Death

I have spent my entire life trying to come to an understanding of death. Up to this point in my life, I felt it was the one area I could be certain about - I will die someday. The uncertainty lay in the exact date and time it would happen.

Death is the one concept that we seem to struggle with the most. Why do we struggle if it is a certainty? I always felt that if we could change our mindsets around death, to feel that death is fine or even beautiful, our suffering around this issue could disappear. Yet, most of us do not feel that death is fine or beautiful. 

Here is my backstory pertaining to death...

My parents & grandparents

As a young girl I was raised Catholic and believed in God and heaven. I lost my dog to death after the neighbor poisoned her, an uncle to a car accident, and two grandparents to cancer. Meanwhile, my other grandmother repeatedly told me she was dying. When she had a stroke in her 40’s and lost her ability to function on the left side of her body, I waited and waited for her to die. Ironically, she lived to be 95.
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In high school when I was 15 years old, my brother had just received his driver's license and was driving four friends home from hockey practice. It was winter in Northern Michigan and he lost control of the car and hit a tree. One of the boys, Scott, died.

2 years later my mother died of a brain aneurysm. No time, no goodbyes, just gone. Two weeks later, I ended a pregnancy and from that point on self-hatred was my best friend. At this point, I believed in a God that I felt was making me suffer because of my actions. My motto became, life is a bitch and then you die.

Me with my godparents

"My motto becomes life is a bitch and then you die."

As a young adult my stories about death go on and on and could take up pages - but that is not the intent of this post. 

In my late 20’s I find God again and believe in an afterlife, and even past lives! 

In my 30’s my motto changed to life is interesting then you die. I started my journey of healing and exploring Native American spirituality, and shifted my focus from God to the Universe. I believed that if we were all part of the whole, we could let organized religion go. At this point, I started to consider myself a recovering Catholic and began working on the layers of guilt associated with that.

"My motto changed to life is interesting then you die."

Me and my sister, Tammy

In my 40’s I embraced the concept of anything is possible. I began to start unraveling my character patterns - seeing the continuum from you, me, we to oneness. I realized that there is no way to skip up the ladder to oneness without doing the work first. My motto in my 40’s was life is an adventure.

I truly thought I had worked on my issues around my mother’s death. I thought I had moved past it. I thought I was good with death and that death was my friend. I believed that I was good at helping people die; I could hold space for them and create a beautiful experience, which I have done. I felt it was a gift I had to give - helping people feel comfortable with dying.

But, I truly had barely skimmed the surface of understanding death. I had been holding on to my mother - not truly letting her go, I was NOT ok with letting her go again! 

How was I doing this? Well, by keeping myself small, not good enough, not lovable enough. I was enforcing my core beliefs about who I was. I could even find myself merging with her in the clutter of my drawers and closet. Every time I walked into my closet or pulled open a drawer - wham! - my judge voice kicked in and I would feel less than.

It was a very subtle way of keeping my judge alive, which just happens to be my mother! My bad tone of voice I would use with my family was my mom’s voice. The popcorn I wanted to make and eat each evening was my mother's favorite. The way I kept myself avoiding true contact with people was similar to my mother's actions when she was alive.

But, if I stopped beating myself up with my inner judge voice (which is my mother), then I would need to figure out a way to let her die all over again. I would have to feel that raw, numbing pain again!

Ironically this is all imaginary in my thinking, stored in my cortex as my perception of my memories. 

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"My motto in my 40’s was life is an adventure."

Yesterday while lying down, I could feel the roots coming up from the earth into my feet and spreading  through my entire system. I could feel that my mother was absorbed into this root system and part of  consciousness (Avatar comes to mind now). I could feel the Earth mother (archetype) of consciousness and the flow of this life system through my system. It was  feminine energy - not masculine. I could feel how this new energy flowed and the true strength of this space was just being. Simply lying on the table Being - not being pulled or needing to do anything for anyone - there was value in my just ​being. 

I could feel myself at all ages, into my 90’s, feeling the same as I did when I was 2. I could feel how time was irrelevant and my previous anxiety about being a minute late to my appointment became funny. I could feel that there is no need to be held, that I was part of this Universal consciousness - of which my mom was too.

I could feel myself no longer needing anyone or anything. I was everyone and everything! What could I need or want? I had been keeping my mom alive through the gravesite, pictures, my tone of voice, my smallness, my nervous system. I was totally vibrating and relaxed at the same time.

My mother has been part of this collective consciousness since she died (and while she was alive). I was born knowing about the oneness, but had since merged with her wounded identity.

AHHHHHHHH………………..finally, I could FEEL the whole picture and KNOW that I was part of the Oneness. I had it so wrong and it seems so simple. My motto in this moment is life and death are the same, they are everything and nothing at the same time. I KNOW of Oneness and its spacious vast awareness of everything all at once. 

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Today I am perceived to be 53 years young, ten years past the age my mother was when she died. I believe in a Universal energy that is within ​everything and ​everyone. Why do I believe this? Because I had a direct perception of it and it was truly a place of heaven on Earth. All of our ‘thinking’ gets in the way and our perception of how things should or should not be keeps us stuck. Putting ourselves in any box or believing in anything outside of us is just insanity and keeps us suffering.

Early on, I could see that time was a huge factor in death. We don’t know how much time we have in this life to be with our loved ones. At the same time, the passage of time makes the raw, numbing pain of death more tolerable. Now my deep inner KNOWING is time is an illusion!

"My motto now is life and death are one."