A New Look at Immortality

The Redemption of a Tortured Self: Selfhood Story #4

For in the temple of his mind, each man is alone
— Ayn Rand

My mother died late in the year 2002. When she was alive, we bickered almost every day. I can recall only a few times when we were truly in sync.

She wanted this. I wanted that.

After Mom died, she haunted my thoughts more than when she was alive. Looking back on the last twenty-plus years in terms of selfhood, I noticed a strange phenomenon. Since she died, I have become closer to my mother than I ever was when she was alive. For years after 2002, she was active in my head, guiding my thoughts. I knew what she would and wouldn’t like if I were faced with a hard choice.

Mourning was brief, not because I was angry, but because her last years were too difficult and painful for anyone to wish prolonged. What little joy she knew turned into torture. My thinking about Mom since 2003 has never stopped, and her presence in my inner life has been a surprise and a blessing.

I am closer to my mother now than I ever was when she was alive. For the first ten years, she was very active in my head, sometimes impinging on my thoughts. I knew what she would and wouldn’t like if I were faced with hard choices.

Also, I knew when I was right for me, why I was right, and mostly still do, but Mom’s point of view was always cogent. Thinking of her often made me think twice about what I wanted to do.

She was the other half of “I want to do this or want to do that.” Mom represented the why or why not.

Maybe, after considering her possible diverse opinions, I realized that Mom might have suggested some small adjustments when she was alive that would have been better than my initial plan. So Mom became my personal Yoda, but always more beautiful. Our relationship worked because there’s no personality to her. Just two different approaches to dealing with the facts and how she would have viewed the options.

There was no “I’m an adult now” versus “I’m your mother, and I know you’ll be better off doing….”

I could tell more than a few stories about Mom when she was alive and ornery. Three stories and one picture stand out:

• The one time in my life that I wanted my mother instead of Nanny.

• .The story of a futile family search for lunch.

• The picture of Mom glowing with happiness in 1976.

• Her last outrageous pronouncement.

However, these stories are for another time. The point here is that shortly after her death, she was with me almost every day. My ability to learn from Mom’s wisdom after she was gone was as if she hadn’t been gone at all.

Shakespeare wrote in his play, Julius Caesar,

“The evil that men do live after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

After twenty-plus years, we (Mom and I) still consult about the really hard stuff, but less often than every day. Mom is still present deep in my brain, but the last twenty years of occasional listening to her ghostly opinions on hard choices mean she is alive enough in my inner self to remain my sage.

And this, I think, is how people survive after their own death, by being in someone else’s head as a force for good, proving Shakespeare wrong.

I don’t miss her because I have her and love her more than ever. Maybe she was the “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” element in my life.

To be honest, she would disparage my current relationship with her memory, but eventually she’d come around. Deep down, I know she would be pleased. She always wanted the best for me. And for so many disagreements, as much as I complained, she turned out to be right often enough to be grateful.

Peace with Mom in my head is certainly easier than without her. I feel that we have become closer, but, of course, objectively, I’m still in the world, and she is… gone. However, not gone from my mind, and now, alive on this page.

Peace with Mom in my head is certainly easier than war with myself.

Mom’s Happiest Snapshot, June 1976

Ruth Yetta Siegel Bernstein 1919-2002