July 12th. My dad would have been 80 years old today.
Who knew that my health fanatic father who would not allow me or my siblings to eat sugar or drink soda, except on a birthday or holiday, and who would drink the spinach water from the cooked spinach for its nutrient value, and who had us take all sorts of vitamins, for which I’m grateful, and who exercised regularly would die so young, just shy of his 59th birthday? Who of us knows when our time will come?
A fact of life is death.
I just listened to an excellent talk by American spiritual author Caroline Myss entitled “I Almost Didn’t Live to See This Day.” She tells about almost being killed in a car accident. But for the grace of life goes she. We just never know and her trust in a supreme goodness and rightness brings increased appreciation for every little thing.
Like light bulbs and electricity, bodies will die but life remains. We can experience this truth when reach that place in meditation where we let go of body awareness and drift into pure sensation, pure spirit, pure life, which paradoxically is also the space of death.
Australian spiritual teacher Barry Long taught that we should practice sensing each other’s essence or spirit and not be as attached to the physical so we suffer less when a loved one passes. I find this helpful and beautiful as well.
Spirit to spirit.
It was June 2000. I was called to Florida as my father had taken a turn for the worse. Lung cancer had metastasized to his brain and his immune system had become compromised from the chemotherapy. He died in the end from illness and weakness and not from the cancer per se, which happens often in this type of scenario.
I arrived at the hospital and found his room where he lay unconscious. My sister was holding one of his hands and her husband the other. They were chattering away to him. My mom was standing off to one side. I stood on the other. I longed to connect with my father and since both hands were taken, I connected energetically in the way I knew best.
I dropped into my heart space and felt the love that lives there. As it expanded with my attention, I mentally corded from my heart to his, like linking up lines on an old-fashioned telephone switchboard. I spoke to him from the space of love.
“We are not these bodies, Dad. Do you feel this? We are love. And this is always. We are always together here in the love.”
I am not making this up.
Twice in the time I was with him in this way, my father sat part way up in bed and smiled at me and glowed and looked so very young. Something greater than the physical body that I will call his consciousness or soul lifted him up from that bed and shone out of his eyes and through his smile. He was telling me that he heard my silent heart communication. And he was also telling me that he understood and that he was OK.
“Your energy introduces you before you even speak.”
American author and motivational speaker Mel Robbins coined this phrase about our energy speaking before we do. And there was no speaking exactly between my father and me, but there was a lot of love energy. I call it the etheric Internet, and a poem came to me about this a little later the same year.
Along the heart line.
Along the heart line,
You send me a message.
I’ll send you mine
Across the heart line.
Just feel a thought,
Smile a word.
We don’t need to speak
In order to be heard.
Stay in the glow
And no matter how far
You shall know
Just how close we really are.
From the earth below,
To the sky above,
Through life and death,
The space between us is love.
From the other side.
I am a natural intuitive and after he died he once told me that he was enjoying the travel opportunities that death affords. In an instant, in a thought, he could be with me or my mom or my sisters or his grandchildren. We have been able to be closer in death in various respects than in life.
When I feel sensations like the hairs standing up on the back of my neck or on my arm, I know he’s near. The cardinals at my bird feeder announce his presence along with certain songs on the radio.
“You’ll Be in My Heart” by English singer/songwriter Phil Collins had been popular when he had passed, and my family could have written the lyrics. We all have songs that speak to us and understand how music can be healing.
Most of us know the 1990 movie Ghost with American actors Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore; and if not, I highly recommend it. The first Christmas Eve after my father passed I was staying at a sister’s house overnight. Her kids were little then, and they always wanted me to be there in the morning when they opened their presents from Santa.
Let’s just say I was awakened in the middle of the night when all was quiet, not by reindeer on the roof but by the light and the love of my father’s spirit in a way that mirrored the scene at the end of this movie.
IT IS REAL.
THE LOVE IS REAL.
What is real?
I am fond of the answer to this question from British author Margery Williams in her classic children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit.
”What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
”Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
”Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
And what is essential?
French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery in his classic book The Little Prince sums up my experience with my father well.
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Our loved ones who have passed may be invisible to our eyes but our hearts can see them rightly.
I SEE you and I REALLY love you, Dad.
Yesterday, today, tomorrow, and for always.
Did I hear a ditto?
Read on Medium.
photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash