As my aunt laid in a hospice facility many states away, in the final hours of her human existence, my oldest son laid in a hospital in another distant state undergoing brain surgery for a sizable tumor. These were my real-time thoughts from my journal…
I feel on the verge of tears. What am I feeling? People I love in pain, sadness, separation, separateness, others feeling the pain of separation, the natural cycle of generations turning over and the joy of our son’s future as the word that the procedure went so easily and well. All of it swirling around, transcendence – one momentary and one permanent, life in its natural and beautiful cycles. I think about the people I loved who have passed and come beck to guide me. I am more at one with them than ever before but I liked it better when they were here. It was easier to pick up the phone.
Our love of each other is what makes this life so rewarding and purposeful. But that love always seems to be coupled with attachment and a sense of oneness that is ruptured by the one person transcending. Separateness / aloneness is a horrible feeling. If feels like fear and vulnerability. Especially vulnerability. I feel vulnerable to the pain that my uncle is feeling; knowing that one day it could be my turn. That’s fear of the future. But in the right now should be joy.
The self is housed in the default mode network of the brain which, when we die, dies with the brain. When you shut off the DMN, you get the kind of transcendent experiences described by those who died briefly, and those on psychedelics alike. To lose one’s self is to experience oneness with the divine and all of humanity / existence.
So here and now, people everywhere on this planet are becoming the unbounded light. They are joining the oneness, the divine. They are love and light and joy. I feel sadness in the pain of separation being experienced by my cousin and uncle and father. But I feel equal celebration at the ecstatic experience my aunt is joining. The permanent loss of self is the permanent joining with the oneness.
Ultimately grief will turn to relief and new chapters… and even joy if we allow it.
I don’t have a conclusion or a question for you here… just what is.
~ Love, KC
