Catharsis

Early December 2008. I am at the Crown Plaza Wuzhou in Beijing. This massive hotel overlooks the Birds’ Nest stadium where the Summer Olympics took place just a couple of months earlier. As the director of a global engineering company I have been in the Forbidden City for a week now to try to close a deal with the Chinese government. The lack of progress has stressed me out to no end.

It is 5:20 a.m., I wake up with a severe hangover after last night’s negotiations. It is still dark outside, befitting the black mood which instantly settles over me like a cruel contraption.

I realize the phone has woken me up, I believe it has been ringing for a while but I am not sure. The noise is thunderous. My heart palpitates, the muscles in my chest contract and I cannot breathe. A familiar anxiety takes hold, worsened by the feeling of being very far from home.

I pick up the phone and try to speak but nothing comes out. My throat is very dry. I hear my sister call out my name in an alarming voice. She sounds very nearby, for a moment I think she is here in China rather than at home in Belgium. My aorta pulsates down to my stomach. I have a metallic taste in my mouth as if I have been drinking mercury or lead last night. Maybe I have.

She tells me mother is dead.

I lose it, I go to pieces. The voice of my sister trails off. Like in a nuclear meltdown, my stress chemicals reach boiling point. I have the very real sensation of accelerating without brakes down a slope leading into a solid and unforgiving wall. Raw panic rolls in and deepens for minutes which seem like hours.

Until suddenly I reach escape velocity and my mind shuts down. My consciousness shifts to a lower stratum, deeper instinct takes over to preserve the self. No fight or flight, but freeze. Like an animal that will stand still so that its predator will not see them, I go into a state of stupor in order not to lose my mind. I become a detached observer, I do no longer participate. Closed for business.

Lying still on the bed, breathing shallow, I see myself at the age of five, walking hand in hand with my mother in the freezing cold of a winter wonderland. Our feet make crispy noises on the snow. Everything around us is silent, honoring this moment. I feel enveloped in my mother’s mystery and secure in her blessing. A precocious child, I am eager to learn, and my mother readily answers all my questions. My world is centered on her, I conform to her. There is no visible cause for concern, yet I am terrified of losing her. Separation anxiety has me overwhelmed and, in fact, so has existential fear. They say that by the age of five, you very much understand the human condition.

Well, I did.

I emerged from the age of innocence with a hard and fast grasp of the concept of death. The terror of the realization that I was mortal literally took my breath away. First I could not believe it. Deep at heart, I did not feel at all that I would die. I had just learned about the world, full of symbolic meaning, and my place in it. I was a unique creature with cosmic significance. I had a contribution to make. I was good at being me and getting better every day. Surely it would be a cruel joke for me to have to die. This tragic destiny would befall lesser souls, but surely not me?

My mother had me at forty-two, an unplanned pregnancy after a very dark episode when my parents lost a son with the same name. Even today I still cannot believe that simple fact. My parents gave me the same name. No pressure.

As a replacement child – planned or not - I carried the burden of my parent’s unresolved sorrow. I had difficulty finding my real self, as my primary function presented itself to be the container for the soul of my dead brother.

Very early on, it was imprinted on me that I was an unexpected gift of life, their last-born, precious and treasured. The underlying sense being that I was the improbable miracle offspring. Whether they were ever spoken out loud or not, I remember the words “What are the odds of conceiving at that age and having a healthy and gifted baby son? We need to protect this one with our life.”

I later realized that this maternal over shielding prevented me from accessing my own powers, of finding my center. I started in life by walking on air, not on solid ground. A charmed beginning for sure because I escaped from the dangers of my mother’s midlife pregnancy. It seemed to me I had used up all my luck just getting born, and going forward, the odds were severely against me. Whatever happened next, I should not get separated from my mother.

The very same mother that is dead now.

I am a grown man in a Beijing hotel room but I feel like I am that five-year-old boy again, walking at the hand of his mother, holding on to her for dear life. For dear life…, the irony of that is not lost on me.

The fact that she is gone hurts like nothing has hurt before. I am now forced to think the unthinkable, to speak the unspeakable. That what I have feared my whole life has now happened. This means that I too can and will die, the end of a myth that only I believed in still.
I am alone while the sun comes up over another day in Beijing. I weep. I will also weep on the flight back home tomorrow. And I will bury my mother. And I will talk to my father and my siblings, really talk, and I will feel better. Because we are alive.

I can still love my mother even now she’s gone. That I was given the same name as my dead brother I now consider a gift of devotion, highly unsettling as it has been on my journey to this day.

I feel like a lifelong spell has been lifted. I am still here even though my mother is not. Through all the pain, I feel restoration and new possibilities. The purgation of childish emotions has cleansed the path forward.

I am my own man now.