Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

“She’s in a better place.”

At least that’s what all of my friends and acquaintances have been telling me since my Mom passed from this world on June 3^rd. Presumably my siblings have been hearing the same. Is it true? Is that what happens when you die? Has Mom left our world and entered another, one in which my Dad has been waiting patiently for her to arrive?

If ever there was a time for faith, now is that time. You WANT to believe. You really, REALLY want everything that you learned as a child to be true. Especially when it comes to your parents, and especially if they were as devout in their belief as were my Mom and Dad. And it probably doesn’t really matter what version of an afterlife, a “what comes next” you, or for that matter they, believed. Reincarnation, a lifting of your spirit to join the mass of spirits who preceded, Heaven, or whatever it is that so many of the other great religions believe. With a belief in a thereafter there is peace in our new here and now.

Faith in something greater seems to be a uniquely human endeavor. Faith, and a near-rabid fascination with, and desire to understand and explain our world and our existence. Again, it’s all pretty simple when it comes to the Great Religions (probably need to capitalize that, eh?): everything started when whoever or whatever said it did (“…and on the seventh day…”) and it doesn’t look like it’s ever going to end (“…world without end…” and all). Each great discovery in physics brings us back closer to something that looks like a beginning, although no matter how large or meaningful that discovery may be, each subsequent one actually results in an ever-smaller step back in time.

Until even the most brilliant of physicists throws up their hands and exclaims “from here, nobody knows.”

It’s there, at that point in the “look back”, that faith is the only antidote to sure madness. How can it not be so? The Bosun Particle was nicknamed the “God Particle”, because even the proof of its existence was not enough to explain what happened in the beginning. At some point you go back and back and back, and to preserve your very sanity you must declare that SOMETHING started the whole thing off. It’s about as non-scientific a declaration as you can imagine. It is a declaration of faith.

How about on the other side? At the end? The physicists are pretty sure that the end is just that. The end. Stephen Hawking famously declared the human brain as nothing more or less than the greatest computer ever developed, capable of incredible, limitless feats as long as the current passed through the neural networks between our ears. At the end what remains is no more functional than the celestial junkyard overseen by Wall-E in the eponymous movie. Hawking was all so cut and dried, so distanced from any tiny bit of humanity. Perhaps that’s why he may have been the longest living ALS patient in memory; he couldn’t let go. Death for him meant the end.

But all the rest of humanity seems to have at least enough uncertainty about all things “after” that we wonder. Even Woody Allen, a self-proclaimed atheist once quipped “I don’t believe in an afterlife, but just in case I’m bringing along a change of underwear.” Again, not quite as far from faith as Hawking, but I always had this nagging sense that Allen was mocking those who had faith.

Which brings me all the way back to my Mom. And for me, while not any closer to religion, back to at least a little bit of faith. You see, faith brings with it hope, and hope is what has quietly kept one foot moving past the other for the last many weeks. Just like my Dad, Mom began to spend more and more time somewhere in the past. I hadn’t heard her talk about my grandfather in decades, and yet there he was with her, on the other end of a conversation only Mom could hear. She saw Dad everywhere and in everything. Her desire, her need to be with him was so very powerful. There was comfort for her there; she was happy there with him. She had hope. Mom believed and it made her ready to go. As much as I wasn’t ready for her to go, it made me want to believe.

Tomorrow we will lay Mom to rest, what remains of her earthly body will forever lay next to my Dad. Is there more for her? For us? For tomorrow, at least for me, the answer will be “yes”. Tomorrow I will have the same faith I find when I look so far back that I can’t look any farther, and I will allow myself the hope that faith in “something more” brings. I won’t say goodbye; I will simply tell my Mom that I love her, to say hi to Dad, tell him I miss him, and “I’ll see you later.”

And at least for tomorrow, I will believe.

Anne Lee White 4/21/1937 – 6/3/2024

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