Dying is not Death

Since I have been very young, spiritual questions and thoughts have been a part of who I am. I grew up in a more rural area, which did not include movie theatres or amusement parks. The only library was two shelves in the Kindergarten room at school. Our town had a grocery store, Dairy Q, tavern and post office to round out the commercial district. I remember being five and going out to the back yard where a ridge ran across the property about a foot tall. Just perfect for a back rest in the grass and too look at the sky. My thought on that day was that I did not have to die to be born, so why would I have to die to leave and tried to get a trip above the sky for the morning. I waited, it did not happen. 

When I was eight, for the first time I was confronted with death in my life, when the daughter of family friends was killed by a drunk driver on the highway behind our house. When this happened, my older brother ran out to the highway and when he came back he looked strangely sick, he was only fourteen and not prepared for what he had seen. The next day, my parents went shopping at Sears in the next town to buy a dress for Marie. Pink, pretty, and beautiful dress, which I found myself unsettled as too why she would need such a beautiful dress now? Never having been to a funeral before, we walked into the chapel and I saw a pretty pink box just inside the door and took a run towards it while my mother was trying to coax me back. I just had to see what was in that pretty pink box. Then reality hit, there she was in that beautiful pink dress, laying in a beautiful pink box and this was death I was looking at. I did not become emotional; just remember thinking this could not be right because I did not believe you had to die to leave this world. Death was not computing as I looked at her and heard a woman (which I would find out later was her mother) wailing with a sound I had never heard before or forgotten yet.

I never got along particularly well with Marie; she was two years older and would constantly slap me whenever she chose too, usually to take my radio away from me. After the funeral, a dinner was held at the family home three blocks away and the grief was more than I could handle, felt suffocating. I informed my mother I was walking home and started the walk with my transistor radio in my hand. As I was walking, I could feel somebody following me so I walked faster. The feeling kept up so I turned to see who was following and no one was there. Why, I do not know but my senses told me it was Marie. I threw my radio on the ground and started running home, went inside and locked the door. For the next three years, at night she would come and want to play or in my dreams I would find us going places I knew were not allowed in my world. For three years, I covered my feet at night regardless of how hot the room was in the summer to keep a blanket between her and myself. 

When I turned ten, I devised a plan that as soon as I was older than she was at death I would send her away. After all, at that point I would now be older than she would and no longer intimidated as I was in life by her age, size, or actions. And so I did, on my eleventh birthday I was waiting for the next visit and told her now I was older and she needed to go away and never come back. Never again did I have another visit from her, though it took many years later to sleep without covering my feet. My beginning of knowledge that death really did not exist, only energy taking a different form than in this world. I considered myself a good kid for the most part – not sure, if it was due to spirit or Christmas not being coal. 

I was free from Marie and the next death in our family would not come for another eleven years when my grandmother died. I was not close to her either, though the only strange memory of her was seeing her in the casket in my dream looking back at me. Since then I have always had a dream prior to a death, though could not see that person.

At this point in life, I no longer fear spirit energy and many times find myself incorporating transition with healing. If the healing is not meant to be physical, I work with preparing the person for transition from this world, and then the other side of me comes into play with the energy of that person letting me know at the time of transition they have left this world and are fine beyond this world. I can feel them and something is said or an image given for confirmation of the change. I see death differently and so realize now that although your physical rests here in some form, you really do not have to die to return. Just leaving an illusion to return to the truth of who you are.