Life’s Endings Part 3
My natural creativity that has shown itself in certain areas of my life began emerging about death, and I saw opening in me how I wanted to participate when death came—apart from the rituals of religion (and in addition to them).
My younger daughter and I reached a time when we were the family. It was during these years when I heard that my sister-in-law’s brother had died. Cutting a large, spun-candy-pink cluster from our rhododendron bush, I drove us across Massachusetts, open to both sadness and celebration with his family and his friends. His mother had put a favorite red coat—more like a costume—on him, and I stood quietly watching beside my daughter as she lightly put the pink burst of our blossom on his apple-red chest.
Then when she was a teenager, I knew that despite tall snowdrifts, I wanted us to be at my grandmother’s service in the middle of Maine—a long drive in potentially difficult weather. I brought a poem that said exactly who Grammie was to me. I felt happy that I had it to read because it was about staying at my grandparents’ farm summers of my growing up years—bean seeds in rows, pillowslips blowing, and geranium blooms in the kitchen—images from heated summers on this cold, snow-blowing day. Challenged by the snow-burdened Maine Turnpike on our slow, but safe drive home, I felt comforted by the giving, the sharing, and the belonging, and hoped that feeling lay quietly in my daughter’s heart, too.
From 2002 to 2007 the life endings of my second husband, my mother, and my father confirmed the changes continuing within me. Brief excerpts follow from the fuller writing about these special people in A Flower for God.
Five years after my second husband had been gone, I presented his message and his music at my spiritual center a final time. “The seats were filled, and I saw tears. But I spoke with clarity and sincerity in assurance that the two gifts he’d given me were his coming into my life, and his leaving. That had happened. That was God. I knew all came from God and was good. In my surrender, I’d found truth.”
For my mother’s memorial service in Rhode Island, I was able to travel from Florida, and this excerpt is found in “Last Times” about my parents. “By the time of my mother’s service at the nursing home set on Narragansett Bay where she had lived for eight years, I knew an inner freedom that allowed me to express my love in a new way.”
From November to January, months not recommended because of their snowfalls, was the wrong time to be traveling from India to the farm in Florida, and then to New England. But from a feeling I had, I thought that my dad might be approaching his final days. During the time of our being together we experienced the healing of a difficult role he had played over certain years as one of my spiritual teachers. It was grace. And from this excerpt from Flower, it is clear that I surprised even myself … “Feeling the wonder of what had already happened, a totally unexpected question popped out. ‘Dad, what do you think will happen when you physically die?’ Not having prepared this, and so uncertain of what would happen now—a stilted silence?—I waited, but he began to talk without hesitation.” And his views, written down, further deepened my knowing of the continuing journey of the soul.
My realization is, “The physical death of one loved may feel like a jump into a dark crevasse, yet having faith (as wings that lift) sustains us until we feel enriched by our rite of passage.”
© All excerpts from A Flower for God