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2006-04-02 - 10:53 a.m.

My mother died in her sleep during the night of March 24, 2006, or early in the A.M. of March 25. I wrote about this in my previous entry, but now I realize that I want to get much more into the depth of it all. I don�t know how interesting this and the following entries will be to read; I only know that they will be helpful to write. Actually, one of the things that I learned was what a good support system I have, or can quickly create when the need arises; in this case, mostly my family (who, of course, shared in this with me), but also many other people. And what I also realized is that so many of the other people somewhat surrounding my age (which includes some readers of this diary) have either already gone through this with their parents, are going through it, or will. As just an example, while I was up north in Petaluma, I received word that the mother of Pam, a friend of mine, died on Tuesday, only half a week after my mother�s death. And there were other friends who recently had similar deaths in the family, such as just the week before, the �grandmother-who-had-been-like-a-mother-to-me� of Jen, a friend at school, died, and Jen�s husband, Sib, lost his sister that same week, a double-whammy in the family. And a month ago, another friend, Jan, her husband, Gil, lost his brother, who along with his wife, had been a regular travel companion of Jan and Gil (this past summer the four of them had taken a long-planned-for spectacular Mediterranean cruise together). And yet another friend, Sue, her husband suddenly died over a year ago, but she is still in the grieving process, which will still be deep for a couple more years, and will never really end.

But younger readers, too, have racked up many extremely significant deaths--being young is no protection from this. All are affected. �You don�t get out of this life alive.�

I love it, though, that my book of spiritual aphorisms defines �DIE� as �Dwell In Eternity�. And Jungian-psychologist-storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes (in her very helpful tape, The Radiant Coat) says that people can and do talk and work with their transitioned loved ones all the time, which I am discovering is very true for me, too. I used to think that when people in the past reported this to me (�Dad helped me get that promotion that I thought was impossible,� and so on) that this was just a coping mechanism for seriously grieving people. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn�t, but I have experienced it myself, now (I will talk more about it as these entries progress), and feel that it is unquestionably REAL. The thing is that one common denominator among all people throughout history and across all cultures, whether they be saints, prophets, shamans, wise people, seers, healers, channels, counselors, guides, psychologists, and everybody else, they have been touched by deaths, and they have reported their experiences and their stories and their thoughts and these have been filtered through the sands of time and are now available to us in the form of myths and stories and the group wisdom of humanity, and so I believe that we can synthesize from all these experiences something that is as much of the truth as we can possibly understand it, and if it isn�t, there�s no point in talking about ANYTHING, nothing we know is right, then. So for now, this will have to do!

Just last night as I was driving through Topanga Canyon, I asked my mother, �Can you tell me, is where we think you are really true, or is it just a fantasy that we need in order to deal with your death?� Immediately after I asked that question, a light-blue pick-up truck crossed right in front of me, parading before me these words that were written across the length of the hood, �We know that you have a choice.� This really was the work truck of a plumber or somebody, advertising his high level of satisfactory service based on the fact that you don�t HAVE to use him, you could choose somebody else, so he works had to keep your business. I know that. But still, I knew I had my answer. This was something I had been told before, but had forgotten, that in that dimension (what we call the Astral), which is a creative dimension, the person pretty much sees a reality of their own making (within certain limits). If you are a devout Christian, for example, and believe Jesus will come to get you, what will happen when you die is that Jesus will come to get you. If you are a Buddhist and think that Buddha will help you, it will be Buddha who helps you. A Native American may be greeted by his ancestors. The point is that however you picture it, whoever and whatever represents love and spiritual power to you, is how that love and spiritual power will be experienced and will bring you forth.

These are for �good� people who deserve, and expect, �heaven�. What about �evil� people? What did Hitler experience? Suppose he believed that he would be enthroned as the great �Aryan Fuhrer� of some �Eternal Reich,� for example, would that be his experience? Well, if he was able to believe and expect that, then yes, that would be what he died into. Of course, such an �eternal reich� would truly end up being a hell world, as in �be careful what you wish for, for you may get it�. Think about this one for a while�.

Truly �evil� people probably do not have any kind of glorious, loving expectations (after all, Hitler�s death was a suicide once he realized that all was lost), but go to their death in the midst of the turmoil of vast negative emotions, and the realm they experience would be a land of battles and demons (in other words, �hell�). One can�t blame God for this�this was how heavenly energy of pure potential was configured by the person�s consciousness. And only changes within them could get them out of it. It is entirely possible that loving entities within that realm will constantly work hard to evolve or heal such a lost being out of this despond and back into a growing light, but �you can lead a horse to water, but you can�t make him drink.� Ultimately, it is up to the individual to accept and work with the help that is there.

Well, back to my mother, she has been led to pure crystal springs and she is drinking deep!

I have seen this same level of choice with resultant �reality� occurring down here on Earth among the members of our family. My brother and sisters all see Mom in the midst of glorious love, happiness, and much celebration, whereas our father, whose spin on everything remains negative, sees her in a kind of purgatory, which completely flabbergasts the rest of us. One aspect of �the family myth� that I thought we all thoroughly agreed on was that the one good thing about Mom�s death (whenever it would finally occur) was that then she would be finally freed forever of the multiple sclerosis. Whatever all that was about, we were all clear that upon her death, she would have successfully finished that test, karma, task, or whatever it was, with flying colors. So it was such a genuine shock to us to hear Dad say that she was going to have to have it again in her next lifetime, at least for a while. What on Earth would make him think that? His contention is that he felt that her task was to heal the disease here on Earth, and since she never ended up getting up out of bed and walking again, she failed in her mission, and thus must �repeat the course� next time.

If we didn�t love him so (and also fully understand that his nature was to seek out and become oriented around the one atom in the Hope Diamond that was slightly out of alignment�the justification for the concept here is that the o-rings caused the Space Shuttle to explode and engineers are trained to look for the faulty o-rings), we would have been shouting him down with rage. �She had to get up WALK again, and since she didn�t, she�ll have to try again?� Good God, words cannot express how stupid this sounded to us. I later said to my brother, �Oh, I suppose that he thinks that everyone who died in the Tsunami will have to be in another tsunami next lifetime, but this time try a little bit harder and swim to safety?� My brother laughed, and said, �Ridiculous, isn�t it?� I mean, WHO in the history of humanity on Earth got up out of their bed after 30 years of being bed-ridden due to nerve derangement�yet that was the requirement of this one person? This is how God, or the Universe works, hum, hum? How about the deal is how you handled the things that happened to you?

But he has done this to himself, too. I�ve already written, I think, that of the thousands of women with multiple sclerosis that my mother contacted or read about on-line via her multiple sclerosis group, that she was the only woman whose husband stayed. All the other men simply couldn�t handle it and left their wives. Not my father. He dedicated his life to helping and serving my mother. Never from the moment this disease began was he ever more than a couple of hours away from her side (and that was only when he had to go to the grocery store or something, otherwise, he was a moment�s notice away from her side). He always said that he would take care of her to the day she died, and he absolutely DID, even though he is now sick himself with prostate cancer and is only a few months shy of his 90th birthday (up until her final day, this frail, 130-pound man was still picking her up to get her on her scooter so that she could go into the bathroom). This is absolutely what he wanted to do and he wouldn't let anybody else do it. I think his love and caring for my mother is a stupendous achievement and he should be celebrated with a crown of laurels. However, if you ask him, he says he failed, because he did not wake up the night she died. Here was a person who was so sensitive to every change she made in the night, if the pattern of her breathing changed a little, or there was something different about her snoring, he would be up and checking on her, but the night she died, he slept through it. This tells US that she died completely peacefully, but he sees it as the one time she needed him the most, he wasn�t there for her. What do you do with a person who thinks like this?

I asked him what he would have done if he HAD awaked? He said he would have sat with her and held her hand as she died. I said that that was a beautiful fantasy, but that�s NOT what he would have done. Instead, he would have done whatever he could have done to still keep her alive. He admitted that was true (after all, he had previously stated that he believed her lifetime task was to heal herself of the multiple sclerosis).

�So,� my brother said, �if Mom wanted to die, if it was her time, then all you would have done would have been to interfere with that plan.�

We (other than my father) now all know that Mom knew she was dying at least as far back as January of this year, and she was telling us that, but we all REFUSED to hear it. I have an e-mail from her that said, �At much screaming, my toe section is gone.� [This was a gangrenous section of toe that was in the process of what is called �self amputation�.] She continued, �There was no bone inside, just a hollow shell. I am being cremated in pieces. The process has begun.�

That statement, �being cremated in pieces� was prophetic. What she died of was a cascade of necrosis (�infarction of the cells�), cells dying one by one due to a lack of blood flow due to the nerve damage in her lower extremities. My eyes read this e-mail, viewed it as one of the constant expressions of her sense of humor, but otherwise just passed it off, because I didn�t want to orient my focus on her dying, but on her living. That�s how we all were, and who would blame us? She, herself, was probably that way, too, attempting to focus on her own living instead of her dying. She�d toss out these things, but she didn�t put stress on them. �No, I am really telling you, I am dying!� She did not do that.

So I said to Dad, she was telling us these things, but no one was hearing it, so there was no way he was going to accept that she was dying that night, at that moment, so really, the only way she could complete the process the way she wanted was for him to remain asleep that final night. �You didn�t fail,� I stressed, �you were 100% perfect.� But he refuses to accept that. While we all have been in glorious communication with her, feeling messages in our heart and seeing signs everywhere, making us feel much, much, much better (he says we are deluding ourselves), he says he has felt nothing from her because she is angry with him for failing her that last night. As if a soul in her level of consciousness right now would ever think that way! Good Lord!

Another thing he thinks, as I wrote above, is that she is in a kind of purgatorial non-communicative realm whereby she will have to review and come to grips with her failure in this lifetime and make plans for trying again next time. �She�s entangled in these conflicts and they�re not letting her in,� he says. Oh well, as one of my sisters says, he had to make himself guilty for something, so this is how he sees it. As Mom�s message to me said (with loving gentleness), �We know that you have a choice.�

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