Hanging with the Elephant by Michael Harding Page A

My mind is like an elephant that might drag me off a cliff at any moment in a sudden fit of rage. Such is the state of my mental disequilibrium that I am a victim every morning to what rises up in my mind, and I have utterly no control over it; as my teacher once said to me when we were in Mongolia together, ‘Always something arising – but never what you expect.’
    I couldn’t have expected what came into my mind that morning when I knelt down on the floor of my studio to meditate. It wasn’t the beloved. It wasn’t the episodes of
Breaking Bad
I had watched the night before. It wasn’t what food I planned to put on the list before going to town. It wasn’t even the cat, though she was at the window, screaming to be allowed in (and just by the way, I was out of cat food as well). But none of these things disturbed me.
    It was my mother who came, like a ghost flitting in and out of my mind, like something in the distance, like a small moth in the corner of my eye at first, or in the back of my mind, as they say. She was in the back of my mind but I certainly noticed her there.
    This is how it happens. Sometimes we live throughmoments of intensity like a death, and it’s so overwhelming that we replay the moment over and over again. We can smell it and touch it repeatedly in our mind. And then one day, the event arises as usual, but it’s different. We see it in a new light. And there is no reason for this. It just happens.
    When my mother died, I was with her. And her going away from the world was simple and eloquent. She panted her way as if she were taking giant steps, one at a time towards a summit. And when she reached the summit, she vanished.
    I had replayed that moment over and over again in the two years since she died. I can still remember sitting on an armchair at the wall just inside the door of her room in the nursing home. Sometimes I would get up and stand at the foot of the bed. I remember a radio in the distance, out on the corridor, and what music was playing in the very moments when she stopped breathing. But what never occurred to me until that morning, sitting in a swivel chair in my studio, the cat outside the window, the beloved in Poland, two years after my mother had died, what had never occurred to me until that moment was that I had not held her. And it horrified me, like a letter that announces some terrible debt you owe and just falls through the letterbox and lands on the floor at your feet. I never held her. OK, there might have been a moment when I engaged her in a chilly embrace akin to what the pope might offer another fully vested bishop during thesign of peace at mass; a fumbling formality without much passion. But that is not the way I held the beloved. Not the way I held the cat. Not the way I held my own child when first I took her from the cot in the hospital delivery room. Not that way. I never held my mother like that. And she was obliged to go, to leave, to head down along the long, dark tunnel of death without a human hug from me. My brother was there and he treated her beautifully. He hugged and held and blessed and kissed her. But I just watched. From me she went away empty-handed, empty-armed. And there is nothing so empty as the beginning of a journey when you have not been fortified by the assuring hug of someone you love.
    Even at her funeral, I had felt unbearably sad without understanding why.
    I stood by the graveside, realising that I could have treated her far better. I could have loved her more or said something to heal the unsaid things of a lifetime. I could have even offered my heart, openly, and said, ‘Mammy, I do love you. I always have.’ I could have done kind things more often, especially at the end. Just to make her smile. And I could have done more to make her life easier. But I didn’t. And I only realised all this after she was gone.
    I remember getting out of the black car just behind the hearse as it arrived at the graveyard and feeling