On Death

Death. Having just written about the passing of my beloved Travis, I can’t get my mind off of death. Well, okay, I can, but I don’t want to. So there.

And so, fellow pilgrim, you’ve really gotten into me today. And so, once again, I write in response to you… and to one you wrote in response to… I’m assuming your post was a response to this post.

Which brings us back to death. I’ve been relatively sheltered from the experience of late. Yes, Travis is gone, so is Savannah, and Pam. Jim & Jerry left in 1998. Fran on New Years Day this year. I guess someone I’ve at least known and cared about has died just about every year for the past five years.

I know in the years ahead there’s a lot more to come. My folks are nearing that passage, I know. Sometimes a little cloud seems to come up and hint that my passage is approaching as well, but I generally discount that thought. I don’t fear it, I just don’t trust the message.

But I’ve noticed that death is effecting me differently than it used to. It really hit home with Fran. After the rosary (my family is Catholic, even if I’m not) I stood beside her casket with Mom. Mom got misty eyed… I know she’d cried earlier in the day. She’d cried lots. My eyes misted a little too. But I looked at the body in the casket and thought “That’s not Fran.”

I saw it in Travis too, even before he died. You look at the face of the one you loved and… it’s not them. That wasn’t Fran’s face, it wasn’t Travis looking back at me in those final hours. They were the faces of the bodies that I was familiar with, but there’s more. Gosh, I can’t put my finger on it… can’t get the concept out here.

Life is a journey, I’ve written here. Or a dance. But it’s culmination here on planet Earth is not the end of the journey… nor the end of the dance.

Is there an end? I don’t know if I’ll ever know. And I’m not sure I should even care.

I do know this. That we all come, eventually, to a place where we can not go beyond in our current mode of transportation… we come to a place where the shell that has defined us is no longer capable of going on. We transition to a different place. “Abraham” calls it the Energy Stream. I call it heaven. I really am not sure there is a difference.

It shouldn’t be something that makes us sad, either at our own dying or at the passing of our loved ones and friends.

Most of us do mourn the loss of others. I know in spite of these words I’ll mourn the passing of my parents. Christianity hints pretty strongly that death should not be a time of sadness for us, but of celebration. Celebration because the one who is gone has achieved the prize, is with God. I remember during my time with the Benedictines that they celebrated the passing of a brother. They put on their whitest garments, and they sang happy songs. They may tear up, saddened, but over all rejoicing. They mourned what we all really mourn… OUR loss of the one going. They recognized it for the innate selfishness that is what mourning truly is.

Death, where is thy sting? Only we who live are stung. Those who die are not. They are set free, transitioning from this earthly reality to another reality, one that I trust is happier than this one, but different, that’s for sure.