Journey Through Fragility: Lessons on Love, Loss, and the Human Experience
This week, I am taking a break from the Holiday Serenity Series to share a personal message straight from my heart to yours.
There Is No Death Only The Force
As of the time I am writing this, my father may be nearing the end of this expression. I went to visit him last night with my niece and my brother. My mother was already there. He was on a ventilator and getting massive amounts of fluids. They were debating back and forth if they were going to do a blood transfusion because his platelets were low.
I watched him reach for my seventeen-year-old niece, whom he helped raise, to try to comfort her as the tears silently fell down her cheeks. It is an image that I will never get out of my head and one that sent my brother out of the room never to return.
Transitions bring up many things for people. Through these last months, I have contemplated my connection to my father, memories both happy and sad, regrets less about the things unsaid but the things undid, the fragility of life, what his impact has been on the world and those around him, what I want my impact to be, what I have learned from him, what is quality of life, what does it really mean to live, and what has us hold on. Sometimes all at once.
In this time, faith isn’t always a comfort. If you have heard my story of my brother coming back to me as a dragonfly, you know that I truly believe that we get to choose a different ride on this amusement park called earth. Most of my family are of the Christian faith and believe that they are in a better place. (Although lets face it, that is a 50/50 chance and with the people I know more like a 20/80 if you know what I mean). Knowing that still doesn’t negate all of the other thoughts and feelings that come along.
Damn this being human thing!
The important thing to remember is to allow yourself to feel, don’t make yourself wrong, and don’t let anyone tell you how to grieve.
As I was writing this, my mother messaged and said that my dad was taken off the ventilator. They gave him a pint of blood for his low platelets and he was panicking over his cigarettes. A miraculous recovery or the last-ditch fight in a losing battle who knows? Just for today, I am going to be thankful for it all and remember that there is no death only the Force.
I want to leave you with a prayer from the Lakota People:
Wakan Tanka, Great Mystery,
Teach me how to trust
My heart,
My mind,
My intuition,
My inner knowing,
The senses of my body,
The blessings of my spirit.
Teach me to trust these things
So that I may enter my Sacred Space
And love beyond my fear,
And thus Walk in Balance
With the passing of each glorious Sun.
– Lakota Prayer
