Note: A version of this post appeared on a previous version of this blog on March 10th, 2023. I am reposting it here on February 27th, 2025, the third anniversary of my mother’s passing.
In late December of 2021, about two months before my mom died of leukemia, my wife and I arrived at her house for a visit. It was then that I learned from my brother that she was about to be taken to the hospital with a severe case of covid 19. She’d been sick with the cancer for a year, and between pandemic-related travel restrictions, and the fear of exposing her to the virus in her weakened state, I’d not seen her in person for more than two. This was a disorienting and terrible nightmare.
After I returned to my dad’s house, I went to the back yard with a pair of headphones and listened to All Things Must Pass. This was not a deliberate choice, so much as a deeply ingrained automatic action. Over the past two decades, the music of George Harrison has become for me a kind of meditative focus on the subject of death. It is like a mantle I can put on to give myself a measure of comfort and clarity when faced with the incomprehensibility of loss and its accompanying emotional maelstrom. It doesn’t matter if the loss is mine, or a friend’s; whether I have immediate access to the recordings, or I have to softly hum the melodies to myself. Harrison’s music, and those songs in particular, became the lens through which I examined the end of life, and the necessary beginning I had in processing what was happening to Mom, and what was happening to me.
Because of her cancer treatments, my mom had not been vaccinated against the covid virus. For a few days, though I sometimes spoke with a measure of optimism, I was almost totally convinced that it would kill her. Even when I had the opportunity to speak with her over the phone, and it became apparent she would recover, I was haunted by how precarious the state of her health was, and how fragile was the infrastructure to support her. Her stays in the oncology ward, though hardly blissful, had been characterized by comparatively quiet, gentle, and attentive care. What she told me of her stay in the covid ward was very different: suffering the pain of both her conditions, she felt neglected and forgotten in a dark and overcrowded place. Picturing her in that place, I felt the horror of death more than at any previous time. It wasn’t the sort of thing that music could make me forget – but that was, as I’d come to understand, the point of the music, and the reason that it continued to exert a power over me in such a desperate time.
—
A word now about the music.
George Harrison died in November of 2001. His cancer was of the lungs, likely caused by a life spent smoking cigarettes (whether her own smoking habit directly caused or contributed to my mom’s leukemia is not something I have the necessary understanding to say). At the time of his death, I was fourteen and had only really known and understood who he was for a few years at most. It had been long enough to make me sad, and to recognize that a piece of something I was coming to love – the Beatles – was passing from the world. It wasn’t quite long enough for me to have discovered his solo work, something that was just a little harder for a teenager in the days before youtube. At the time he passed, the “quiet Beatle” was still very much a cipher to me.
My first exposure to the post-Beatles songs came with the Concert for George album, a two-CD set that I bought shortly after it was released in 2003. The first CD contains about forty minutes of Indian instrumental music, largely performed by Anoushka Shankar and including a rendition of George’s Indian-style Beatles song, “The Inner Light.” Frankly, it was not what I had bought the album for, but it was undeniably beautiful and illuminated the character of the concert’s subject in a way that a tribute procession of greatest hits would have missed.
Disc two is where that procession begins, and like George’s solo career it is stronger for having waited until the appointed time to emerge. A grand ensemble of family and friends play a set of songs that span that career, but focus mainly on his work with the Beatles and his landmark solo album, All Things Must Pass. What impressed me the most about the title song from that album, as sung by Paul McCartney, was how prescient George had been in writing for himself, some thirty years ahead of schedule, the perfect song to comfort and console his mourners. It seemed to me the most appropriate song ever to be sung at its composer’s own memorial:
“Now the darkness only stays at nighttime
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It’s not always gonna be this grey.”
-George Harrison
As time passed, I realized that the Concert for George had played a trick on me. In spite of the fact that he was deceased and consequently did not sing or play a note on it, I had mentally categorized it as a George Harrison live album. George feels present, almost resurrected, in every song, an uncanny evocation of the reverence the assembled musicians feel for the man and the material, and the joy they evidence at the privilege of being able to play that material in front of an audience and in one another’s company. For a performance of “Handle with Care,” Tom Petty jokes that with Jeff Lynn and George’s son Dhani on stage with him, it’s practically a reunion of the Traveling Wilburys. It isn’t quite, but the illusion rings true (perhaps all the more so because Dhani does not attempt to impersonate his dad by singing his parts).
Over the years, I have attended many funerals and memorial services. I won’t say that it was my misfortune to do so, though it is misfortune that gathers families together to say their farewells. It was at events like these where I got to know many members of my extended family more deeply, as they shared stories about those who had just passed – and about themselves, and each other. There was never a concert stage, but there was love, and that same human quality that compels us to contend with memory as a tangible presence. In the sharp immediacy of the present, it’s impossible to forget the depth of the past, or the future’s increasing brevity.
—
In the spring of 2020, in the midst of the world’s confusion at the beginning of the covid 19 pandemic, my maternal grandmother was among the victims of the first wave of infections. She had been declining for many years with Alzheimer’s disease, and her final illness did not take long to run its course. With the travel restrictions and the pervasive fear of contracting or spreading the virus, there were no immediate plans for a memorial service, with family members flying in from all the far-flung corners of the country. The sudden loss of my grandma, as experienced through a computer screen and in the absence of the customary plane ticket home, became a defining memory of 2020.
At the very end of that year, my mom was diagnosed with leukemia after a sudden collapse and a visit to the emergency room on Christmas Eve. After the initial shock and stabilization, she began the usual treatment of chemotherapy, spending 2021 alternately in and out of the hospital, sometimes getting better and sometimes not. As the initial panic faded, I tried to remain open to all eventualities, while trusting in her determination to survive. All things must pass, I recalled – a truism that applied to both health and sickness, sunrise and cloudburst. As long as it seemed that recovery was possible, it was easy to be comforted by the knowledge that Mom would not always be sick. But when the hope of recovery faded, that knowledge took on the ironic quality of a curse.
Even as my mom was being treated, I began to cherish a future scenario. One day, Mom and I would be able to visit the ashes of her parents together, along with any other family who cared to join us. All we had to do was see her through to the end of her cancer, and for the danger of covid to subside enough to make travel practical again. All things must pass, and we were both young enough to wait it out. It’s the sort of fantasy I indulge in often: modest and possible. I’ve never gone in for “the power of positive thinking” or any of that bunk – whatever my brain is doing behind my skull has nothing to do with what must happen outside it – but I’ve found that things turn out well enough, often enough, to justify a little optimism.
The problem with a recurring fantasy, of course, is that you get attached. And the higher the stakes, the greater the disappointment becomes when what you are attached to is lost.
—
When I was in college, I encountered some members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON. From them I acquired an annotated copy of the Bhagavad Gita, which I would eventually find time to read. This was not one of the most significant meetings of my life: though I was intensely curious about religion and theology, I continued along the path that led me from a Roman Catholic upbringing to a pragmatic, irreligious outlook. I was never tempted to seek the divine by memorizing and chanting the famous Hare Krishna mantra, with the exception of all those times I was alone in my car, singing along to “My Sweet Lord.”
Listening to All Things Must Pass, and absorbing its thoughtful lyrics and gorgeous harmonies, gave me a frame of reference for understanding some of the more challenging parts of the Bhagavad Gita, and contemplating my ongoing relationship as an outsider to religion in general. Like many among the irreligious, I’d been dissuaded from belief not only by unsatisfactory appeals to the supernatural, but by apparent contradictions inherent in religious philosophies. In the Gita, I found persuasive calls to a kind of selflessness that was rigorous and terrifying; that the path to liberation or salvation lay in choosing to act without choice, or that to act for one’s own sake was to miss the point in acting well.
Musically, the song known as “Art of Dying” is fast and dark, like the rushing of an inevitable future into the present, while lyrically it contemplates the means of escaping an infinite cycle of reincarnation and suffering. It also embraces contradiction, in its description of the learning of the titular art:
“But if you want it
Then you must find it
But when you have it
There’ll be no need for it”
-George Harrison
This song is perhaps too scary, and too death-focused, for a memorial concert and a celebration of life. But it cuts right to the most consequential of the spiritual beliefs that Harrison embraced, expressed with such conviction that, in pondering them, I began to understand that in a bewildering reality there is only one way to speak the truth about the intangible – through contradiction. If we cannot understand life and death from a single point of view, at least we can acknowledge the mystery with a little poetic liberty.
—
Apart from leaving memories of love, I don’t really know what it means to die well. When my mom was approaching her end, it often took powerful anti-anxiety medications to keep her from dissolving into tears. She could lose her temper in heartbreaking fits of frustration, as her body began to fail her, or her mind was clouded by drugs. But sometimes she could be resigned, seemingly ready to let attachments go, facing the reality of her situation and making necessary preparations for the good of others. She certainly had her regrets, but I sensed in her a desire not to die regretfully. I can only hope she achieved that goal to her own satisfaction.
When I found out that, despite beating covid, Mom’s chances of surviving more than another month or so had been drastically reduced, I resolved to fly back home again, as soon as possible, and spend a week with her. I think I was under the impression that I could save her by being by her side, taking her to her appointments, proving to her that she wasn’t alone, and helping her to find the strength to beat the odds again. All it took to shatter that illusion was silence: when I got to the airport, and called to let her know my flight was on time and I would be home soon, she didn’t answer right away. My heart raced for nearly an hour, and my mind was battered by unanswerable fears that I was somehow too late, and that even if I wasn’t too late to be with her, I was certainly too late to make a difference.
When she did return my call, it was to tell me how happy she was that I was coming, and that the bread my wife had baked for her had just arrived in the mail. Just like that, I was hopeful again – not because anything had changed, but because I could hear my mother’s voice. As I write this, it’s been over a year since I last did. Something of that hope has remained, however, in the thought that I made a difference where it was within my power: seeing Mom and making her happy while she was alive.
The reality of the transmigration of souls, the cycle of death and rebirth, or the possibility of liberation from that cycle, is not my subject today. But I have come to recognize that all life on Earth is of the same source, and that all things that live for any length of time must face death over and over again. To learn the art of dying, perhaps, is as simple as knowing that you will die, with a certainty that admits no hesitation. We may struggle against it for as many years as we like, but there comes a time when all of us must leave here, and at that time no dispute is possible.
In the week I spent with her, I helped my mom with things that were everyday and extraordinary. I took her to hospital appointments, pushing her in a chair or letting her hold my arm. I showed her pictures, and read out my wedding vows a second time, because she’d been too sick to attend the ceremony (and the video feed we set up had cut out at a most inopportune moment). I told her about things I wanted and intended to do with my life, so that she would know I’d still be living in the fullest sense. I let her understand that I wanted her to live as long as she could find the strength to live, but that I would be alright when her strength ended. I tried very hard to make that true.
—
I’ve learned that the universe is marvelously beautiful, complex, and considerable from infinite points of view. Sometimes I am bewildered by reality, but when I look at the universe from my perspective I do not see a god in it. I’ve also concluded that, from other perspectives, there may still appear to be one.
So why do some look out into the heavens, or into their own hearts, and see god? There are many explanations, but I sympathize most with the idea that god serves an emotional need in people – a need to be seen and listened to, a need to be cared for and cared about, and to believe that there will always be somebody – something – to do these things, even under the most disastrous of circumstances. To be “godforsaken” is the loneliest possible condition, synonymous with ships lost on the frozen, dark beaches of distant, windswept islands – conversely, to share an existence with god is to know that there will always be somebody to hear your most heartfelt pleas, whether or not they deign to answer them.
I get the appeal, and more than that I respect and admire an honest, earnest, passionate and sincere expression of the heart’s greatest desire. When these expressions are made to a god, we call them prayers.
“Give me love, give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light, give me life
Keep me free from birth
Give me hope, help me cope
With this heavy load
Trying to touch and reach you with
Heart and soul”
-George Harrison
Put aside the question of “efficacy” – the power of prayer is in the praying, not in who listens, or who might have the power to grant it. We’re not rubbing a magic lamp, we’re baring our souls. How we conceive of cosmology or theology is less important than the unifying desire for relief, release, peace on Earth, and communion with heart and soul. This desire burns through every conscious day. Giving voice to this desire is as basic as gasping for air, laughing in joy, crying in pain.
—
The last time I heard my mom’s voice over the phone, I was relatively confident that I’d have at least one more chance to speak with her. There were others, closer at hand, who wanted to see her and speak with her. I thought I was being gracious in holding off and being patient, letting the others have their chance and letting Mom save her strength. But the last time really was the last time, and I realized that fully when I tried to reach her and learned she would not wake again. I spent nearly an hour crying at my classroom desk instead. I’m not sure how I got through the last two periods of the day.
Gracious or not, there wasn’t much I could have done differently. Mom slept into the weekend, holding onto breath through my birthday, and finally passing the day after. I spoke to her once through my brother’s phone, acting on the theory that she could still hear in that state. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I spoke to her anyway because I had to. When I wasn’t talking to others on the phone, or talking things through with my wife, I stared at walls, thinking about what on Earth I was supposed to think.
Many blessings came to me in the preceding year, but for all that my mom’s illness had still pulled me deeper into a state of dread, quietly eroding my confidence in myself. What I came to realize months after she had passed was that I had almost allowed that confidence to slip away completely. I managed, barely, to keep up appearances, meet my responsibilities, and show my despair as little as possible to the people who cared about me. But my career was becoming a hell and I was losing touch with any sense that I’d ever been suited for it.
In the fall of 2022, I was working a temporary assignment as a middle school teacher. My previous teaching job, the one I held when Mom died, had ceased to exist in the summer, when the school had closed due to a lack of enrollment. In both situations, I felt the pride that I held in my profession evaporating, and the quality of my work degraded as a result. My guilt rose in proportion with that decline, as I worried that I was letting myself and my family down, and worst of all dishonoring the promise I’d made to Mom to be alright.
Feeling overworked, unappreciated, and dissatisfied with myself, I struggled to reconcile my pride and my sense of responsibility with the truth that I wanted to leave. Until the day I turned in my classroom key, I could barely admit that to most people, and consequently I hardly spoke to most people at all. But when I finally felt free to voice my pain, it became easier to live with it. The load is not so heavy anymore. It lightens with every word I express from my heart.
—
There are matters of the heart, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it. Then there’s the rest of all this: the world of externalities, coincidences, matter and space that often seems to have little to no connection with our inner truths, complicating what ought to be simple with mess and confusion. Cue the song:
“I’m living in the material world
Living in the material world
Can’t say what I’m doing here
But I hope to see much clearer
After living in the material world”
-George Harrison
My mom died almost exactly thirty five years to the day after bringing me into this life. Figuring out what to do with an indefinite stretch of time to follow, with all the competing claims on my time and attention, has been the undercurrent of everything I’ve done since then, and by necessity, everything I’ll do from now on.
Many years ago, when I was depressed, I imagined that I only had a little time left to live. I didn’t think I knew why my life would end in one, three, or five years, but maybe it was easier for me to conceptualize a short life with a definite timeline, than a long one that would just go on until it didn’t. But in this busy, confounding, material world, that’s just what life is – short and long, there until it isn’t. If we can’t see clearly through to what is at the end of life, it is because life unfolds differently for all of us – there’s no straight, common path, though there is a common destination.
Mom didn’t live as long as she wanted to, or say and do all that she intended. There are gaps and discontinuities, some of which still radiate pain. But in a moment of reflection about a week before she passed, she told me that she had had a life of varied phases and experiences, and it was amazing to think that they’d all been parts of one single story. I knew when she said it that, if I were in her place, I could say the same thing about all the things I’ve seen, or the selves I’ve been. Even in our brief windows of time, we perceive so much.
Real or illusory, this is where we live. This is where our stories play out, and where they are recounted and reconsidered after we pass that task on to others. This is where the metaphors are made real, where we sneak in a little humor to refashion the world. This is where the music plays.
—
In my impressionable younger days, I believed that in a sense somewhere between figurative and literal, I could become one with the essence of a great musical recording. My theory for how this could be accomplished consisted mainly in listening to the music very loudly through the best headphones I could afford. I seem to have a few memories of success, but today I’m missing either the youthful ears or credulity necessary to achieve a state of pure bliss. But whatever the metaphysical implications, the right song has always had the power to move me when it comes at the right time.
Mom and I used to talk about music a lot; it helped that I held the music of her youth in such high esteem. Among the things of hers that I have today is her collection of vinyl records, including a copy of George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh. That record signifies, in tangible ways, the simple faith that the playing of music can light the world, if done in the right way and for the right purpose. There are naturally complications and frustrations associated with large-scale, star-studded benefit concerts as instruments of charity, but the good that music does for us is as prone to be subtle as grand. Music can rekindle idealism in a moment, or form the basis for memories and commemorations.
During the covid pandemic I began a project where I marked each new day by adding a song to a playlist, with no organizing principle except that I thought it was a good one; my notoriously wandering mind governs new entries day by day. There have been a few stretches where I’ve been too busy, or distracted, or heartbroken to adhere to a daily schedule, but for the most part I keep it up. As it happens, while awaiting the news that my mom had passed on, my mind landed on a little song played by Joe Brown at the close of the Concert for George. From the heart, to the point: “I’ll See You In My Dreams.” It’s a truth that goes down easier than the heady, metaphysical stuff, meditations on eternity and impermanence – and in the immediate crisis of loss, a gentle tune can be a virtue.
There’s no conclusion to these thoughts, because I still haven’t finished saying goodbye. Until I can’t say goodbye anymore, I’ll go on remembering and commemorating my mother, for all the pain and all the love we shared in the time we had together. The wisdom of the songs won’t make things alright, but they still help me to make sense of what can’t be finished in a lifetime.
Ink Tea Stone Leaf 
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