It’s a magnificent autumn day. A crispness in the air announces that summer has passed and our days are numbered until a winter chill will usher us to retreat into warmer layers of coats, hats, and scarves.
As I write this post, about 800 miles away in Arizona, a funeral for my cousin is in progress. Our immediate family is stunned. Shocked. Reeling.
Only 2 weeks ago, the oncologist told her that she was no longer in remission and that medical means could prolong her life only briefly with the same measures that had earlier removed all quality from it.
My cousin declined. Ripples of incredulity reverberated through our immediate family members. “This isn’t real,” they commented. “It can’t be real.”
These moments of shock that distance us from our “normal” sense of reality are important beyond our recognition. For it is within these moments that we glimpse a higher truth—that life seems like a dream because, to reference the Indian scriptures, it is a dream.
But instead of clinging to those sacred moments of seeing what’s real and what isn’t, we try to scramble back under the comfortable quilt of the illusion that this world is real instead of those flashes true insight. Based on habit, recognition, and those thought patterns we find comforting, we are hypnotized by our daily affirmation that this world IS reality.
Have we got it all backwards?
Doesn’t death itself tell us that our lives are impermanent? To quote my doctor brother (whom you’ll get to know in From Bagels to Curry), “No one gets out of here alive.” To live for fulfillment in this world that we will someday have to leave is like building castles in the sand, as impermanent as their foundation that will be washed away by the tide or blown down by the wind, as though they had never existed—as though they were nothing but passing dreams.
In this spiritual memoir, I chronicle facing these same issues 9 years ago with my father’s passing. About the day of his funeral, I wrote:
The glorious afternoon is made bright by a light deeper than the sun. Loved ones hover silently in the afternoon heat. The grass at my father’s gravesite is exquisitely green, covering the hillside in a radiant sea of life force. Has grass ever been so brilliantly colored? The funeral seems dreamlike from beginning to end, fashioned like the song from a Jewish play, “laden with happiness and tears.”
Who in this world has not suffered loss of some kind?
If we take that loss in the right way and let it take us to a truer understanding of what is real and what isn’t, and what really matters and what doesn’t – that is how tragedy can take us to truth.
Hello Lila,
You helped me about 9 years ago when my husband Clark died from cancer. I was known as Anne Collard then, I am married and now am called Anne Beam. After Clark died I went back into nursing and have worked (paying job) as a hospice nurse for over 8 years. Thank you for writing about what nobody in our culture wants to talk about, until they or their loved one faces death. My work in hospice is about the living and as I see it, so many of people’s problems are about grief, especially unresolved grief from years past. I could not have continued on after losing Clark except for the love of my cat and the support from essences! I am blessed with a wonderful earthly life. I will always miss my loved ones, I’m just about the last one left from my “family”. But the pain of loss is the proof of the love I have and continue to have with each and every one of them. Just wish I could reach out and feel their physical hugs.
Blessings to you and Thank You for all you do!!!
Anne
Dear Anne,
How special to hear from you. Thank you for taking the time to write and to share so openly. And please forgive my delay with this response. Congrats on submitting the first comment on the new site all the same!
Yes of COURSE I remember you! And well – your work with Spirit-in-Nature Essences, your love for animals, and more.
I know what you mean about that feeling of missing loved ones. It’s one of our biggest tests in this world, it seems.
Your comments were very moving, and I’d like to address them more fully in the January, 2018 blog – which is right around the corner – if you don’t mind, to do them justice and to share some ideas.
Thank you as well, Anne, for making this world a better place with your compassionate service to others.
Meanwhile, wishing you happy holidays and a blessed New Year,
Lila