Weekly Zephyr #130: Aino

Hello again, good readers of the WZ.

I hope this letter finds you enjoying the holiday season in the company and style you prefer, and I thank you for meeting me back here after a longer break than I expected.

It’s funny how we know things without knowing we know them.

When I took put the Zephyr on pause back in the summer, all I knew was that I needed to keep myself for myself for a while. This turned out to be almost but not all the way true. What I didn’t know was that my mom was going to die during the pause and that the amount of myself I’d need to help her die was the whole amount.

Aino passed away on the evening of September 23rd, a Friday evening. Twelve Fridays ago today, and today, December 16th, would have been her 87th birthday.

I don’t know how much to tell you. Let’s see how much wants to come.

On the Saturday evening before she died, my mom called me from her room before bed to let me know she was seeing something strange and marvelous.

There, hanging before her in the dark of her room, was what she described as a yellow tablecloth. A benevolent-feeling yellow tablecloth, an elegant yellow tablecloth.

I wish you could have heard Aino call anything elegant. Her highest compliment. She’d breathe out the word with maximum awe, pushing off hard from the first syllable so she’d glide far through the pool of the rest of the word.

Another wonderful word to hear her say was “mystery”.

In Finnish, the letter Y is pronounced like this: you shape your mouth as though you’re saying “ooo” but then you say “eeee”. So it’s an off-ooo sound.

Aino split her Ys when she said “mystery”; the first Y was Finnish and the second Y was standard English.

Moose-tery, but not exactly. Meusstery. And, again, a strong push-off from the first syllable since every word in all of Finnish has its emphasis on the first syllable.

The yellow tablecloth was a mystery.

The tablecloth came back the next night, only more so. My mom called me again, marveling harder, to let me know the yellow tablecloth was there but now there were shapes by the ceiling, too, and there was the silhouette of a beautiful woman in the yellow tablecloth, a beautiful and good woman, that much she could tell. The tablecloth had an enclosed feeling, a light feeling.

Funny which words come for what thing, and how much they don’t matter in the end. It was a tablecloth because she said it was but also that was a doorway, a hallway, a portal. Now we know that.

And that’s how our Holy Week began, which is what those days before her death have been calling themselves in my mind.

I was about to tell you about the next morning but I can tell that I’m not supposed to. So that part I will keep private.

Yes, now I see the pattern. I’m allowed to tell you that certain parts of my mom’s exit were difficult and frightening for her, but I’m not allowed to paint a picture of her in your mind that doesn’t describe her more fittingly for posterity. Nobody wants their portrait painted in their roughest moment. Me, neither.

I wanted to tell you about these difficult episodes not to expose her in some way but to brag about what a good job I did helping her through them. I did, I do, I really want to brag. I did such a good job. She would also be happy for you to know that, guaranteed. I’m going to find a way to brag that honors the terms of what I feel this agreement is.

You have to think on your feet, see, and the circumstances are the most fraught they can be, when someone is dying. I got the wonderful advice to meet her in her reality, so if she was experiencing something frightening that I couldn’t see or hear, I remembered to help solve the problem from within, meaning that we’d operate from the assumption that she was experiencing something 100% real and engage on the most fortuitous terms we could find.

You know what, this is really a community brag because it was from my community that this excellent advice came. What a win. I can be modest and egotistical all at once, my favorite.

I want to give you two images/episodes from our Holy Week.

1. Tuesday morning, 9/20

Copied from my FB status later that day:

My mom is in the phase where you hear or see mysterious things. Visitations, visions. She’s been hearing her late brother Jorma listing all the people on her side of the family who are there, and this morning she heard singing and calling from Finland. Absolutely everyone she knew. Brothers, grandmother, old friends. The girl who made the dress she left Finland in. “Do you remember me?” “Come see us!” “Jusso Mustonen loves Aino always.” “My Aino!” “We love you.” She related this to me with tearful joy. “You can’t imagine,” she said. “It’s so beautiful. I’m so loved! I’m so loved!”

1. Wednesday evening, 9/21

Our friends Barbi and Hans came to visit in the evening. Aino was animated in a way I didn’t see coming. She’d been spending so much time sleeping. We sat in her room, Barbi and Hans and I, practically having a party. You hear about people on their deathbeds having a late rally. This was Aino’s. My mom was telling stories, reciting poetry, beaming, beaming, radiating sweetness. Hans told Aino about his young daughter Stella—who, outrageously, had died—and my mom pledged with fervor to find Stella when she got there. It was meant to be, she declared. We had a wonderful party. I’m so glad she got to host another one. Aino always did that so well.

After they left, I sat on the floor next to her bed and she stroked my hair while I stroked her arm. We’d never loved each other so unobstructedly, or maybe when I was a baby we did, before I could build my walls. And we did have a white-hot, memorable love exchange after I gave birth to my oldest son, when I was high on morphine and being done with labor.

This was the softest time, though. Softness itself, this quiet stroking and speaking love to each other. Heavenly.

Dave and I slept on her floor all week. That night, after she and Dave had both gone to sleep, I sat awake, senselessly happy. It felt like Christmas. I went into her little bathroom and took a selfie in her mirror because I wanted to hold onto this strange joy somehow.

Another funny thing happened that evening; a chant dropped into my head and I started reciting it to myself over and over, as though someone had slotted a nickel into my back to make it go.

I need to try and tell you a long George Harrison story as quickly as I can, for context. Let’s see if I can make it a small/medium. Here goes:

Two weeks after George Harrison died, back in 2001, I had a dream about him. I loved the Beatles like everyone does but never had any strong George Harrison feelings one way or another. But there he was in my childhood bedroom in this dream, and we were kneeling on the floor next to each other, and the room was filled with this explosive, dense, intense love, more than a body can hold, more than I have ever experienced before or since, every kind of love squashed into one, and he was telling me he’d be my mentor, and that was it.

All I know is this:

Whenever love shows up with that much force, that’s not a mistake or something you can write off. Not all dreams are dreams and I woke up sunburned but in the good way.

Who knows? Who can say? I don’t, I can’t, but also: I can.

Since then I had an affinity for George Harrison, a crush on George Harrison, a little bit of an obsession with George Harrison at times, but I can’t say we were in any kind of mentorship situation that I could tell.

And now you’re caught up.

You can hear the chant that dropped into my head exactly how it dropped there if you go to George Harrison’s song “Brainwashed” and head to the 4:02 timestamp. I hadn’t listened to that album or song in years. Last time it had been in rotation was 2008, when I was having what seemed like a meaninglessly obsessive George Harrison phase.

But there it was, post-bathroom-selfie, as I sat by myself awake on my mom’s floor in this Christmas joy silence.

Namah Parvati Pataye Hare Hare. Namah Parvati Pataye Hare Hare. Shiva Shiva Shankara Mahadeva. Hare Hare Hare Hare Mahadeva. Shiva Shiva Shankara Mahadeva.

I took up the chant immediately, knew all the words somehow, sang it silently to myself, anchored myself to it. When it came time to lie down, and I listened all night in the dark to the private concert of my mom’s strange and musical death breathing, the most primal sound I have ever heard, one that evoked awe but not joy, I had something to hold onto.

I rode the chant all the way to and past her death, where the grief got so wild, so stormy, so oceanic. I lashed myself to this mantra/chant, and to George Harrison singing “All Things Must Pass”, the first demo version, the simplest one. No big orchestration. George’s voice and one acoustic guitar. I glugged them like medicine and they quieted me down.

Shiva, you probably know, is the Hindu god associated with dissolution and destruction and death. Parvati is his consort.

We can’t live in a world without death. We have to have it. We can’t have only increase. How obscene that would be, how suffocating.

When I chanted, when I listened to George Harrison sing “All Things Must Pass”, I could accept her death. You can get roughed up without having been assaulted. A sun shone behind the experience, however hard I cried.

A note on the Judgment card pictured up top:

This is the second-to-last card of the Major Arcana in the Tarot, and it’s not as bad as it sounds. I like this particular one because it gives me yellow tablecloth feelings. Judgment is the end of an era, a major era, one that shall not return. But this isn’t the Death card. The Judgment card is pregnant with the next era. It’s unspoken but it’s implicit. A whole fresh era can be good news, especially if you’ve learned from the last one.

Next week, there may or may not be another Weekly Zephyr coming. We’ll see how I feel. If there is a Weekly Zephyr next week, it will be the last one. I will still be here writing to you, you won’t have to do anything different, but a new era wants to be born. I will either tell you about it in the next Weekly Zephyr or I’ll tell you about it in the first issue of the next incarnation.

I’d like to end with a birthday toast to my mom. I want to make her laugh. So I have to tell you one more tiny story.

When Elaine Stritch died, the Broadway star, I mentioned the news to my mom. She said “Who’s Elaine Stritch?” and then asked how old she was. I explained and said she was 89. Without missing a beat, my mom cried, “Oh, good riddance!” For a moment we stared at each other, saucer-eyed.

GOOD RIDDANCE? 

And then we laughed and laughed and laughed and she said, “I just mean that she was probably ready!” and she made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone and I told her I couldn’t promise that at all.

Please raise your glasses. My mom was ready to go, so ready. That tablecloth didn’t show up too soon. Aino had been trying to drag it over to herself for years.

You know what we’re saying. I promise you, she’ll love it.

Glasses up.