Often celebrating Hallmark holidays for a week rather than a day, I would be on target today with the first of several spontaneous events for my mother except that she passed in 2010. Flowers and a card or a box of chocolates on the one day created by Anna Jarvis to celebrate Moms are simply not enough. As with birthdays and anniversaries, there should be ample time to honor Mothers with at least a week of festivities.
Did you know: The American incarnation of Mother’s Day was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914. Jarvis would later denounce the holiday’s commercialization and spent the latter part of her life trying to remove it from the calendar. https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/mothers-day
Yes, I know that today is the Sunday before Mother’s Day. My point is that this is when I would begin to let Mom feel the love and thanks. It is with this one forthcoming that I have a poignant story to tell in a discovery made while camping with a group of wonderful people a few weekends ago. While several camping friends were playing Magic: The Gathering, a few others (former and current) students at the college I teach at were discussing their anatomy lab. One spoke about the details of extremely blackened lungs he had witnessed during his lab which truly hit home as a learning experience. He offered information about how the CCSF anatomy lab often receives cadavers from UCSF. It was at this point that my attention went full throttle in the direction of their conversation. I asked the approximate age of the body. He said it was a quite small elderly woman. I laid back on the grass to look at the sky. Could it be possible that my mother’s body was brought to the college where I teach in the past couple of years?
When Mother’s life was ticking away in a Skilled Nursing Facility not far from my apartment in Oakland in 2010, she called me in one day to ask that I research another option for the donation of her remains to a teaching university. She said that she was just weighed at 97-lbs and our arrangements at UC Davis would become null and void if she slipped under 100-lbs. She had great anxiety about this thought as she didn’t want me to incur any cost from her death. Mother had been diagnosed with an aortic aneurysm a few months previous along with a severe case of COPD. We went to great lengths to find a way for her to give back to society and science at her insistence. After a lengthy round of paperwork, she was accepted into the UC Davis Body Donation Program. A few relatives tried to talk her out of this, but she had a two-fold reason: she didn’t want to burden her daughter with her arrangements and she had always been a believer in helping society with our bodies when we pass insisting that we both fill out Organ Donation Registration at the California DMV.
Her plans were about to crash when she was told of her diminishing size. She panicked and had me on a search since the UCD program has a weight restriction limit of 100-lbs. They would not accept a body under that weight. I discovered that UCSF had a similar program with no weight restriction and with the added benefit that once the university completed the teaching with the cadaver, they not only arrange for cremation but also work with the Neptune Society to spread the ashes at sea. She was relieved. My sister-in-law was revulsed by these plans. It’s what Mom wanted and I set about the task of new paperwork for her to be accepted into the program. It went without a hitch. Apparently, those who die with causes related to COPD are quite helpful to students studying the lungs.
At one point sometime after Mom passed, her sister called me to ask if I tried to call UCSF to inquire when they would use the body so that I knew when the cremation would take place. I shivered at the thought. “No, Auntie. I can’t do that.” I was still in the early stages of grief and I could no longer be connected to my mother’s corpse. Her soul had passed and lives with me. I didn’t need to be a part of the remains. Here is an interesting article about this.
Here I was years later, sitting on the coast of beautiful land in northern California with a few students discussing the amazement of the human body and what they learn from opening up one whose life had long gone but kept on giving. I was filled with a bit of sadness, yes, but more importantly felt a sense of the universe in full circle back to me. I don’t know for sure if the small woman with black lungs was my mother on the table in his classroom at the school that I teach at, but if it was, I am humbled by the awe that life brings to each of us. I hope that this inspires people to know that there are options to a burial in the earth.
Happy Mother’s Week. If you love your Mother and she has given you all a woman can for her child – celebrate her all week. Call her now before “Mother’s Day.”
Body donation for anatomical research