Stories about life, love, death, and what comes after.
“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 didn’t really believe she was all of that until she stepped out of her tired Brenda suit and into her full Zsa Zsa magnificence.
Our people do not leave us. They may leave our awareness and we can work to get that back. To a degree. Mostly an unsatisfying degree. It’s hard to give up constancy. It activates all of the why’s and a sense of unfairness and that deep, irreparable feeling of having something stolen from us. It isn’t the same. I wish I could say it was. But for many of us ~ me included ~ what comes after grief can bring incredible gifts. That is absolutely true and I am so very grateful it’s been my experience that after a long time of the most hopeless misery, I found something that helped and healed not only my broken heart, but a fear of death that held me captive for decades.
I was huddled in the corner of the room crying, a blanket over my head. Brenda was next to me in an ER bed, crying from pain. In the midst of chaos and sorrow, a shiny sign from my dead husband. And only hours later, we were laughing so hard the nurses shushed us. “All our darkness will turn to light.” It’s true.
I saw Mike standing completely still at the edge of the cliff, looking out over the rim at the surrounding landscape and I went to him. He was wide-eyed. He looked stunned. Alarmed, I asked, “What happened to you?” And I will never forget what he said, my rational-minded though deeply spiritual husband: “I don’t know but when I got to the top of the cliff, something swept me to my knees. I was overwhelmed with the presence of God and I knew that I had been here before, that I had lived here once.”
“That was the thing in that dusty old building. It was the little something extra in the web Mike was weaving, a little lagniappe that led me to the certainty that these events weren’t simply by chance…”
In my pre-meditation reading (30 minutes for my SAD lamp to work its magic), I’ve been slowly rereading Roland Merullo’s “Lunch with Buddha.” I’ve been reading it for this passage, which comes at the end. (ALL of the Buddha books are fantastic. If you can’t stomach books on spirituality, these are novels, beautifully written, chock … Continue reading no regrets
Can the death of our loved ones bring gifts? Yes. Though I’d never have dreamed it eleven years ago, my husband’s last breath has led to joy.
Even when we don’t ask for signs from spirit, we will get them. An anniversary gift from my dead husband, out of the blue. Still right here.
I heard the last beat of her heart, my little dog. She was here, here, here. And then not. It seems impossible, the finality of that. And then she came back to me…
The ancient mystics knew the truth about death: crushing grief can lead us to healing, to alignment with what our souls already know. And then “we wake up laughing…”
An Unexpected Mystic 