Eight years ago, my very dear friend Brenda Bollmann Baker took her last breath. We had known it was coming. A year-long battle with bile duct cancer, along with every conceivable bad effect from chemo and radiation, had taken a toll. Despite seeming to have vanished after nine months of that torture, in the two months before her death, that especially vicious cancer had come raging back, stronger than ever, and it was everywhere.
An energy healing had given a brief respite. It felt like a turnaround in that the Before Brenda, the pre-cancer Brenda, was evident for a couple of weeks. She was bright-eyed, clear minded. She was able to meditate again, something she’d missed during the hellish days of treatment. We traveled to Prescott from Phoenix to spend a day in a workshop with her beloved Suzanne. She rallied in every way.
And still the physical was progressing, and it caught up. I clearly remember the morning a very weary Brenda looked at me and said, “can we please quit pretending that I’m not going to die?”
Yes, please. What a relief. We abandoned the admonition to picture a bright red stamp of CANCELED! any time the thought of cancer occurred or if ~ heaven forfend! ~ the word was spoken aloud. And it was such a gift to be able to speak honestly from that point. Dying can be very lonely. To have to pretend it’s not happening is a kind of abandonment. Yes, there was healing of deep emotional wounds. It was not to be a lasting physical recovery.
From that point, she wanted only comfort and assurance. Brenda had a strong connection with spirit. She was working very hard ~ and succeeding ~ in developing her skills as an evidential medium. And yet there’s no bigger challenge to belief than the end of life. It’s easy to say “life is eternal!” when we’re fit and frisky. Quite another when when the end of life is actually in sight.
Brenda and I talked endlessly. Post-pretense mornings those last several weeks were spent with coffee, which she could finally drink again now that chemo was done, and endless discussion of what comes next for us after the last breath. The conversation was nonstop and it was focused on what we knew to be true, what we hoped for, and the experiences we’d both had that supported our convictions.
I’d been at the whole idea of there being more to human life than meets the eyes for decades longer than Brenda had been. We’d both abandoned our doom-and-gloom Missouri Synod Lutheran childhood indoctrination long before, but I’d been forced to pick up the idea of a power greater than myself in 1980, while Brenda had rocked on with her life, avoiding any further entanglements with that punishing and judgment-heavy system that had rocket-fueled her self loathing.
One of her favorite stories in those last weeks was one I had told her in 2015, which seemed like the perfect analogy to illustrate our innate divinity. That is who we are, it’s what we arise from. We are ~ will always be ~ divine, and yet these human suits can be so very convincing that we are not that. By this human experience, we are deluded into thinking that we are only this, that this world is all there is, but in truth, we are so much more.
Two days after she died, a small group of her friends gathered online to hear of the stunning sequence of events that occurred after she took her last breath on May 9, 2018. Part of that was Brenda coming through to Suzanne Giesemann with so much news and information from the other side that we were all, even Suzanne, blown away. (And of course she would visit Suzanne, a highly skilled medium. She was Brenda’s teacher and a very dear friend to boot. How better to share with all of us?)
In a final flourish from the first extended communication between those two, mere hours after Brenda’s death, Suzanne asked for some kind of evidence that it was really her. “You know I’ve got to have that evidence, Brenda.”
And in a flash, Brenda’s words: “Like my boa?” And then she wrapped those feathers around her neck and sashayed away, leaving Suzanne with a certainty that this was something significant, and that I would know what it meant.
Like my boa? I saw the email late that same night. Oh my God (which is exactly how I responded to Suzanne’s email). Oh. My. God. It’s real. I mean yes, OF COURSE, it’s real. I *knew* this, but *knowing* from my direct experiences of spirit, and KNOWing because my dead friend is reporting from a realm we typically cannot see, hear, touch, or feel? That’s a whole other level and even writing about it this morning, eight years after, I am covered with head to toe shivers.
This is what I wrote up for our group gathering that Friday. I didn’t trust myself to be able to tell the thing coherently. EVEN knowing, I was heartbroken. Knowing does not eliminate grief. The loss of someone so beloved in the physical is agonizing, no matter what we know. I don’t think I’ve ever put it out into the world before, though Suzanne has shared the story many times in her work. But it feels right this year, as so many of her close circle of friends are feeling her, hearing from her, and sharing Brenda news.
This is the Zsa Zsa story. I first shared this with her some time in 2015, long before she got sick. But I told her the whole thing on repeat in the weeks before she died. Endlessly. She asked for it over and over. “Tell me Zsa Zsa,” and I did. And to remember this day, I’ll tell it again.
When Suzanne (nudged by my dead husband Mike) introduced the two of us three years ago, she said “I think you will have much to talk about.”
That was an understatement. We rarely shut up. We talked about everything, anything, all of this life leading up to the point we met and every insight, new awareness, and burst of awakening thereafter. It was magical. I understood why Mike sent her to me: I needed him back, my best friend and soul mate, only this time that love appeared in the sassy form of what our friends referred to as “a Brenette.” Brenda and Lynette. Instant friends. Inseparable.
Early on, as we were discussing the wild concept that we’re all just wearing these meat suits for a little while before we skip off and resume our real lives, she was having a little struggle with that. Brenda was very much invested in living this life, right here and now. She had plans, BIG ones, as most of you know. She was so enthralled with the fact of awakening, she didn’t want to miss a minute on this earth.
But in trying to illustrate what I believed to be true, I told her of a summer my family spent in NYC. I was 6 or 7, a tiny town Oklahoma girl, utterly enchanted with the glamour of Zsa Zsa Gabor and her sister, Eva. They were princesses, so glittering and gorgeous and fabulous that they didn’t even seem real.
With my family, I was walking down Broadway late one night. We walked past a theater and there was some sort of play? movie? variety show? [I have never been able to find it] going on in which Zsa Zsa was featured. Only her glamour was gone. She was ordinary, plain, like Cinderella after the ball, back to scrubbing floors for the wicked stepsisters. I was crushed.
We walked on by the theater, and as we were crossing the entrance to an alley, suddenly a side door flew open and SHE sailed out. The real Zsa Zsa. She was magnificent in full Zsa Zsa regalia: blond hair perfectly coifed, glittering gown, and a big fat feather boa around her neck. She floated into a waiting limousine and was gone. It was a magical moment.
I suggested to Brenda that this was what our lives were like. We might be washerwomen or hard working field hands (or teachers or social workers), but once we take that last breath and the curtain comes down on this play, we sail out the back door in full Zsa Zsa mode, back to our glorious true selves with a final exhalation.
My Brenette loved that story. LOVED it. She was going to share it during her next appearance on Suzanne’s radio show. She asked me if I would write it down for her, as she was afraid of forgetting any part of it. And that’s what she’s showing us with her comment to Suzanne. “Like my boa?”
She has returned to her ZsaZsa self.
Fabulous, perfect, magnificent, and whole, even more divine than she was in the play.
Brenda the human story was not perfect. None of us are. We’re not supposed to be. We are here for the AND of human life. Yes, divinity, so effectively cloaked from our awareness once we come sliding down the chute. AND this human experience, which is rich in ways beyond what we can comprehend, even when we become awake to the Truth of Us.
We chose to experience human life because we wanted the experience of contrast. Light AND dark. Joy AND sorrow. All of the ANDs that allow us to really experience what we’re made of. It’s one thing to say “I am the light!” when we are surrounded by the blaze of our fellow souls. It’s quite another to be immersed in the travails of human life and to come to see that we still shine.
Brenda’s life continues to have an impact far beyond what she must have imagined possible when she was walking this earth. She has touched countless hearts and minds, she continues to visit with students of mediumship around the world (invite her in, keep at it, she’ll show up).
Someone who didn’t know her in life once said to me, “it’s interesting that someone so ordinary and unremarkable could have such an ongoing impact.” First, grrrrrrr, heifer. Second, ordinary IS the human condition. We think this is it, this material world, our physical selves. We’re not even close.
She was brilliant, hilarious, and she did not suffer fools.
Just as Brenda was, we are all here for reasons far beyond what we can ever truly know as we move through this life. Here are some final words from Suzanne’s guides, Sanaya, on that very thing:
THEN SANAYA: Every once in a while, someone comes into your life who changes your life. It’s not a momentary passing, chance encounter in which you never see that one again. We are speaking of one in which the meeting may seem to be a chance encounter, but trust us, these meetings that change your life in a positive way have been well orchestrated across the veil by the Director. These are not bit players. These are major characters, no matter how long the connection in physical form, for you have known them before and you will most definitely see them again. Value these friendships for what they are: members of your soul family, part of your eternal life. Teachers. Friends. You walk together for a reason.
In myriad ways, we “walk together for a reason” with countless other souls wearing human suits. Sometimes briefly, sometimes for extended periods, and every bit of it matters. We won’t know until we clear out of here how it all fits together. One of Brenda’s favorite sayings was “Trust. Relax. Let Go. Allow.” Life will unfold as it will, and our souls celebrate all of it, so let’s do cut to the chase and “allow.”
And in the end? We’ll all be quoting Brenda in her favorite saying of all: “I am free.” And so it will be.
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NOTES:
The morning after she died, Brenda’s friend SandySoulsister channeled the morning message from her team in spirit, which was clearly about Brenda’s transition. There is so much magic afoot in this world … it’s delicious.
You can hear Brenda on Suzanne’s podcast on STEs from March 22, 2018, before she knew she was terminal.
And several of us talking about what came after she died, on Suzanne’s Messages of Hope May 31, 2018.
And a little extra magic, sent by a friend shortly after I posted this. Karen, amazing physician-turned-gifted-astrologer, didn’t know Brenda in life, but she’s heard Brenda stories for years, so of course BBB would use her. For the joy of it. BOA!!!
An Unexpected Mystic 