There is a spot in the cranium where the soul enters and leaves the body, or so I was told recently.

35 years ago, long before I knew about the spot in the cranium, I saw my mother’s soul leave her body. About twelve hours before she died she had become uncharacteristically agitated. Cancer had filled her lungs and barely enough oxygen was getting to her brain. She was having difficulty communicating, like a stroke patient. She couldn’t find the right words. But she was insistent, pleading. She mustered a strength that we thought had long gone and she sat up at the edge of her bed. With an imploring glint in her eye she repeated, “I want to go! Get me on the boat! Let’s go!” She chanted the same thing over and over making eye contact with each of us. Then she stopped. She looked down at her hands, neatly folded in her lap, and with a winded, defeated breath turned and lay back in the bed. She closed her eyes and slipped into a coma. We sat with her all night, her breath becoming increasingly labored and infrequent until there wasn’t another. In that one moment, she went from being my mom, the funny, fun loving, beautiful, smart, witty person I loved more than anything, to merely a human form. A skeleton with flesh and skin. A cadaver candidate. What had changed with the last pulse of blood oxygenating her flesh? Nothing but the departure of her soul. I swear I could almost see it floating away. Was it an exhaustion induced specter? I swear that it wasn’t. I saw it and felt it.

So recently, when I heard about this hole in the cranium where the soul enters and leaves, I wondered when John’s soul entered his body? Did his soul enter his body when his body was inside my body? As he wriggled and twisted inside me, his unique personality was evident months before he was born. He was definitely born with a soul. It was there before he took that first breath and cried that first cry. I was there. I saw it and felt it.

With the realization that I had shared a body and a soul with my children, I finally had an accurate description of what motherhood is. We have been a vessel for their body and their soul. They were part of us. They are so much a part of us that we have to work impossibly hard to let them NOT be a part of us. And it’s why it hurts so much when they go.