Reflecting on Death

It has been two months since my last post. Between my two kids finishing up with final school projects, my side business needing remodeling, my husband driving me insane from being home due to short term disability..... my head has been spinning. I've barely had time to breathe let alone write anything cogent here.

So the kids get done with school, we pack their bags so they can go up and spend the summer with the first wife, hubby is healing and on his way back to work.... and just as I'm getting settled in to get this house in order again I get one phone call after another giving me bad news after bad news. I'm wondering when it's going to stop. Deaths happen in threes, it seems.

Last week my grandfather died at the age of 82. I just went to his funeral today. Military honors and all. It was sweltering hot, everyone was sweating through their clothes and I have to say that we were (all 150 of us) holding up quite well until the Taps was played. Then we discovered there was a severe shortage of tissues. My twelve year old niece was sitting on my mother's lap and when the three shots were fired she screamed and had to be taken to the car. She and Grandpa were close and she was just plain devastated and traumatized by the whole thing.

My nephew(by marriage) was killed in a hit-and-run this past Saturday. That funeral will be this Friday. My poor brother-in-law drank himself silly the day after it happened. Mother and I took food over and sat with him and my sister. He started yammering on and on about killing the guy who killed his son and then sobbing about how wrong he was so say such things. All I can say at this point is that our whole family has gone slightly psycho this past week.

THEN tonight, only hours after getting home from my grandfather's funeral Mom calls me and tells me that a longtime friend of ours died on Monday. He was living with family in Joplin, Missouri when the tornadoes broke out. He had cirrhosis in his liver among other things. He'd been bed bound for a while. Well when the tornadoes hit, he jumped out of bed to try and get a bag together and get to a shelter. He never made it. He fell to the floor in his bedroom and went into multiple system failure, dying two days later in the hospital.

This past week has been filled with nothing but death. I hope these are the last funerals I have to attend for a while.

Any followers of this blog who've read my posts on grief know already that I believe that the 'grief' of a loved one's passing from this material world is ultimately a selfish expression. And a subconsciously jealous one. Sadness they're gone from us(if we allow it to) tends to spiral into a selfish circular logic which is all about what the survivor has 'lost' and not what the recently deceased has gained. An aunt of mine said it best today, "I'll see Daddy soon and I guess I'm just jealous, really." She gave a silly laugh and smile afterward and we shared a knowing look with one another. No one else at the table got it. They looked at her slightly horrified.

I had a wonderful experience just before Mom originally called me to tell me about Grandpa's death. She woke me up from a sound sleep with her call and only a short time earlier I remember dreaming that Grandpa and I were talking. It was almost like a phone conversation but ... closer. I can't tell who initiated the 'call' but he asked me some sensitive questions; things I don't think I could have had the nerve to explain in person. He hugged me and told me that he understood everything and why I made the decisions I did and that he loves me. And, "everything is ok." More questions were asked but- it was easier and more efficient that he just take the information he wanted and then he said good-bye. I felt like he pillaged parts of my soul with that last bit but it wasn't intrusive in a bad way. Just... efficient.

I told Mom about the dream and she said she was so thankful that grandpa and I got a chance to talk. I was so sick during Easter this year that I didn't get to see him during that last holiday get-together. We made our peace with one another. I was still pretty numb that day but you know what? I had my one cry-fest and then I was done with it. I remembered what grandpa said to me and just like that- my sadness was gone. It evaporated like morning dew on grass when the sun comes up hot and bright. I felt his presence for a day or so and then he was gone, at peace at last, lying beside his wife who he'd been missing for more than twenty-six years.

From the Nag Hammadi scrolls in the Manichaean literature section, I'd like to dedicate these verses to all our loved ones:

Come, spirit. Death has fallen, and sickness fled away.
Let there be no desire for the house of affliction,
which is wholly destruction and anguishing death.
You were cast out from your native abode. You suffered in hell.
Come nearer in gladness. Don't turn back
to regard the shape of the bodies. See, they return
through every rebirth, and through every agony
and every choking prison where they burn and sigh.
Come nearer. Don't be fond of perishing beauty
in any of its forms. It withers
and fades like a broken rose that dries in the sun,
its grace destroyed.
Princes and dead souls lie shackled in the tomb
where all is blackness.

My soul is saved.
I am dressed in light.

On Death, Grief, and Selfishness

We had a death in the family last week. On the day I found out about it I cried. The next day my tears wouldn't come and I had no answer as to why this was.

I loved this person. I still do. I miss them and I always will. This is what the emotional part of my mind keeps chanting. But there is something else I've discovered that lies under that thick layer of grief: joy.

Why?
And what is this joy?
Why do I feel this joy?
Where did my tears wander off to on that second day? Are my tear ducts malfunctioning?
Why am I not sad anymore?

I have grieved over loss in my past. This entire experience doesn't feel like the 'grief' I have known in the past, however. This feels different and I only discovered why when I let the rational part of my soul surface and allow me to pick apart every aspect of what I was feeling in a non-judgmental way. This distinction is important if we are to make real progress in finding gnosis. NON-judgmental rational thought. It can be scarier than heck because we're socially conditioned to categorize everything into Good, Bad, and Leave-The-Gray-Area-Alone.

That gray area is where gnosis exists. We have to learn to think outside the box that is this material world.

What I have concluded in my search for answers on this topic is that psychologists' definition of grief is backward in relation to gnosis. They believe and teach others that grief happens in stages. This I cannot really argue with. Our emotions do evolve. But dissecting the fundamental judgment they make about the cause of sadness in grief is dependent on one concept only-- that the sadness is based on a feeling of losing a loved one. The survivors are left behind with too many questions and these will supposedly never be answered. Dig deeper and you'll find an atheist component to this psychological argument. If you believe in heaven are you really losing someone or only have a brief period of time before you do see them again? So who's losing what here?

Psychologists cling to this loss rationale and never dig deeper.

I dare. I'll do it now.

Grief is selfish. It serves no purpose. Why do I say this? Because when you examine the very nature of "losing someone to death" you find that it is wrapped up in the survivor's experience. Not the one who died. It's all about what the survivor supposedly lost.

"I miss him/her!"
"I'll never see them again."
"I feel so lost without them."
"What am I going to do without them?"

Do these thoughts sound familiar?

Let me put this in another light. Suicide. Psychologists(and curiously enough, most religous clergy) teach the world that to commit suicide is the epitome of selfishness. Why? Again, because the survivor would miss out on the loving company of the one who wants to kill him/herself.

What exactly is selfish about realizing how hard and unforgiving and hellish this world is? What sane person wouldn't want out?! The answer is the person who is hylic/somatic. Worldly. Materialistic. Unable to see the forest for the trees. Cannot see the eternal nature that is our soul and our divine parent, Pleroma.

Am I advocating suicide? No. But I am advocating truth and the concept of the Bodhisattva, that is an enlightened person staying to teach instead of going back to Pleroma as they crave.

A Bodhisattva has the choice to stay or go. A person who is hit by a car doesn't. But as survivors we have a choice in how we react to OUR loss. Our jealous loss. We have a choice of either accepting that we will not see that person in their worldly body again until WE die and then move on -- or we can wallow in selfish grief.