Birth at the End of the World

The Morning After We Buried Mom

Sunday, November 19, 2006

The morning after we buried my Mother
Dawn opened up the day with mist and gray
I stood on the porch of my sister’s new house
Cold upon the lake
Remembering the chill of touching
Momma’s lifeless hands and face
As a wall of fog gray as corpses
Shields trees and water from view
Bird calls sparkle in the void
Bordered by clay red and torn
Edged with grass brown and wet
Fog glued together heaven and earth,
Sky and lake, and turned bone-white
And as the sun rose above skeletal trees
The fog began to move and churn
Across waters stilled before the sun’s return
Unstaked wild life’s hunger for warm bright light
November brings paleness to shortened days
And time ebbs and flows
The moment recedes into the past
Memories become as fog
And all things die
As it’s just another day
As it’s just another day
And it’s just another day
Just
Another
Day
Before darkness returns to take us Home.

Mom in Happier Days. Dot Bass at 53, October 1984, Riverview Farm, Virginia.

During my Mother's Dying

During My Mother's Dying

Early July 2006. My Mother lays ill in the last cycle of her life after battling metastatic ovarian cancer for three years. Her name is Dorothy Elizabeth Ussery Bass. Most folks call her "Dot." Although my home has been Seattle, Washington for quite some time, I am again in Virginia, the land where she gave birth to me, and feel compelled to write the following:

Last night I slept ten and a half hours, awaking from a heavy dream combining aspects of Mt. Rainier, the Appalachian Trail, and my friends David & Tina from Richmond. The night before I slept only 3-4 hours. I got out of bed early & went for a walk, rambling around the farm and across the land. Did push-ups on the concrete apron of the old cow lane, my hands pushed down where cowshit used to pile up in amazing quantities. Now it's been washed clean by the rains & bleached by the sun.

The most beautiful songs burst forth from songbirds perched up in treetops and on the barn roof cupolas. We don't have songbirds much out West, they tend to thrive East of the Great Plains - they need deciduous forests. An amazing array of bird songs fill the morning air. It feels cool in the morning only because warm air is cooler than hot air. It later got up to a sweltering, humid 100 degrees. Damn. People slow down. You walk with deliberation and a sense of conservation. People say it is unusual for such temperatures so soon. That's August weather. Global Warning (sic, yes).

I've been enjoying the nights. Stars and familiar constellations thru hazy skies. Watching the moon grow. I love the zip of myraid dragonflies darting and hovering into the evening, transmuting softly into floating clouds of blinking fireflies as night settles. Mid-day it's June bug time. The giant emerald-brown beetles rumble in swarms above bushes and treetops. As the cows are gone, the lack of flies is noticeable. A few ticks though. I picked only three off me after a hike across fields and down a wooded ravine. I'm staying with my sister and her family down on the lake. I really like it there. Peaceful. Quiet. I like the silence where time seems to slow wayyy down. Makes me rethink things - do we really want a second home on Lake Wenatchee with stunning views but jammed between other homes, or would we rather have free ranging open spaces for kids to run and play in right outside the door? I find myself become reattached to the land I came from, as perhaps only a farmer's son could.

Yesterday I stop by the cemetary on my way to Richmond. My father's grave is a year and a half old now. The little animal figurines placed along the gravestone are faded from the elements, as are a vase of flowers. I clear away one wilted rose so I can read his name: William Merritt Bass. My mom's name is already there, the grave ready to receive her when the time comes, the only thing missing the date of her death yet to come. I have a little conversation with Dad.

I walk over the graves of my great-uncle R. Aumon Bass and his beloved Mary Scott Bass. He was deaf and she a deaf-mute. She died 33 years ago and yet I remember her so clearly. They were the last to live in the old Bass Farmhouse. For months after her death we could stand outside and hear Uncle Aumon wailing, mourning her loss. We could hear him crying all the way down the hill to my parents' house. As Aumon presented himself in public as a taciturn man of composure and dignity (unless he lost his temper), the rest of us where taken off guard hearing him grieve. We didn't know what to do.

It made us all uncomfortable.So we avoided the issue. If he talked about her death at all, how much he missed her, I just listened quietly not knowing what else to do. Don't quite remember anymore. Except that he followed her into death 9 years later.

Robert Augustus Masters, one of my current mentors, writes in Darkness Shining Wild death is the last thing to come out of the closet. In our culture we now talk about sex and money, race and religion, politics and the environment, everything else but Death. We don't know how to be with death. We often spell it Death. We don't do that with birth, do we? Death lives in the closet, but not really. When one becomes present to death it is right there in our laps, sitting next to me in the car, hovering over my mother, flowing between trees and headstones and flowers and livestock. I drove passed a dear burst open along the side of the road. My second day here while driving the back roads a deer ran out right in front of me and vanished into the woods. As I topped the hill six more deer stood grazing in a hayfield. My God, it is hot. But I drive with the windows rolled down to feel the air blasting me but really for the smells. I love the smell of rural Virginia. Every state has a distinctive smell, each region of the country does, and Virginia smells different from Florida from Vermont from Iowa from New Mexico from Oregon. From Washington. Just like, I would imagine, Tuscany smells different from Norway and England from Bavaria. Death has its own unique smell, too.

Yesterday in Richmond I hang with David Wilson and his wife Tina Ennulat. It is a joyous reunion, almost tearful. We are the best of friends from our grad school days, they have four beautiful children, and I haven't seen them since the summer of 2001. What makes it special is that we all became buddies as separate individuals, I was especially close to Tina, and then she and David became a couple. So we're all "equal" friends rather than one tagging along just out of spousedom. Gwen, they say hi & hugs to you, and Kristina, they can't wait to meet you. And see our kids. Tina is an author and an editor on staff for a couple of big, glossy high class magazines, while David is a school teacher. He lights up with a passion for children and learning. He loves teaching kids. That's his purpose.

We drop off their youngest son at a kiddie birthday party. I fit right in with the parents. They are so Virginia with that strange and unique blend of hippie and preppie from my generation. Gwen, I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about. Right in the middle of the city is this gigantic old farmhouse on a double city lot. They've turned the yard into gardens and flower beds amok with red clay and vegetation. The two pet guinea pigs are taken out of their hutch and put in an open pen to get some exercise. The kids are spraying each other with constant streams of water. Water is everywhere, sprayed up in the air, on the slide, on the grass, on the trampoline, squirting straight up from hose-toys. Kids run crazy, laughing, not seeming to notice it is a hundred frickin' degrees. Us adults either explore the gardens or hang in the shade of an enormous wrap-around porch with old-fashioned wooden rocking chairs. It turns out three of them have traveled to Seattle and to Vancouver BC on business!

We leave and go on an air-conditioned driving tour of The Fan, the Bohemian core of Richmond anchored by Virginia Commonwealth University and The Village Cafe. The James River is gigantic in flood. A rushing, raging tumbling mass of brown and white water roiling thru trees. It seems almost a full mile across. So many rapids. Enormous flood stage rapids. Scary fun.
And sure enough, a train of big blue rafts followed by a flotilla of kayaks barrel down and dance thru the wave trains and drop over ledges into churning holes. I feel the tug of the river, the lure of the paddle, and decide I'm quite happy just to watch.

We return to the birthday party to pick up Tina's son. Other parents are arriving. One mother brings her dog. Off leash. Suddenly we spot the dog with a guinea pig in its mouth. No violence. Just holding it in its mouth.

We rush forward, the dog drops the guinea pig, which tries to crawl away. The Dad of the birthday boy picks up the guinea pig and cradles it against his chest. The guinea pig dies right there. We suspect a broken back. Shock. Trauma. Heat. No blood. The little boy is quite distraught.

Suddenly the dog is back in the pen after the other guinea pig. The architect yanks the dog out by the collar as its owner comes rushing over.

"Go put Wilber up in your room right now!" the mother of the birthday kid yells at her son. He does so, in tears. He is angry and splutters threats.

The father is stern but matter of fact. "He's just a dog. That's what dogs do." The woman who owns the dog is embarrassed and blubbers all over herself. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry my dog killed your little boy's guinea pig." Over and over again. I watch it all in slow motion, more just holding the space. All I can really think of is the presence and the immediacy of death. Death comes fast and unexpected. One never knows. We may never see each other again. I feel the point is really to take on the practice of being aware of death and dying and learning how to accept it and be with it so when it comes it comes and we can grieve with it and support one another openly without whispers and discomfort. I remember, Kristina, it seemed to me you didn't quite know what to do when my dad died and I reached out to you as my lover and life partner for support. We all talk about an interdependent web of life all too conveniently blind how interwoven that web is with death. Death can bring the living closer together in life as well. I feel it important to support one another thru the dying and the grieving not leave each other all alone as my Uncle Aumon was. Yes, we really do need one another. Death drives home that social aspect of our humanity. Somehow "need" has become a bad word, the opposite of that good word "independent." Just as the 4th of July comes. I would love to see Earth celebrate an Interdependence Day.

I drive home from Richmond straight to see my Mom. She appears so comfortable and peaceful. Then a wave of pain hits. Or a burst of nausea.

Then's she's peaceful again. We hang out. I read an article to her from the paper. I show her pictures of my family life in Seattle. Lots of photos and videos on the laptop. She loves that. For now her mind is surprisingly lucid and clear. As the cancer progresses and spreads throughout her body and invades her brain all that may change. Mom really wants to see all her grandkids again, Morgan, and Kate, even Talia. I say maybe October is a possibility, but I do not committ. She may be going home this week. Beth has around the clock care lined up at $6000 a month. Insurance will not pay for it. It will come out of her own nest egg. She has an estimated five months left, but who really knows for sure. It could be 2 or 3 months, or a year, and the cancer will continue to exponentially spread as it is no longer being treated. Mom is so weak. Can't walk much. Her legs are swollen, tight, dark purple, with oozing sores. She's quite content to lay in the bed and bide the time. She claims she's comfortable and just waiting for the end. Where as she fought to live with every breath she now seems to accept her own approaching death. Then suddenly she looks afraid, then sad, worries about dividing up the estate, and then moves on.

I'm going to go visit Mom soon, and then visit more graves. Graves of relatives and neighbors. I'm suddenly present to the large numbers of people who played prominent roles in my life, especially as a child and young adult, who are now dead. Funny. The article I read to Mom from the paper regarded a breakthru in human genetics research. There are 6.5 billion human beings now, and every single one of them was able to be traced back to one single person - male or female is unclear - who lived sometime between the reign of Tutankhamen of Eqypt to Alexander the Great to the time of Jesus. That person lived somewhere in East Asia, most likely from either Taiwan, Siberia, or ...can't remember the other places. The lineages of every other human being alive at that time died out. So at some point all the ethnic and religious groups currently killing and maiming each other in war all shared the same great-ever-so-great grandparents. That is wild. And all those living today from remote tribes in New Guinea to the cosmpolitan streets of Paris and New York are all kin. We are all having sex with people who are genetically our distant relatives. Kristina, we're kissin' cousins! And so is everyone else. This was done thru an amazing combination of genetics biologists, geneaologists, & statisticians teaming up on a supercomputer inspired by the landmark work with the human genome project. And I don't even know if all this is really true.

Time to go live, and someday, sometime, I will die.

The Afterlife, if it actually exists, and I believe it does, awaits as another adventure.

As does this life.

A couple days later....

Yesterday was 100 degrees again. Both temperature & humidity. Until wind, thunder, lightning and driving rain drove me from old graveyards.

A few other things stand out from my journey here in southcentral Virginia: obesity, sweetie, & Jesus. I've never seen so many people struggling with obesity and diabetes. My goodness. Truly round people. All calling each other "Sweetie," "Honey," and "Sweetie-pie." And "Shuga." Except the men never ever dare say that to another man less he become suspect.

At my Mom's care facility in popped a young nurse named Dana. She was short & petite, a refreshing difference from all the roundies turning sideways to get thru the door. Dana had a full head of lush, gorgeous hair dense with tight, thick curls.

"Mif Bass, I'm here to to draw your blood," Dana announced.

"Oh, no," groans Mom.

"Oh, yes. You know we have to do it every two days, Sweetie."

"Oh, God," my Mom groans & moans. "Not again. The last two people stuck those needles in me and couldn't get anything. Anything."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Sweetie."

"Can you do it right?"

"Between me and Jesus, I tell you what. If I can't get any blood out in two tries I'll stop. OK, Honey?"

A few minutes later Dana is ready. She uses a baby needle as Mom has tiny veins. The first attempt fails.

Dana puts a bandaid on my Mom's hand and comments, "Hey, now you're bleeding after I done put that band-aid on. That's not fair!"

The second attempt succeedes.

"See, Sweetie," Dana says. "I kept my promise."

Between me and Jesus.

Blood spurts onto the white blanket.

Dana left her gloves on the floor.

Some one will analyze my Mom's blood to determine drug interactions and dosages.

I go on a tour of cemetaries.

First to visit the grave of Raffie Stokes, my first mentor even though neither of us knew that word at the time, at Bethel Grove Baptist Church. I had trouble finding the grave, and was a bit peeved at my self for being so self-conscious for being a White man in a Black graveyard. Man, it is HOT!

And I find the grave, marked by a little tin square on an aluminum popsickle stick: "Raffie Stokes 1909 - 1997." That's it. His grandson, murdered by an angry girlfriend with a car, has a nice fancy tombstone nearby. Plastic flowers and red clay soil. Then back to my Dad's grave at

Trinity Memorial Gardens. "Dad," I say. "I finally understand the value of a dollar. I get it." And back to Aumon & Mary's graves.

And then on to Pisgah Baptist Church in Rice, an offshoot of Sharon Baptist Church in Sandy River. I walked into the enormous cemetary and am momentarily stunned by the size of my dead relations there. Knowing, too, it is just a fraction. I wander around the deceased elders and infants of my tribe. Basses, Gateses, Bruces, all intermarried, and their spouses families' families. The whole cemetary is somehow interconnected and not just by the crab grass. I want Kristina to see this so she can get an understanding of clan. In part to better understand me, and in part to prepare her for her visit to Japan where an entire nation is clan. I want my children to stand in this cemetary to somehow get an appreciation for family history and the extensiveness of their clan.

Lightning flashes on the horizon. I notice black thunderheads piling up and moving fast. A wall of wind slams into massive oak trees and bends them over. I bow to the whole cemetary and abort my trip to Sharon's graveyard. I think of relatives buried from New England to South Carolina. As I get into the car rain thunders down. I drive as long as I can without turning on the windshield wipers. Then I do. Leaves, twigs, branches litter the road. The rain hammers down. A gulley washer. I love this storm. Lightning forks jagged across dark skies and zips right in front of me. In two hours the storm clears and the air is clean and fresh. Graves washed clean.

I am grateful to all the dead people for their many contributions to my life since my birth. Their names and faces move in and out of my mind. Uncles and aunts, cousins and distant relations, close neighbors and church folks, the bad and the good, the upright and the eccentric. All in service. And now dead as someday we all will be.

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Me & my Daddy, March 1960,in Virginia. He's 30 & I'm 11 months old. We had 44 more years together.

Death with Father, December 2004

Death with Father

As a Prelude of sorts I first include sections from an email I wrote a few days after my father died on December 1st, 2004. At the time my life had fallen apart about a year earlier and I was bankrupt, divorced, unemployed, and half-mad. I was struggling in my relationship with Kristina and desperately trying to get my feet back on the ground. It was one of the worse times in my life, and a cauldron for eventual success. I was also deep in the Warrior Sage work and had not yet been disenchanted with the philosophies and practices of David Deida. July 2006.

Death with Father

I am a rich man. I am blessed with an abundance of pain and growth and waking up and amazing things happening, a wealth of life experiences. It's been rough. I sail my ship thru one storm after another, and it's been rough. My stomach heaves as each swell rolls underfoot and each rogue wave washes the decks clean for each new beginning every moment.

Dad died early Wednesday morning in the ER. It was bitter cold and the third anniversary of my partnership with my fiance Kristina. My brother Joe and I were up all fucking night. Death was messy and brutal. As Gary, the founder of my men's group told me afterwards we come into the world messy and we leave messy. At least it was quick. So quick I wasn't even aware he was dead at first, just sleeping.

About three days ago I got my father alone and said, "Dad, listen up. I want you to know I love you."

"I love you, too," he said.

"I flew here because this might be the last time we see each other alive."

"I know it."

"I'm serious. Not just because you're eaten up with cancer but because I could go down in a plane crash or car wreck, tho I rather not give energy to that."

"Yeah, I know it."

"Dad, while I would love to have you around for many years to come, it's OK with me if you give yourself permission to die."

"I've already thought about that."

"I know you're a fighter, so am I, but there comes a time when you might just want to surrender. You gotta give yourself permission to go when you feel it's time."

"Already have."

He just stood and looked at me. We hugged. And we parted.

He had lung cancer. Inoperable 3rd stage. Dad's a warrior and a king. A former sailor in the United States Navy, he served during the Cold War aboard the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier, for five years including the Korean War. Was well-traveled. Saw the Arctic Ice Cap and Carribean islands. Toured all over Europe. Sailed the Mediterranean. Road camels in North Africa. Got stoned on hashish in Turkey. Chased wild women in Italy. Chased my Momma in college. He laughed as he shared the tales of his youth even after my mother chastised him. "Bill," she would snort, "don't go telling people that." He'd laugh and horrify us about a fellow sailor with an unusually long penis that the Italian whores called "Donkey Dick!" This young man laid fast asleep on the bottom bunk deep in the bowels of the aircraft carrier. His majesty hung loosely over the metal edge of the bunk. Sometime in the night the guy up top swung down to go to the toilet and accidentally stepped on it with his bare foot.

Later in life Bill Bass was a successful and prosperous dairy farmer, quick to adopt innovative farming techniques. He was also a quirky social engineer, one of those Independents who tacked from Democrat to Republican, from Reagan to Kerry. He often hired misfits and convicts and worked to help get them on their feet. I grew up working with thieves, murderers, and really wild men.

He was also the first farmer in the community to hire women in a traditional male environment. He met with lots of resistance and ridicule, but these women all needed work and here was an opportunity to work, and they took it.

He was also married to my Mom for 53 years and very involved in his community. Dad was a selfless deacon in his church and a fearsome advocate in local farm politics. His Virginia farm at its peak was over a thousand acres. He was very first stage in many ways, but open to looking at new ways and kept changing over time. He was very practical and hot-tempered and impatient, beat my ass, and I rebelled against him all thru my teens and early-mid twenties. The Man liked everything from hunting game to cultivating roses. I was as different from him as night from day, yet he was my Father and his blood ran with mine.

And I loved him.

The cancer came fast. It took a month to kill him. I was disturbed to see a once robust, vigorous, confident man reduced to a shriveled husk with fear palpable in his eyes. Death was several hours of shaking and stumbling, shitting all over himself, coughing up astounding amounts of bloody mucus, constant vomiting. Tubes and needles and oxygen mask. Cold. People coming and going. Hot. No privacy. Trying to preserve dignity. My brother Joe and I maintaining a masculine presence no matter what. Sleep deprived bulldozers we were. Warriors. And then we got him stable. Or so we thought. A shout. Eyes rolled back. Mouth wide open. On his back. Facing outwards to the world, to the whole fucking universe. Totally open in his death. And Joe and I were too sleepy to even realize it at first. Good, we thought, he's finally sleeping. Exhausted, we stumbled out grateful for the excuse to go home and sleep. Sleep. Like Dad was sleeping.

And then we found out later he was really dead. Momma woke me up at dawn with phone in hand. Goddamnit.

How does a third stage man cry? In the first stage you stuff it. In the second you collapse and weep. I don't know how a third stage man cries.

Suddenly I was sick of all the labels and shit and just became me. William Dudley Bass. I was my own man. Finally. After 45 years. I was free at last. And I opened up. And wept and wept but always stood solid. I opened into the grief and the tears and the realization I didn't even fucking know I had any responsibilities crying out to me. I'd been a free spirit, content to experience life just to experience life, the whole world revolved around me, and as a writer it made sense at the time as I viewed experiencing life as "work" so I could thus write about it. But I hadn't written much in years.

Somehow somewhere I made wrong choices bad choices shut down and turned off the tap and became financially and creatively catatonic. I floated. Adrift. I realized I had spent so much time with my face turned up into the sky I was not even aware where the fuck my feet were on the ground.

I want one train, one career, one family, one woman. Now things seem to be coming into alignment. I had closure with my Father while he was alive and now I'm burying him. His shadow is no more. Gary and BJ have been absolutely generous and deep in their stand for me in this time - I am grateful for you two brothers. Not just this dying of my daddy, but all the troubles and challenges Kristina and I faced in our partnership. So thank you. I also appreciate you, Debbie, and you Kathy, for being there for Kristina as she struggles in her storms.
I am grateful for Arnie for the opportunity to work and generate income at Seattle Piano Gallery when I was down and out during that dark spell. I am building my Train and can't wait to push off.

I'm working with a new career counselor to revamp this career change I've been navigating without much success. Also, I've committed to write for publication again and eventually teach and present from my writings - I am a great creator and that is closest to my heart. I do feel somewhat scattered, a lot is going on, and yet things are falling into place. There is a sense of serenity and calm as I focus on the nuts and bolts of the train itself.

As I move from completion with Father to a new job that starts Monday to launching my train I am clearer than ever about the responsibilities of Fatherhood and the providing for my daughters. During this past week I have stepped up to the plate and now stand on the plate, whereas before, I am ashamed to say, I didn't even realize there was a plate to stand upon.
And it is clearer to me more than ever how deeply I love you, Kristina, and how committed I am to our partnership and growing a life together. Now matter what you do or chose to do, even if you leave me, I love you. I will always love you. I am excited about going back to work, writing again, being with our kids again, and building our partnership as I serve you as deeply and openly as I can.

My purpose deepened over the last two days. I am here on this planet as an instrument of God. As a divine instrument I serve the world wide-open. I best serve human beings by serving their relationships. All our relationships. Wide-open and in breakdown. Doesn't matter. And I am open, too, to going even deeper as Purpose reveals itself truer and truer.

On some deeper level I have fallen in love with myself.

All of you in the Passion Warriors' Men's Group (when I was in Fall 2003-Spring 2007) and all of you in the Seattle Couples Group (of 2004-2006) - I would not have been able to make it if it had not been for all your own sharing of struggles, openings, and pain, and Love! And for your stand, and the courage to reach out and touch one another and me, and we hardly know each other, yet in this work we know each other deeper than we sometimes know ourselves.
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