I was notified this week of the passing of a close friend. Her death was a surprise and left me feeling an empty hole inside. She lived to a ripe old age and there was nothing unusual about her passing, but none-the-less, I struggled with adjusting to the unwelcome news.
I remembered back to when my dad passed. I fought then to fill the empty space in my life that seemed unfillable. Sitting at my desk two days later, trying to write a short talk to give at his funeral, my pen failed to ink any words. My mind drew a blank.
Dad was gone. I would not be visiting him anymore. He would not be calling on me. I would not hear his voice, ask for his advice, or have dinner with him again.
What now?
As I groped for an anchor to stabilize my emotions, and making no progress with my talk, I heard a distinct voice within saying, “What are you waiting for? Get busy and write. You have a job to do.”
I bolted upright in my chair. It was dad! It was not an audible voice like a person talking to me in the room, but it was a divine impression giving me direction. It was a “dad direction.”
Dad was always a very industrious person. He never wasted a minute with inactivity or idle wondering. He was always an up and doing kind of guy, and very successful in his work.
The command to get busy and write is exactly what dad would have told me to do if he were standing over my shoulder.
Dad was with me. Dad was not gone. He had never left. I suddenly realized.
I would never see him again as a bodily form, but his real individuality as an idea of God was always present in consciousness. Dad had not gone away. I needed to start looking for him in a different place and in a different way—in Mind, not in matter, and as idea, not as physicality.
The belief of death is an awful imposition on humanity, for no one ever dies. The temporal body disappears, but each of us has a spiritual individuality that lives forever in Spirit. And Spirit is here and now, discernible in the present through spiritual sense.
We “stay in touch” with our loved ones through spiritual sense.
And this is what I started to do. I stopped grieving over the loss of a physical form and started rejoicing in understanding dad’s true spiritual form. Dad was an idea in Mind, and I was just as at-one with that idea now as ever—in Mind, not in matter.
From a spiritual point of view, nothing had changed between us.
My belief of loss vanished and the grieving stopped for I had nothing to grieve over.
As I can see clearly today that my dad is alive and well in Spirit, I have done the same with the announcement of the passing of my friend. She is alive and well in Spirit, as idea. She never was a physical body. She was a spiritual idea all along. Grief is the effect of holding a mistaken identity. Once we drop the mistaken identity and adopt the true, we see there has been no loss, and grieving is replaced by rejoicing.
As the Psalmist wrote:
“I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”
This rule applies to all of us, without exception, including our loved ones. Understanding it is a choice of looking in the right place for life and identity—in God! Not into matter. And in this understanding there are no more empty holes.
This is my story of when my dad died. My name is Dennis, but my dad always called me Denny. When I was a little boy my dad would play his guitar and sing the song Danny Boy for me, only he changed it to O Denny Boy. I did not know the true name of the song until I was grown.
When my dad died, I said to him in the casket, sing Denny Boy for me one more time. The next day we were visiting the cemetery to check on his grave. A friend went with us to visit the grave of her daughter who was buried in the same cemetery. On this girls grave was a marker that had the word Serendipity on it. My daughter asked me what this meant. I explained that is was a sudden event, miracle like that blesses.
I walked away from this girl’s grave and spotted an unusual marker that had musical notes on it. It had words on it too: “O Danny Boy, I love you so.”
Dennis,
Thank you for sharing. Wow! Your story really reached me…
When I was with my father at the time he was passing on, he actually was speaking to his brothers and sisters. I didn’t really understand it at the time as he was asking them where his mother was and I thought that he was directing that question to me. What I took away from that was that we do see those loved ones again who have gone on.
Denny’s experience was very touching. Thank you.
when my Mother passed on she too would talk with relatives. Mostly many of her aunts and cousins who had gone on before her. The hospice even gave infomation to patients familes about this common happening.