Recently, I’ve been reading a highly-regarded woman philosopher whose name is Martha C. Nussbaum. MCN is, along with other fields of her expertise, a scholar of ancient philosophers. She likes the Greek and Roman Epicureans and Stoics who wrote and taught at times when great empires controlled political action, leaving to their subjects just power enough to affect private and personal life. MCN wants to see what we in our time can learn from their therapeutic compositions.

One of her books, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, starts with her mother’s death as MCN experienced it. I read it with great interest since I too loved my mother and grieved at her death. Was MCN’s grief like mine?

MCN was preparing to give a lecture in Dublin, Ireland, when she learned that her mother, then in recovery from surgery, had suffered a sudden, life-threatening complication. Since she could not get an overnight flight home, she gave the lecture and then flew to Philadelphia the next morning. Deplaning, she called the ICU, only to learn that her mother had died just twenty minutes earlier. In the hospital, ushered in by a nurse, she saw her mother “as so often I had seen her lying asleep at home.” She “wept uncontrollably, while the nurses brought me glasses of water” and, for weeks thereafter, “had periods of agonized weeping, whole days of crushing fatigue; nightmares in which I felt altogether unprotected and alone, and seemed to feel a strange animal walking across my bed.”

Some of these emotions, like anger at the innocent smiles of the flight attendants, or at the medical team’s being unable to save her mother, she recognized as unreasonable. Other feelings – like anger at herself for having chosen a professional life that led her to miss the deathbed farewell – fell into juster proportion in the days that followed, when reunions, public ceremonies and related duties filled the times and spaces vacated by the loss.

I wondered how my memory of my mother’s death would look to me, in comparison. In my case, family circumstances did not fall into place so harmoniously. There had been a great many matters to attend to that still obscure my retrospective view of … Abigail in her pure and precise relation to her mother. Allowing for all that, what did I feel at the loss of her? Where did it leave me?

Unlike MCN, I didn’t feel anger or guilt or self-reproach – for all of which the hospice professionals advised me to forgive myself. Of course, I thanked them anyway. It was not the time to suggest that they consider a paradigm shift. They were doing their best to be supportive and I didn’t want to discourage them.

My whole heart was affected, but one emotion stays in my memory. In ordinary times, I don’t believe that death is the end, here differing from MCN. But at the precise time when I lost my mother, I actually hoped it was the end – because otherwise there’d be a point to waiting. I would need to wait my whole life through before I saw my mother again – and that was too long to have to wait!

There was one other respect in which my kind of grief was unlike MCN’s. I would have interpreted her two-part dream in Dublin, which she had the night before her flight home, differently. In the dream’s first part, her mother appeared, “in her hospital bed, very emaciated and curled into a fetal position.” MCN had no comment about this part, but I would say that it registers one elementary fact about death: 

it’s as hard to get out of this world

as it was to get in.

In the next part, her mother “suddenly stood up, looking young and beautiful as in the old photographs … . She smiled at me with her characteristically embracing wit, and said that others might call her wonderful, but she very much preferred to be called beautiful. I woke up and wept, knowing that things were not so.”

Without thinking twice, but instantly and instinctively, I would have seen such a dream as a preview of her mother’s “beautiful” appearance in the world she was about to enter after she left this one. After all, MCN – who has drawn emotional realities previously shrouded in darkness into the light of day where all of us may recognize them – 

has no way of knowing

that “things were not so.”