Families ask why their loved one died without them there, our friend Priya in Auroville says of the hospice experience. After, say, a four hour vigil by the bedside their loved one dies alone, apparently, so often, just as the family leaves. I think it is because of the connections and perhaps the tension that they stay on, they stay connected. In Mum’s case we were letting go, all quiet and sitting cross legged with her on the floor. She had her head in Mary’s lap and I was holding her legs and just being mindless and relaxed, watching my own ego and its accretions and magnetic iron filings and somehow letting go of the magnetism the iron filings of thoughts dropping away around when Grace’s breathing—which was labored—became calm and smooth like a sleeping baby, she relaxed.
This stunned me, a confirmation, I say now, that what I experienced this light from her, must have some validity because I felt her speaking to me, not in words, but in a golden light. I didn’t see it in my head, but felt it in my heart, and as if speaking to herself … that up there where she was now looking back down at her body she felt free, like a child, and she reflected that she never expected it to be like this.—I felt this powerfully in my gut and heart, my head pretty silent.
Despite a “spiritual” orientation I am still a hard skeptic and doubter when it comes to anything. And sure, I know this is possible, especially now given that we are encased in dense medium that conducts electromagnetism which is light, out of which all things are fashioned and have as their medium, so it is scientifically possible to have an energy body, quite aside from the overwhelming evidence of near death experiences (NDE). Say I am delusional but this is what I experienced, and this is my first experience, even if vicarious, of someone looking back down at themselves and others in the time of death, as if both saying farewell and for all intents and purposes giving a last farewell blessing which came to me physically and mentally an expansion of heart-mind, or as we say in India, manas.
Perhaps, so I think, this is due, not only to Grace having lived a long and full life, but also because she had been basically healthy. She just ate less and less, her skin color was healthy when she died with us sitting on the floor around her (shall put it in my will, to allow me to die comfortably on the floor not in a bed) and also that she was not in a hospital with tubes coming out of her, a thought she always dreaded.
Our goal in the past two years after she turned 100 has been to make her life as comfortable and pain free and medicine-free as possible. She lived for the longest time on pomegranate and other fresh juices, papaya, veg, some scrambled (country) eggs and butter, small amount of chicken or liver etc., sea fish, Horlicks, and oatmeal. During these last days she refused solid food. Over the past weeks we gave her baby antibiotic once to relieve the fluid build up which I understand is inevitable when the circulation slows down to the lungs and blood becomes stagnant … not wanting to repeat antibiotics we gave black cumin seed oil (Nigella sativa) with honey (a miracle medicine used reportedly by the Prophet Muhammed) and this also relieved the congestion a few weeks after the baby medicine dose.
Then Friday midday Pakkiyam called me from my room upstairs where I was writing and said I‘d better take a look. That’s when I found Mum resting her head on Mary’s lap on a quilt on the floor so they could change the bed sheets and air out the mattress. Her breathing had the fluid again and in the sleepy way that she has been over the past month or so. We then mixed up some of the baby amoxicillin and gave it to her with a spoon; she swallowed it and then gave her spoonfuls of water and I helped Mary turn her on her side so the lungs would not be compressed … I am telling about all this to show that she was, indeed, for short while, in difficulty and I was at that point imagining that even if the medicine worked, some day not too far from now things might turn ugly with her gasping for breath; however, I did not expect her to die at that time but to just get weaker and sort of drown in an agonizing end, a horrible hostile prospect which passed through my mind.
Then Grace looked wide eyed up to the corner of the ceiling across from her, a place where she used to say that she saw girl talking back to her, a kind of visualization she had for years, and I wondered if she was seeing her again, or something else strange and wonderful.
As I held Mum’s legs and Mary stroked her head I did this thing of looking in my heart and letting go of the thoughts and attachments of mind that somehow like magnetized iron filings constitute our ego fears and so on, and then, as I say, all by itself came this golden light, not in my eyes but in my heart … which epitomized Grace’s personality somehow, encapsulated almost and I felt her presence not from her body before me but from that place up in the corner of the ceiling of her bedroom … absolutely childlike and free musing on the freedom of it all while simultaneously her breathing became calm and smooth, no congestion at all … totally relaxed, “sleeping like a baby,” as they say, on Mary’s lap.
Now, Pakkiyam came back in from the kitchen and stood with her arms akimbo asking what was happening. I felt this alarming to Grace up there looking down and gestured, shh, to her, sit down with us, which she did … because in my mind it was as if Grace (looking down) was alarmed at this person standing there hovering, and when we five just sat quite calm as she went calmly to sleep, I was in this glow, so calm, sweet, no drama, no Sturm und Drang, no emotion, stress, or turbulence. I was impressed. Mary looked over at me, since Mum was resting on her, she knew, and I took her pulse as I had done so many times before and unlike those times when it had always been strong, there was nothing, this in itself was one of the strangest things I have experienced, a warm body with no pulse, it is something I have never experienced before, still of this world but the heartbeat no more. I got up went into the kitchen and looked at the clock, it was about 12:50 pm that she would have died.
Though I am not sure of the cosmology here, Frank’s wife Debora described the essence anyway or for me the feeling of the event perfectly in her condolence text message when she said, “The world has lost a true woman and how lucky is the other side to finally have her back. She stayed with us for a long time, Mark and that was such a selfless gift from her to you. Thank God her spirit is free again as in her youth. I know you miss her.”
This is what I experienced beyond all expectation, that she felt free.
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