i can see clearly now

Today marks 11 years since I heard Mike’s last heartbeat, the finality of which I’ve written about before and will never forget.

It’s also the ten year anniversary of the day I first heard the name of my spiritual teacher, Suzanne Giesemann, thanks to my sister Karen’s by-chance drop-in on a little book club where Suzanne was speaking.

When my father died three months after Mike, neither my other sister, Margene, nor I, could bear to see him in that coffin. He hadn’t looked like himself even before, dementia having stolen the animation and sparkle that was his trademark. In the coffin? We didn’t even want to think about it.

I’d watched his last breath and that was enough. (I’d also watched an indescribable something — an essence — lift out of him at that moment and, just for an instant, restore his appearance to what he was 30 years before the onset of that wretched disease. His soul, my real father, freed of his ailing body.)

Margene and I sat in the waiting room of the funeral home playing, “I Can See Clearly Now” on repeat. It was a song very meaningful for her owing to how it comforted her after her soul dog, Petey, died. In that funeral home, it became mine too.

I started hearing it everywhere thereafter, always with a shiver that let me know my dad had a hand in it.

Mike began sending me signs right away too, including, in the first few days after his funeral, a long dead, many times repaired antique French clock suddenly beginning to tick and chime, doing so for three days before stopping forever.

I had what clinicians call a complicated grief after Mike’s death. I was angry, struggling with PTSD. In my view, he shouldn’t have died then. The medical errors were devastating. I felt robbed and all I wanted was to go with him.

Underlying that complicated grief, though, was a lifelong terror of death and hell and every other wretched thing the Lutherans threw at me before I left the church at 13. Nothing I’d ever tried had impacted that, though by 2012, I’d been on a spiritual path for more than 30 years.

I’d prayed, meditated, retreated, conferenced, and had developed a host of spiritual practices which had dramatically improved things, but that death/hell combo was so deeply embedded, it wormed its way into just about every aspect of my life.

One year to the date of Mike’s death, Karen heard Suzanne, called right after the meeting adjourned, and as a result, I watched Messages of Hope that very night.

Life.

Changed.

It took a few years, true, but the benefits began to accrue right away and picked up speed. It took A LOT of reading, study, effort, asking for help, mediumship readings, and more. And then, before long, the search became a joy, because a new world was opening up.

I could see clearly a reality I’d never really considered before. And then my own STEs (spiritually transformative experiences), and making the direct connection with my loved ones confirmed it was all true. It was transformational, beyond anything I could have imagined at First Lutheran, or even in what came after.

Just lately I’ve been coming across the phrase, “I can see clearly” often enough that I know it’s a snag. “Pay attention here!” It’s popped up in my Kindle library, in a book title. I’ve heard the song playing a couple of times in public places. It was in an email this week. Looking for something else, I was reminded of a favorite book of 12 step people, “A New Pair of Glasses,” which is all about changing beliefs and seeing clearly.

Just this morning, wrapping up a rereading of Roland Merullo’s delicious book, “Breakfast With Buddha,” there it was again, in a passage talking about how committed we are to our blindness and how daring to take a step out of our old thoughts, beliefs, and know-it-all-ish-ness, could profoundly change our lives for the better.

It’s a long quote but worth reading.

Precisely reported or altered by church elders… every [religion’s] stories circled around essentially the same idea: that there was another dimension to this life as surely as the earth turned; that there were people, there had always been people, who sensed that dimension and made some kind of leap of faith to be in harmony with it. And there were others who did not.

It was about choosing between A and B, yes and no, and sometimes those choices were petty, and sometimes they were of enormous importance. It was about cruising along in the comfortable vehicle of old habits and ways, old thought patterns, old conceits, or sensing some new truth and setting off on foot.

Sure, there were phonies and charlatans claiming to know The Way.

But at some point you had to stop closing yourself off because of them.

At some point you had to risk the ridicule of the mob, of your own internalized voices, and try to see clearly what had been set in front of you in this life, and try to act on that as bravely and honestly as you could, no matter what kind of rules you’d previously been living by.

At some point … you’d be asked to believe in some possibility that transcended newspaper headlines and TV shows and the opinions and assumptions of your friends.

And how you responded to that would have a greater impact on your life than anything else you’d ever decide to do, or refrain from doing. I could see that. Sitting there on my rock, in my few minutes of North Dakota solitude, I believed I could see that very clearly.

“Breakfast with Buddha,” by Roland Merullo

What a gift I was given when my husband died, and daddy shortly thereafter. We are forever and I know now what I did not then.

Out of desperation, I chose YES, in a willingness to consider something beyond this world, something that caused old friends to roll their eyes and dismiss me as crazy from grief.

As a result, what I once thought might kill me, has proven to be the single greatest gift of my life. Unbearable pain and sorrow and emptiness have been left behind. Choosing YES has brought me to living fearlessly, with the certainty that love doesn’t die with the last breath, that life really is eternal, even for people who aren’t perfect (which is all of us, of course).

I can see clearly now, and it’s beautiful. My greatest wish is that every one of us could find that same peace, that same knowing.

In AA we used to tell people, “if you just can’t believe there’s any kind of a higher power, believe that I believe and start there.”

I don’t believe there’s something real and magnificent beyond that last breath, I know it. I hope that you’ve found that too. And if not yet, find some people who are certain and trust that. It will come. And it’s joyous.