Where’s he gonna go?

Yes, that’s a part of the wonderful mystery, isn’t it. But we know. Even when we’ve forgotten, we know. Because we’ve been there. This is a post completely about FAITH! And Returning.

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Preface: As I write this preface on Thursday, March 9, Dad is resting comfortably in his bed, nestled among pillows and comforters, with the sun streaming in through the windows, and soft music playing. He is semi-conscious. It is very evident now we are with Dad on his final steps in his Journey Home—it may be, now, only days, if not hours, before we are forced to part. A parting in only one way though. More on that later. Just know our family is enfolded nicely within the loving support of an amazing Hospice team, the outpouring of warm thoughts from you all, and the love of each other. These are precious and tender moments we are living to the full.

Prior to this current moment, a moment now dictated solely by the innate wisdom of Dad’s body, I had written a number of blog posts that have been queued up ready for publishing. I want to continue to move forward in publishing them and I’ve made the decision to post them exactly as they were written, when they were written—this might give you more of a sense of a “living, thriving Dad” in the spirit in which I wrote them. We still have some things to learn about and from my Dad; I hope you stay engaged a while longer. It continues to be my high honor to share him with you. Thank you so much for your continued interest—your engagement here has been a salve for my own soul as I’ve shared my Dad with you.

We are on day 16 of this particular vigil.

~ Kert

Here is the first of the queued-up posts—most of which were written many weeks ago.

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With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time…
And all shall be well
And all manner of a thing shall be well…

~ T.S. Elliot

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This is kinda, sorta, a “Dying Wiser” post, but not officially.

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Gonna take a little walk
through them fields.
Gonna carry me gently
for my heart to heal.
Gonna find me a daemon
in a dark, dark wood. 
You can’t come with me…

I wish you could. 

~ Gregory Hoskins
song lyrics from “Take a Little Walk”

I read something very intriguing the other day. But first….

So much of our mental energy, and even existential angst and suffering, when we age and approach our ends, arises because of the mystery of the unknown that awaits us. This is 100% Dad’s experience right now—and I am fortunate to be along side. There is fear there, understandably. Or rather there can be fear there; if you’ve read these posts from their near-start, you know fear at the precipice, any precipice, isn’t inevitable—it’s, oddly, a choice.

Dad is at his threshold, or actually just a few but unknowable amount of short steps shy of his own precipice. Every day he takes another step toward it—and as he does so, the mystery and uncertainty, and sadly fear, for Dad, seems to grow. Like Hoskins writes in the lyrics above, Dad would give ANYTHING for a companion to walk with him there. But we can’t. We can just get “thisclose…” and then we will have to part ways. For a little while at least.

Our ancestors, and by ancestors I mean the WAAAYYYY-back ancestors, before the human invention of all religions; ancestors who were indigenous to the places and landscapes of our own origins; and by proxy, and just as legitimately, the indigenous ancestors of every place, THEY knew where we went, and they know where we go. Because, unlike our current selves who have self-distanced from our once-innate connection, our ancestors (and still current indigenous cultures) had always stayed in connection with the eternal soul—because they lived so intimately with Nature, where it, the “Anima Mundi,” can be so vividly found: the “Soul of the World.”

We know we’ve self-distanced ourselves, as a culture and as individuals, because, as Dad is showing us, we feel fear and uncertainty as we approach death. And we want companionship on THAT journey. But we only go alone. So as we’ve said before, we lost what once was a cultural innateness on how to “do death” well. Nowadays, we really struggle to even talk about it, so we’d rather not. And then we don’t. And then as we approach death, well, we turn into my Dad—a person who would have benefitted from knowing a better way to be while dying. Dementia notwithstanding.

We know our ancestors stayed connected to that mysterious “next,” because they ritualized all aspects of the journey through initiation, ceremony, ritual, mythology, celebration, and Eldering. Those cultures told their stories of the living and the dying to their children—and they memorialized their dead by weaving them into the culture’s rich tapestry of existence and history. To become an ancestor is quite the thing! In that manner, their ancestors are never forgotten. Instead, they know their ancestors bless their current journeys, called human life, because the’ve been here and the ancestors know where they are going and how to get there. And they will welcome them upon arrival. There is a sense of honor and dignity within the members of cultures who have sustained and nurtured the sacredness of death.

Gregory Hoskins, above, shares in a lyrical and nurturing way, the longing for companionship when it’s our time to go. Because we fear what we think will be a lonely journey, we don’t want to go alone. “You can’t come with me, I wish you could.” This is a concept that feels right because I think we all share a measure of trepidation and angst when we think about our deaths—it’s pretty great to be alive as miraculous humans on this miraculous earth, why would we want all this to end?

But we’ve simply forgotten. We may have to go “there” alone, but it’s not to new territory. We’ve been there already.

So it’s just a Returning.

Twain, in his uniquely witty way, was wise in this sharing. ‘Cuz, he knew.

Eternal Echoes

Okay, now the passage that intrigued me and served as the seed for this post.

In 1999, the Irish philosopher/poet, and former Catholic priest, John O’Donohue, published Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong. (Perennial/HarperCollins, 1999. BTW, I highly recommend this! I highly recommend ANYTHING by the late O’Donohue!). In that book, on page 24, in an almost throwaway passage, because the way he wrote it was so sublime, he writes:

There is no other way into the universe except through the body of a woman. But where were you before you were conceived and entered the womb? This is one of the most fascinating in-between times in any life. It is also the one we know least about. Yet it is a journey that each of us has made. In the Western and Oriental traditions, we have a vast architecture of theory regarding life after death; there are bardos, purgatories, Nirvana, and beatific visions. There is a carefully thought-out path of continuity, transfiguration, and final homecoming after death. It is interesting to note the substantial absence, especially in the Christian tradition, of any geography of the time before we were conceived. Maybe it sounds ridiculous to explore this, since we did not exist before we were conceived. This may be true, but it is surely too simple to imagine that one moment there was no sign of you, everything was blank and empty, and then the next moment you began to be there. If you came out of somewhere, then you had to be somewhere before you came. There can be no such apparitions of pure beginnings. As well as having an “afterwards,” every person has a “before.” The difficulty in imagining this is that the other world is invisible, and all we have are intimations of our invisible past.

“Each of us comes from somewhere more ancient than any family.”

“…every person has a before.” And “Each of us comes from somewhere more ancient than any family.”

Don’t you just LOVE that?!? Kind of makes me want to go there—which I will soon enough. So shall you. So shall Dad. Turns out, we’ve been there before. Imagine that!

Personally, O’Donohue’s sentiments, teachings he intimated from his ancient Celtic ancestors, offers me so much sustenance and assurance that, come my own end, I’ll simply just get to go back to where I’ve come from. And because I came from a “somewhere” that is eternal and boundless, a place I’ve only left for the very short time I will be inhabiting this human body, I have faith that that won’t be a time I will fear. Quite the contrary, it will simply be the next wonderful step back into a place that returns me to Soul. These are Elderings from the sages of our past. And they cannot be anything other than True. So we ask ourselves, when we think of Dad, “Why the fear? You know where you are going…

…it’s called home.”

Dad will experience exactly this too—it is the inheritance of an ancient and eternal knowing that only our Souls know. He just isn’t at the trust and faith place yet. There still are times when he will tell us he’s ready to just give up; while at virtually the same time be too scared to want to go there. I think he actually does pray to God to “hurry it up, already. ‘Cuz I’m ready.” He still asks “why hasn’t the Lord taken me yet?”

This is where Dad could have benefitted from an Elder—Eldering separate from, but that also enriched, his own learning from his Catholic tradition. It is quite obvious either those teachings didn’t go far enough, or Dad wasn’t clued in. Likely both. In any case, Catholic liturgy and catechism didn’t resonate for Dad to a place of true knowing. The fact is, this is not uncharted territory; the great spirits and ancestors of our past had “been there, done that.” And it WAS a part of their culture back then, through their myths, stories, and cosmologies, to teach it to their children. Some cultures in our world still do this—mostly the Native indigenous cultures who reside, still, in their places of origin. Because O’Donohue would remind us such narratives are intimately connected to the landscapes and geographies of our birth.

So again, Dad didn’t have that wise Eldering. But through Dad now, he’s Eldering us. And it’s to our benefit. But we have to pay attention, right?

Right???

Don’t we say “We can’t wait to get home?”

I think this happens to most of us. No matter the destination or amount of fun we may have had when we’ve been on holiday somewhere, most of us likely feel some form of “it will be good to be home again.” (I feel that way even after three days at Disneyland—one can tolerate It’s a Small, Small World only so many times! AMIRITE? OFCOURSEI’MRITE!)

We gain or experience deep comfort in our return home from that long trip elsewhere, a return we never fear because it is home and familiar and safe. And as O’Donohue and Watts (below) and Twain, and all those ancestors and indigenous peoples would remind us, we should feel the exact same when we die.

We’ll be home, then, too.

Like our current home, there is nothing to fear there either.

Dad doesn’t understand or trust this, yet. We’re working on it but he would have benefitted from some good old fashion Eldering on this point. Eldering that went further than what he was taught in his Catholic catechism. Fortunately for us, that Eldering is available to us—but whereas it would have effortlessly been taught to us by our ancestors had we lived in another place and time, we have to make effort to find these Elders and these Elderings in these current days. The seeking of it is a courageous act because the topic is hard; and it does take effort because it is so much easier to watch Netflix, or post to Facebook, or lose ourselves in all forms of social media. “Learn more about death? Now? Why? That’s macabre. And it gives me the heebie jeebies. What a downer. C’mon, let me show you this cool cat video on my TikTok!”

In case you are wondering, I don’t have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok accounts. Unfortunately, I can no longer live without YouTube though. Sigh.

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Born in England in 1915, Alan Watts was a writer, philosopher, and popularizer of Eastern and Mystical religions and philosophies for a Western audience. His talks are meaningfully famous and popular and can be found all over the internet. They are worth listening to as he offers a unique and often-times lighthearted yet spot-on look at this thing we are all doing—“being human.” Watts died in 1973.

This is truly remarkable.

“What will it be like to go to sleep, and never wake up?” That is what death is. Then he reminds us we have already done that:

“It’s the same as it was when you woke up after having never gone to sleep.”

That was when we were born.

“We are in the universe to inhabit the lovely eternity of our souls and grow real.”

~ John O’Donohue

Here’s to growing real.

A Celtic Blessing Upon Entering Death
~ John O’Donohue

I pray that you will have the blessing 
Of being consoled and sure about your death.

May you know in your soul
There is no need to be afraid.

When your time comes, may you have
Every blessing and strength you need.

May there be a beautiful welcome for you
In the home you are going to. 

You are not going somewhere strange,
Merely back to the home you have never left.

May you live with compassion
And transfigure everything
Negative within and about you.

When you come to die, 
May it be after a long life.

May you be tranquil
Among those who care for you. 

May your going be sheltered
And you welcome assured.

May your soul smile
In the embrace
Of your Anam Cara. 

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By the way, do you have your carton of Strawberry Ice Cream in your freezer on stand by? Bonus points if you make it a plant-based, vegan variety (we like Oatly, Ben and Jerry’s, So Delicious, and Halo Top brands). Double bonus points if it’s oatmilk.

Love, always love,

Kert

🙏🏼

T plus 250 days and counting. At the end of every day, we all are one day closer to our own deaths. And not a single one of us knows the number of our days remaining—neither still does Dad. So may each day be lived as the miracle it is—and when it’s all over, let’s promise each other we’ll meet again, in all the beautiful places we were before we were born.

Dad will welcome us there too.

“All shall [indeed] be well,

All manner of a thing shall be well.”