“Daddy, I don’t want you to ever die.”
Yikes. What do you do with that?
Just before bed and Zach was pretty upset. You could see the thought flash across his eyes.
I brought him back. Here we are. I’m alive, you’re alive. I love you, and I will always love you.
We talked about the only sensible response to the fact that one day we die, hopefully a long way away: make the most of the time we have.
Don’t be lost in the past or the future. Come back to the present. Find out what’s truly important, what we truly love, and attempt to bring as much of that to life as possible.
Not just in what we do, but in how we show up while we do it.
So far, so clichéd. But clichés become clichés for a reason.
Is there anything else to be squeezed from this?
One of the most profound experiences I’ve had was when my mum died.
She’d had cancer for about six months and had steadily gone downhill. I was staying with my parents, helping out where I could.
My dad came and got me that morning. I’d woken moments earlier and knew something was up, so I wasn’t surprised.
I came into her room and focused on her body in bed. That’s where I expected ‘her’ to be.
She wasn’t there. At all.
Her body was ‘empty’. So confusing to have a person you’ve known all your life suddenly not be in the place you expect her to be.
My awareness expanded to take in the room. Ah. There she was.
My sense of her wasn’t located anymore. She was bigger than that. She filled the space.
It was incredible.
I said goodbye, opened the windows and let her out.
Actually, who knows if I ‘let’ her out or if she was just waiting for one last goodbye, but within seconds that tangible sense of her was gone.
What did I take from this?
I came away knowing, somehow, that we’re more than our bodies. We’re not just our minds and our thinking either. There’s something deeper, a sense of Self that is more than our ever-changing thoughts, feelings and physicality.
What happens after death, I don’t know. But that experience changed my sense of what we are now.
Ever since then, my interest has been in getting really familiar with that larger sense of me.
Free of struggle and suffering. To be free before I die.
The great Anthony de Mello had a wonderful response to someone asking whether there was life after death:
“Is there life before death? — that is the question!”
That’s become the question for me.
I don’t really know why all this came to me this morning, but here you are.
Hope it helps.
Go well,
Arjuna