AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter
June 1996


For 
Mother
Godspeed

by
Brenda Forman
drbforman@aol.com




My mother died 
yesterday.  At least, her body died -- her mind had gone someplace else, 
I know not where, a decade  ago.  And where she is now, I cannot 
imagine.  Wherever it is, though, it is part of something vast and 
glorious in which each and every one of us takes part -- whether we know 
it, or admit it, to ourselves.

I am not a believer in the heavens and 
hells of the endlessly varied and shamefully contentious religions that 
humans on this tiny planet have imagined for themselves to explain the 
ultimately inexplicable fact of life and death.  These myths, to me, are 
little more than what whistling through the graveyard was to older 
superstitions:  sounds we make to reassure ourselves that there is -- 
somewhere -- safety, love and meaning.

Yet when I consider the great 
glittering, unutterably glorious universe within which our tiny 
existence takes place, I must believe in something -- although I cannot 
give you a name for it.  Everything lives and dies around us.  As it is 
said, "For everything, there is a season."

The stars themselves are 
born, live and die.  The Hubble Telescope has shown us their nurseries 
in photographs so lovely as to be a religious experience in their own 
right.  And they die, too, in a burst of glory that sends the message of 
their passing hurtling throughout the galaxy for our telescopes to see 
and puzzle over.

Humans are not always lucky to die so well.  My father 
died the wrong death.  Always the explorer and the adventurer, he should 
have died in some exotic combat zone, killed by some fated bullet in the 
full adrenaline flush of his intrepidity and excitement.  Instead, he 
died slowly over a decade of heart disease that sapped him of everything 
that had ever defined the singular man he had been.  My mother, too, 
died the wrong death  --a decade's humiliating decline after a life of 
strength, love and insistent independence  -- her mind frayed beyond 
recognition and helplessly dependent on the (thankfully affectionate) 
staff of a Medicare facility in Connecticut, kept physically alive only 
by the insistence of the medical profession that her blood pressure be 
controlled by pills that kept her physically alive but could never 
restore the mid that had once so informed that strong body.

I do not 
wish to die that way.  I wish to die as the stars do, suddenly and 
mightily and with a silent shout of gratitude to whatever we choose to 
call God in this immense, glorious and endlessly strange Creation.  Let 
those who come after me puzzle over why and how I lived and died, but 
let my own passing be a cry of glory and affirmation that life was given 
to me and that I yielded it with the freedom and blessing with which it 
was bestowed.     drbforman@aol.com