we leave this life and enter a new one. It makes sense to me that how we die - that is, what our intention is at the time of our death - affects the coming experience. We celebrate birth and new life when a baby is born. Would it be so different to celebrate the death of a person as they are born into another world? The moment of my mother's death was filled with light, awe and wonder. Though she suffered from cancer, and I believe her cancer was connected to the anger she carried all of her life, all traces of suffering seemed to disappear as she surrendered. On this side of the veil, it is hard to know, though it seems our ancestors had a strong sense of the other side as the regenerative transformative domain of the Goddess.
I believe midwifing the dying in simplicity of being and motherly love is based on giving. It is not based on exchange. When you sit with someone in their dying, you are not looking for payment or something for yourself. You are simply giving your presence. The gift of giving is its own reward, as it fills the hearts of the giver and the receiver with a warm love, communication and compassion. This gift-giving is the foundation of motherly love. Our whole society and economy are based on exchange, so how do we know what giving really is, especially in a time of need? If we don't understand the nature of giving, then we also don't understand the nature of receiving. Exchange is not about either one of these. Exchange is linear and patriarchal, based on an expectation of "getting."
Gift-giving is cyclical and circular, ushered forth from the very Earth Mother who gifts all of us. Gift-giving creates true community and communication - "muni" is Latin for "gifts." If we have lived a life in giving, then we can die in the same experience. If we have lived a life dependent on exchange, we have limited ourselves to always seeking "what's in it for me" and feeling we don't have time to give unless we get something in return. It is no wonder that we live in a death-denying society. The patriarchal mind sees death as a "there's nothing in it for me" situation. There is no sense of a giving back to the Mother in this denial. A mother gives unconditionally because she simply loves. She is capable of loving and giving. And yet, this giving does not just happen effortlessly. Any mother will tell you that nurturing requires mindfulness, great effort at times and the ability to put another's needs before one's own. This is not a blind giving away of self, as has become the condition women find ourselves in patriarchy, but rather a sharing of the self.
Another way of viewing this capacity to give is learning to exchange self for other - putting yourself in the shoes of another, or seeing them as yourself. Mothers do this naturally, all the time. Why do we have male authority figures in our religious traditions telling us how to love like a mother? Who knows best how to do this? Why when men speak of this, are they listened to, and when women do it, are we ignored? Author of For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange (1997), Genevieve Vaughan writes :By not recognizing gift-giving as an important independent human way of behaving with its own logic, the continuity between mothering and other types of activity are lost . . . . We must become wise enough to shift paradigms towards the mothering way.(1999).
It is self-evident that this continuity is all but lost in the current ruling paradigm. There is nothing more important to do than restoring this continuity in our lives.
I see many people who are not able to freely love and give. And the odd thing is that all of us want to be loved and to be gifted, as well as to give love and to give our gifts. So we are desperate for the very thing our fear pushes away: fear of allowing someone to love us because they might take advantage of or hurt us, like someone may have done when we were little, fear of being visible and seen for who we really are, fear of not knowing, fear of being wrong, fear of being right, fear of fear. How can people learn to shed this fear in the face of death? How can people learn to shed this fear in life and not wait until death has arrived? Genevieve states that when we are ready to truly create a gift-based society then we will be able to create a community with the spirits of the dead forming a "practical heaven on earth."1999).
I do want to speak to violent death, as it is difficult to think of death as a celebration in the face of such grievous pain. I know that many people, many women and children die horrific and violent deaths in patriarchy. I do not want to say that these deaths are celebrations. I know these deaths are very difficult for the living to accept, and to have any sense of deity when a child dies a violent death must be unspeakably difficult. And yet, while we are on this side looking at the violence that has stolen our loved one, what is happening on the other side to the one whose life was taken?
I remember when four women were murdered in Yosemite in 1999. They were: Carole, a mother, her fifteen-year-old daughter, Julie, Julie's sixteen-year-old friend, Silvina, and twenty-six year-old Joie. The crimes were particularly heinous, committed by a woman-hating man who was completely consumed by demons, though apparently appearing to many people to be "gentle." He was so manipulative that he fooled the FBI after having been questioned several times. The FBI even engaged his help in collecting possible evidence at the scene of the crime of the murders of Carole and Silvina, where he worked. (What is important to note is that a female journalist went to the crime scene, spending a night at the lodge where these women were murdered.
In the evening, she got in the hot tub that was occupied by one other person - the murderer. She of course did not know this, but after talking with him for a short time, she felt extremely uneasy and left to go back to her room. There, she pushed up chairs and a table against the door - something she had never done before. What was it this woman felt? Why didn't any of the FBI men feel anything like this? She knew he had been questioned; nevertheless, she intuitively felt his energy, and as it turned out, she was correct). I went to Joie's grave, the last of his victims whom he decapitated in the pristine wilderness near her rustic cabin, leaving her headless body in the creek beside her home.
When I sat at her graveside, I wept in bewilderment and rage. How could this loving, sweet Goddess-child, naturalist and wonderful teacher about Yosemite's environment to many children, have been taken in such a manner? I still have no answer for that question, but as I sat there, I was overcome with a sense of peace. I had told her in prayer I was going to Yosemite with a group of women to do a healing ritual to cleanse the energy where the murders had taken place and asked her if there was anything she wanted me to do.
I then had a vision of a beautiful butterfly, but instead of an insect body, it was a woman's body, wings outstretched glistening in radiant color. I knew it was Joie. She said to me "make the world safe for the children." She was not in pain, nor was she suffering. She was beautiful and at peace. As I got up to leave, a butterfly appeared and landed on the flowers marking her grave. I felt completely blessed. While her death was grotesque, I knew she was in a place of celebration. When my friend, Monica, and I talked about the death of her youngest child, who was killed by a car in 1985, she said that the look of peace on young Leif's face at the very scene of the accident gave her a sense that he was in a good place, that he had been "met" by love
d ones. Her agony at his loss cannot be described, but he came to her later in a dream and said "love is all that matters." Are his words an honoring of a kind of celebration of spirit?
Though I would never ask a mother who has lost a child to regard that death as a celebration, because of her own loss and grief, I do have to wonder what is taking place on the other side for the one who has died. While I know that the Mother is not always serene and nurturing, that she is sometimes wild and fierce, mysterious and untamable, I trust She knows what is going on.
While I do not understand why certain things happen they way they do, I have felt She is there on the other side, guiding and loving. When Monica shared with me what Leif had communicated to her, I replied that he was the child of the Mother, speaking Her wisdom. We both agreed this was true. And, her pain is still her pain, as is true for Joie's mother, Silvina's mother, and the family of Carole and Julie. Sometimes I think a deep piercing of the heart opens us up to things we would not otherwise know. A mother's love for her child knows no bounds. This is a fierce kind of love that is feared in patriarchy. We need this love more than ever now as we face tremendous odds for our survival in this new millennium.
References
Vaughan, Genevieve. (1997)For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange. PlainView Press. Austin, Texas.
________ (1999) "Gift-Giving and the Goddess, a Philosophy for Social Change." Avalon Magazine.
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