My dearest friend in the world is walking down the path to death, release and a new reality, with great strength and forbearing. She is not ready to give up yet and she is fighting. The medical people have all but given up on her and offer palliative care – she is having none of the damned chemical invasion, intervention. She is going the natural route. For now she is holding her own. I am walking this road with her, however she chooses to walk it and I cannot fathom how she must feel and I am dreading the day that my footsteps echo alone. This soul has always in my lifetime meant home, and all I had to do to find my way back was listen for her soft voice whispering in the wind.
-Excerpt Dec 16 2017
A beautiful soul passed from this earth. I spent four weeks of hospice with her. She died in her house, where she wanted to be. This is what the passing of a warrior soul looks like. She was diagnosed with stage 4 small cell carcinoma in May of 2017, a very aggressive, fast growing type of cancer. By new year’s she gave up the radiation treatments that would stop the cancer as it encroached on different areas of her body out of sheer exhaustion and weakness. She had apology in her eyes when she told me she was done irradiating her body and I reminded her that I promised to walk beside her what ever the out come, what ever she decided. I knew this day would come, after all the things we were doing didn’t work any more and after all her determination to live waned from the massive pain her body was in. The cancer caused a wasting syndrome and she could not eat enough to keep any fat on her lovely bones. They gave her 6-8 months – she beat that by 2 more, and the last one was the greatest battle I’ve ever seen. These are my random thoughts, observations. It is hard to help, to witness a beloved die.
Sunday, January 7th 2018
She fell twice that night, not with standing the walker, which after the fall she decided she should maybe use. That was the night I moved in with her. Very shortly after that hospice supplied a hospital bed and a wheel chair. Once the bed came, she rarely got out of it. (till the day she didn’t at all.) We started low dose morphine that day.
Thursday January 11th, 2018
I keep going in to her room to make sure she is breathing. Her BP is very low, and her hands are like ice. She listened to part of a pod cast about crystal cities and flying. She told me a long time ago about this. It was healing for her to know she is not the only one who remembers. It takes it out of the realm of fantasy and into reality. And always her dogs are there with her. The ones she has loved and lost. She knows that when she passes they will all be there to greet her – they are the love that is calling her from this place that has done nothing but hurt her. This other place that is home, has beautiful skies and green life and trees and grass and meadows and crystal cities and pink clouds that she and her beloved dogs all fly on together. Where they are all happy and there is no hurt and no stupidity. She has told me countless times. Where people are kind and loving and there is no hurt and no torture and no nastiness. Where people actually care and love one another and life is beautiful. She knows this place from her memory from a place deep and hidden that has revealed its self to her as she has begun disengaging with her 3d identity. This is home and there she will go when she can no longer sustain a broken and old body. She has in some ways always known about this place because her heart, her true heart, has always held a soft spot for the magical and the wondrous. This, she taught me. And I have throughout my life at times touched upon it. I have felt the call of my home. A place no less magical but a bit different. Sometimes it is like we were cracked from the same mold. We both know that this is not our home, and that many things here on this world that are considered fantasy are actually possible and real, where we come from, and it is has been a long, long sojourn here that we are both deeply tired of. She remembers Egypt and the Aztecs. I remember Atlantis and the deluge. I remember being an energy being. She remembers love.
She keeps going through times of wanting to be alive, and not. She will eat and come back to life for an evening and then sink back into the dying. She waits. The body is holding her. When she has eaten food, her clarity comes back for a moment and she shines through her eyes. Other times, it is just a remnant of her more like all that is behind those eyes is the personality of the body, like her soul is trying to be there but it can’t get through the pain and sickness. It is a haunted, childlike part of her. The body tricks her into eating, and the energy that food brings allows her come through and for moments she is herself, then it’s almost like she realizes what she has done and she must sleep. She is trying to leave and that part of her personality that is of the body is not sure it wants to go yet. The fight is epic. All because we are not sure that the afterlife is real.
The life after life – that we continue is a great mystery to us. Of all of the indignities, pain and things we must live through in this life, this is the greatest. Supposedly, we should know. But we don’t. Whether it is from programming and being taught or because we really don’t have the skills, I am not sure. We are supposed to take on faith that there is an afterlife. But none of us know like we know that water is wet and the sun is hot. So she has been floating somewhere in the middle dreaming land – she asked me about purgatory – she couldn’t remember the name… maybe that is where she is sitting trying to figure it out as she decides.???
Saturday, January 13th 2018
You never really ‘own’ anything. Nothing in life is ever for sure, or solid. Not in this place, on this earth. You simply have to hold on for dear life. Life is strange. As solid as we think this 3d place is, it is not. As unchanging as we think this place is, it is not. The winds blow, the trees sing and the weather changes all on a pin head. People come and people go and even while they have a body, they are always changing and moving and blown by the wind. We think this place is so solid and unchanging, but it is not. I am watching a tired soul simply abstracting herself from her body, quiet inch by quiet inch because of loneliness. Because of her decisions to be lonely. Because that is what life has taught her.
We choose by what we learn, and sometimes what we choose gives us pain that could be avoided or that is not necessary, but in order to avoid a different pain, we choose a pain we know we can handle, never knowing that there could have been a no pain option because that is all life has taught us – pain. Sometimes I think that is because we want to hold onto what is, instead of letting go and letting be. We mistakenly think or want that life to hold still. But nothing from moment to moment is ever still, ever the same. Nothing is what it seems.
There are angels all over her home – I never noticed because they are just part of Mom. They sit on shelves, the top of cabinets and hang in paintings, everywhere. The hospice nurse remarked on it, and I spent the day seeing them all in tiny corners everywhere.
January 31 3:48 am
I awoke to sounds of yelling, coughing and agony. The pain had broken through her morphine and she had turned herself 90 degrees in the bed trying to either get up or get off, maybe to run away. It took a pill and two doses of morphine to calm her down. She has that death rattle where she can’t clear her throat. Even with no fat on her, the weight of her bones made it hard to get her repositioned turned and then, for the pain and breathing rolled to her side. She is now resting at least what seems peacefully, and a cup of coffee and two smokes later, I am wide awake in the deep of the night left wondering; what does it take for someone to die? She fights within herself, when I asked her where she was trying to go, she said ‘train’. And while the medicine was taking effect, she kept holding her head, like it hurt and murmuring ‘Home’. Her soul seems reluctant to leave a severely dysfunctional body, and she – maybe because of the morphine – is trapped inside a physical prison that is giving over by miniscule increments. What does it take to die? It looks like quite a heroic act to me.
The organized collection of cells we call the body has its own intelligence. It has a rudimentary awareness. It fights for life as hard as the soul that rides within it. Even after the soul has abstracted itself from that body. I have tried to call in her linage – all those through time who loved her and are in a place that they could help – I have felt them gathering, and yet she is not ready to give up or give in or slip quietly off to the next place she will go, maybe because she has no clear picture or knowing of where her real home is? Maybe her very strong body which will dissolve after this, is what is so very afraid of going? I do not know. Just that she lingers on, in a place neither here nor there.
February 1st.
Cancer must be the ultimate parasitical disease. In a strong body it feeds slowly and encroaches on nerves and tender organs not quite killing and never ever helping. It is almost like it has a personality of its own – a separate part of that body, an alien invasion creating a shell to feed on that becomes its ultimate demise. It will feed upon the host gaining control and strength from it, until it causes a fatal crash, thus killing itself. There is no greater mark of stupidity and psychopathology than ruining your home. It is an analogy that works for this planet at this time. There is a cancer here that is killing the place that it lives. And to think there are supposed technologies and science that could cure both the human body and mother earth’s body. There was a time when the people and the planet worked together. When the people asked for what they needed with respect and the mother earth gave it of herself, when we lived together. Now the people have turned into a rabid cancer, ravishing her body and destroying all in their path. And as these new technologies are supposedly able to kill cancer cells with frequency and vibration, so the mother earth is going through a treatment that will rid the earth of the cancer that grows upon and within her.
This night she tries to tell me something but she is unable. Her throat, tongue and mouth do not work anymore, she cannot swallow. I swab the inside of her mouth with a sponge on a stick and cool water. Tears gather in the corner of her eyes and I know she hurts. I daub them away and give her light kisses across her forehead and cheeks, the only place that does not hurt her when I touch it, and she slides back into a morphine dazed sleep. I quietly rail to the universe that enough is enough.
One part of me is enraged that we have the knowledge to cure those who suffer, and yet we let them suffer, die by inches. Enraged that I am watching a beloved suffer as deeply as she suffers and all I have to offer is palliative, a deeper sleep, I cannot understand that there exists a way to heal and it is not shared, nor given to stop the agony. Another part of me knows, that one day, the mother will just grow beyond the torture and shake humanity off like the infestation of fleas we have become. I want to rant about the systems on this earth that create that agony for people, and I find I don’t have the heart for it.
Her entire life was always a creation of beauty, in what she created around her and for those that saw her gift. She is an artist, and wherever she goes, she will remain an artist with a bigger wider canvas. She cannot help herself in creating beauty all around wherever she is. It is the resonance note of her being. She will float in a bubble of azure, her favorite color and become the ocean, the sky, that wonderful blue. Her earthly remains will stay here, become once again a true part of the earth she came from. Her unearthly self will fly free again, able to create the beauty she has always been from her heart.
I’ll love you forever Mom, and for always, wherever you are.
February 2, 2018 at 9;35 pm
My mother was finally loosed from the agony this life caused her. Fly high mom, I already miss you. As you have said to me many times, “We are Warriors…” We are. We persevere. We hold true in the face of all that comes at us.
Warrior on.
I’ll love you forever Mom, and for always, wherever you are.
In the Mind's Eye 