A Soul’s Interruption

An Explanation of Dad’s Journey Home

This is part III of the three part family reflection on the one year anniversary of my Dad’s death. It comes with a warning:

***WARNING***

Explicit metaphysics dead ahead (no pun intended). Proceed with caution which is best done, always, with an open heart and a sense of wonder.

Always.

I know most, now, do not know of my dad at all. So I thank you for your indulgence and patience as I bring a sense of closure to this “first year” without him a physical presence in our lives.

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Consider the following:

∞ b - d ∞

Do you get it?

Hint #1: This is Dad’s Journey in five simple symbols.

Hint #2: It is not mathematical in nature—this is NOT a math phrase.

Now do you get it?

Hint #3: It’s our Journey too!

Yes? No?

❓

[I’ll come back to this in a moment]

After compiling my brothers’ reflections of my Dad last week, I’ve been pondering how best to wrap up this “celebration” of a life at the one year anniversary mark of his death. I’ve concluded the best way is to leave everything just as it is—including all the experiences he gave us, especially on the farm, over the course of his life; and the shared experiences we had that were the most intimate as we navigated his active dying, his death, his cremation, and his inurnment. For those who’ve been on this journey with my family as readers to this blog, you’ve shared in those experiences, many in real time, as they were written over the past almost two years. You glimpsed his humor, his longings, his boyhood recollections, his fondness for country western music and dancing, his devotion to family and farming, his faith, and his huge, huge heart. I honestly do not think I could add anything more that would be value-added to what’s already been written. Substack will be the archive of all those words and sentiments and it was my high honor to be Dad’s transcriber of his story, his humor, his Elderings, and his love. I haven’t yet gone back to read many of those posts—but I might start doing that now as we enter year two and beyond of our lives with Dad only firmly in our hearts. I am so grateful to have had the time we shared together over the last nine months of his life to capture the fractions of his story I was able to grasp. As time goes on during family gatherings, we’ll surface more memories that should be captured and kept in all our hearts.

That’s how we’ll keep Dad alive.

Okay, there’s more ways too:

Case in point:

It had become a bit of a family tradition that my brother Clary and sis-in-law Gloria started to host a Super Bowl/poker party at their house. Though for the early years of this tradition, Kristin and I could not travel over to visit (me still being a principal and all, needing to go into school/work the next day), my mom and dad would go and sit in the “seats of honor” on the couch directly in front of the TV. And I would get texts and pics of everyone there (unfortunately even when the Patriots were playing, but I digress).

L: Janelle, Mom and Dad during a SuperBowl we don’t talk about; R: Pat and Dad in the seats of honor at Clary and Gloria’s SB party 2023.

This past February marked the first time the family SB party was held without Dad physically present. But he was there. And not just in spirit….

Fully crediting Clary with the idea, and following his urging, Clary’s daughter Janelle, one of Dad’s granddaughters and a Patriot fan through marriage only (that’s my story and I’m sticking with it—DNA is stronger than fandom! But GO HAWKS!), made something that helped reserve his forever spot on the couch.

And we’ll bring it out for each future party. Because, that’s what you do when you celebrate. That’s how we bring laughter and joy, still, into this new and forever-now relationship with Dad. It’s kinda how our family rolls.

We just can’t take his money anymore. But, neither can David—so at least there’s that. It’s okay you don’t know who David is. Trust me. That’s a best kept family secret.

Clam chowder seems to be another addition to the party—but that’s for another time (and no, I haven’t yet come up with a good vegan clam chowder—what would be the point of that?). But I digress.

On Grief and Not “Losing” Dad

I think I have a different kind of relationship with grief—if the deaths I’ve been present with over the course of my life have had any influence on it, and me, anyway. Grief comes with expectations and I’ve learned all those expectations are wrong. No one gets to tell any other person how to grieve. Or when or for how long. Grief will touch us all but the grief that comes is our and ours alone—grief is unique to the person grieving. Even though we may have experienced the same beloved’s death, there is no way I can tell you “I know exactly how feel.” ‘Cuz I don’t. Only you know how you feel; only I know how I feel. But we’ll all feel grief at various times over the course of our lives. To be alive and to know love is to also know grief:

“Grief is a form of loving that which has passed from view. Love is a form of grieving that which has not yet done so.”

~ Stephen Jenkinson

If you are alive, and can feel anything in your heart, if you can feel even the slightest ember of love, you will experience grief. And because you will, grief will become a part of your story—for life. That’s not a sad thing, though. Necessarily. And THAT’s important!

Important because I’ve also learned grief is a skill—and it’s a skill that no one really teaches (anymore at least. I think indigenous tribes and peoples were best at this and maybe still are.)

More from Jenkinson:

Grief has to be learned, which means it has to be taught. Which means it is possible not to learn it. When we keep insisting on grief being a feeling, or a process that needs management and closure, we are talking about grief as an affliction, the same way we talk about dying. But something changes when we see grief as a skill that needs learning, which is what it is. As a culture we are grief-impaired not because we don’t have what we need to feel bad, but because we are grief-illiterate. We aren’t taught to grieve—instead, we are taught to handle grief, to resolve grief, to get on the other side of it. [In short, to get over it, and the quicker the better.]

(From Jenkinson’s seminal work; “Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul. North Atlantic Books, 2015. p 369.)

Grief is not an affliction. Perhaps we’d do better by death, those of our beloveds and those of our own, if, as we love each, we also remember that that love is also a form of grief for each as well—“for that which has not yet passed from view.” I wonder how much gratefulness would fill our hearts if we never forgot that one day, and soon, that which we love, that WHO we love, in the ways we can while they are here with us on earth, soon won’t be. To move this fact from our rational thinking minds (aka “of course I know you’ll die”) to our intuitive feeling hearts (aka “oh my god, you’re going to die soon and I haven’t told you and showed you how much I love you!”). It puts a whole new spin on the fun mottos:

“Don’t sweat the small stuff. Note: It’s all small stuff.

Love anyway. They’re gonna be gone soon.”

Ross Gay is among my favorite writers, poets, and thinkers. Synchronicity was on full abundant mode recently:

Effloresce: (verb)

In this context, “to burst forth, to flower.”

In literary applications, effloresce is typically used to portray a beautiful, meaningful, or colorful emergence.

(Merriam-Webster, 2024)

What if joy could be the prevailing emotion as an outcome of sharing our grief with each other—a result of helping each other along on our shared paths of heartbreak?

Effloresce is the perfect poetical framing of what has been a result following Dad’s death for my family, at least for me anyway (I shouldn’t speak for anyone else in my family on such a profound experience that is grief, although I have an intuition this is true as well for most in my family).

Effloresce—to flower. How apropos:

[We don’t truly realize it,] but flowers in bloom are working their way toward their death…. That’s what their openness means, that the petals will peel off and fall soon, that the heart of the flower will be all that’s left for a while, skewered on the end of a brittle shaft in the thinning sun. It is in the flower’s nature to give itself away unto its death in the act of being itself. Until we learn how to see the flower’s end, until we are willing to see it, how much of the flower do we see? Only the part that makes us feel the feeling we’re looking for. Grief is that learning and that ability of seeing the story of the thing, the whole story.

(Jenkinson, Die Wise. p. 368-9)

When I read that from Gay above, I thought: You know, I think that is exactly what we (my family) did following my Dad’s death. I think we allowed joy to effloresce as we helped carry each other’s heartbreak over this past year and especially through those first days and weeks following his death. And like Jenkinson teaches us, because of how we intentionally journeyed with Dad, and each other through his dying and death, I think we’ve also learned how to better, and more clearly, see our Dad, our whole Dad, his whole story, that now includes his death and memory—and his Soul’s return to where it began: its True Home.

Now, back to ∞ b - d ∞

AKA Dad’s whole story.

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

~ Mark Twain

Putting it into words now, with this last major hint from Samuel Langhorne Clemens:

There is eternity, followed by a birth, then a life, then a death. All followed by the same eternity again. That dash, there, in the middle…that would be a life’s span, from birth to death, as incarnated in the form of a body here on earth. My dad’s life spanned 84+ years—his dash was 84 years long; my life is spanning time as we speak—so is yours. For each of us currently alive, an eternity plus a birth has preceded this current moment. Soon enough, a death and another eternity will follow. For Each. And. Every. One. Of. Us.

My Dad is there now. His Soul has resumed its regularly scheduled programming—interruption over.

I find comfort in this. I see this life of ours here on earth as our Soul’s interruption—a way the Soul, or whatever you might call the mysterious life/energy force that gifts us our sentience, our consciousness, gets to learn more about the Universe, at least this very tiny pale blue dot of it. I’m starting to see how we all might be little flecks of form created from the same mysterious Source (which resides in mysterious eternity) that have been gifted, for the very briefest of moments, an embodied awareness of humanity, before returning back to our original and eternal state—all so that this awareness called consciousness can have a human experience.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

~ Pierre Tielhard de Chardin

Life is the Soul’s interruption from a place and time in which it naturally resides—eternity. What happens after death is the same that was happening prior to birth—we will feel after we die the exact same way we felt prior to our birth. Which is to say—we will have the experience of nothingness. It doesn’t have to be an abstract concept.

In a real way, we each experience this “experience of nothingness” every day. It will take just a bit of calm imagination, but you can call it to mind right now: try to recall what it feels like THE moment you have fallen asleep—when consciousness has dropped, the mind has silenced, the breath has deepened, and an embodied peace has arrived. In that space, all feeling has ceased, all anxiety about the past has been forgotten, all worry about the future has been dropped. It is said that at those times, before REM-cycle/dream sleep begins, that we get the closest we can to what it might be like to be dead. To what it might have been like before we were born. Additionally, if you have ever experienced general anesthesia for a surgical procedure, you’ve experienced the same phenomena—the same space. It’s the exact same feeling. In other related words, imagine never waking up from general anesthesia.

In that space, despite all our worries and fears about it, there is no pain; there is no sadness; there is no worry; there is no recall of family or friends; there is no thinking or feeling or sensing of any kind; and there is no sense of time because time does not exist in that space. Rather, there is nothing. We experience nothingness—the absence of thingness, the absence of all things. And it is peaceful.

Some might even say beautiful.

“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up…children imagine things like this all the time. If you think on it long enough you’ll soon begin to imagine what it was like to wake up after having never gone to sleep. That’s what it was like to be born. The two are not different.”

~ Alan Watts

Now, do I really know this as scientific truth? Nope, not yet at least. But maybe soon if the new scientific inquiry into consciousness and quantum theory has any say—and it will. Regardless, these teachings are ancient and Indigenous and Aboriginal and Eastern—these teachings continue to be handed down to us as Wisdom even though we are rarely now reaching up to grasp them. I’m at a point where I am no longer willing or able to ignore the almost universal consistencies inherent in these wisdom teachings and traditions. So, do I really “know” this as Truth? Yes, yes I do.

Besides, what does it really mean “to know” something anyway?

Dad

At first read, you may think there was a lot in this post that wasn’t specifically about my Dad. But it’s been all about my Dad. This, all this, has been a massive Eldering all from my Dad as he taught me about his dying and death—in doing so, he was helping me learn about my grief. Just as he did each day on the farm when he showed me how to do something (eg drive tractor, pull a trailer, use a backhoe, drive a dump truck, use a stick transmission, train bines, arch bines, raise downed bines, cut ditches, pull water through a tube, weld, torch, kill weeds in multiple ways…all learnable skills essential to farming), he continued to teach me the skill of grieving through his dying—an essential skill to be human.

Yes, sadness and pain and suffering and heartbreak and tears have surfaced over the course of this past year—for many of us. And it’s natural to come to a place of not needing to understand why those emotions may come up at unexpected and weird times. That’s just how grief works. But grief also includes love—and we are not cold-hearted or odd to also know that celebration can be an important part of grief too. We celebrate because my Dad WAS! We celebrate my Dad! We have such amazing memories of our Dad—with so many more to be shared as we move forward into our futures, and as we move dad further into our shared pasts. With each passing day, we learn from the grief that Dad is gifting us, every day, from his death. Just as we’ve learned from our mom, and our sister, and our brother, and friends, and students, and sons and on and on and on. Each day moving forward now no longer carries the whimsically additional “wow, this is the first ____ without Dad.” Now, we enter a space of a new normal with him—joined now with mom, with our sister Toni, our brother Terry, our first born Ryan, and all past ancestors and friends who we’ve said goodbye to—held securely within our hearts. There, he gets to experience whole new worlds he never would have ventured to—only through our eyes now, because he’s returned to Soul. There is no need to place quotations marks around the word celebration when we speak of my Dad’s death. Wouldn’t it be lovely if more families and loved ones could get to the same place of understanding what death is, and could mean, in our lives?

Here’s what I KNOW for certain: Because he was, during his Soul’s interruption here on earth, we are!

And there is joy to be found.

In full efflorescence.

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Live, Laugh, and Love,

~ k

Always and Ubuntu.

🙏🏼