Accepting death, just death

I was having imaginary dokusan with one of the teachers at the zen center. In it, I was describing my struggle last March with whether or not I could include my mother's name in the well- being ceremony during sesshin. I wasn't sure if her name belonged because I didn't know whether the well- being ceremony was for people who were alive and sick, or for people who had died.
But my real struggle wasn't whether or not she belonged in the ceremony, it was whether or not she was alive, or dead...because at the time, for me, she was somewhere in between.
Cognitively, I knew she was dead: she wasn't here, I couldn't contact her, and for most of my life, she had simply been the "angel in heaven" that I had created as a six year old. But right before sesshin, I had gone through some experiences in which my mother had begun to become real to me. She was a real person, with feelings, desires, joy, happiness. She had actually become alive to me, in a way I had never felt before, and so I was confused. I didn't want her to be dead, I wanted her to be alive. And I was confused because she felt more alive to me than ever before, so how could I suddenly accept that she was dead?
I was telling the teacher that this struggle, with life and death, was the beginning of my sesshin, and I joked about how this had set in motion an entire week of crying, in every possible venue at the zen center.

"And where is your mother now?" the teacher asked.

The question struck me, pulled the grin off my face, made me look away.
But then I looked back at the teacher, and started to say, "She's dead."
And then I stopped.

It was hard to say it, and I didn't want to say it. Saying it meant that I didn't have a mother, that she was gone, that I had lived most of my life without a mother, and that was hard to accept. It also meant that I wasn't a six year old anymore, that I was a grownup who had outlived her mother, that I was 41, that I was an adult too.

But a voice inside my head said, "Accept this. You know it will be better if you accept it. So far everything has gotten better when you have gotten closer to it and seen it."
But still, I didn't want to.

And then I asked myself the same question the teacher had asked me, "Is she alive or is she dead?"
And I knew the answer to that one: she's dead.
I mean, that's just true. I know she's dead. She really is. She's not here. She's not alive.

I looked at the teacher. "She's dead," I said, and kind of shrugged my shoulders in detachment from this fact. It wasn't even debatable, it had nothing to do with me, she was just dead.

And I guess that's when I realized that that was all I was accepting: her death.

There were other things that went along with her death that I didn't want to accept: the experience of a six year old having her mother be gone suddenly, the experience of not having a mom, the experience of being a grownup now- someone without a parent. But those things, aren't my mother's death. Those are things that are hard to accept, those are things that I don't like, but they're things that I've added on, they're things related to my mother's death and to my life, but her death, that's just a truth, it just is. I can't deny the fact that she's dead. She just is... dead.

And... it's all I have to accept. I don't have to accept all the other stuff yet. In accepting her death I'm not necessarily accepting all that pain and loss and grief. That stuff will come, or maybe it won't. But I can accept her death, just her death, because it's true.