Halloween seems to be as good a time as any to talk about the dead, ghosts, revenants, and the afterlife, I think, as it is one of the days of the year when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest and it is somewhat easier to communicate with those who have passed on. My father left this world at the age of 85 a week ago and I have found that his transference to the more subtle planes has been smooth sailing, all things considered. I have known others who shall remain nameless who were not so willing to make the transition, and because our civilization has such a problem with open discussions of death, I would like to discuss death and dying in this rare forum where we can honestly talk about the kind of ending of us can escape.
There seems to be an unwritten law in place that the amount of dissonance a person will have about death and dying (including his or her own death process) is proportionate to the lack of genuine spiritual work they have done while on the meat plane. The scanty few Christians I have known who have done legitimate spiritual work are completely at peace with the idea of death despite Christianity's schizoid views on what happens after death. Atheist agnostics who are generous to a fault or grateful to a fault have the same peaceful, accepting vibe. Spirituality is not the same as religion, though the two are not mutually exclusive.
I'll Say It Again: Meatworld Sucks
The ultimate goal of spiritual literacy seems to be not the factoids one can memorize about the history of magic and religion or the verses of holy books recited from memory but sincere and earnest attempts at communication with the Divine. Meatworld sucks and the only way it can suck less is by talking to entities far smarter than we are who are mostly not found among the ranks of other human beings. The only way we can try to talk to these intelligent beings is to put effort into reflecting their best aspects. Like us, many intelligent beings are flawed: just because someone is much further along on the path than we are does not mean he or she completely lacks faults. Athena got so angry at Arachne, she regressed the girl back into a spider's form. Perhaps Arachne deserved it, but it does seem a bit harsh. The Christian god contradicts himself every five pages of the "infallible" Bible, and Allah does the same every five pages of the Quran. Rather than discarding Athena, Yahweh, and Allah for their inconsistencies and blunders, I think it may be a better strategy to look at what they have done right, because despite them being wrong every now and then, they are still far smarter than I am and I still have much to learn from any given one of them in my primitive, ambulatory ape condition.
The Lucky Winner
I hit the jackpot at ten days old when I was given up by a twenty-two year old sansei college student who fled from the East Coast to Chicago in order to bear the shame of unwed pregnancy. Through a bunch of uncanny coincidences, I was brokered to a thirty-something couple in an up and coming suburb. Adoption being what it is, my white parents were charged a small fortune in order to get a half-Japanese, half-white baby. I looked a hell of a lot more Asian back then, and my parents realized it and decided to name me Kim (hilariously a Korean surname, but what did they know?) instead of naming me after one of my adoptive grandmothers. As a baby, my parents tell me I slept an extraordinary amount, to the point where they worriedly checked on me to make sure I hadn't died. Within the window of a year, my mother was pregnant with one of my brothers. I like to believe my adoption had something to do with it, or at least with the kind of relaxation required for nature to work its course in accordance with will.
I started out with what appears to have been a single lousy parent (birthfather reportedly was not at the birth to sign the papers) and quickly got passed into the hands of the world's best parents. Despite life's dramas and troubles, we all stuck it out and I was never away from my family for any significant length of time. Along the way, I grew up, got married, forged a career in music teaching, and realized an odd part of my destiny.
When I was about fourteen, the phrase "My eyes have burned with the living and shone with the dead" burned itself into my consciousness like an annoying ad jingle. I still don't really know what it means. I have some suspicion it refers to a predisposition on my part for talking to dead people. In junior high, one of my classmates who I did not know or hang out with hung himself in his bedroom. Though I never saw his detached spirit, I am fairly certain I had a bunch of conversations with him for about a week after he took his own life. I also talked with dead historical figures in my head -- if I was studying them or reading/listening to their life works, I tended to talk with them as if they were conversing with me. I don't feel this is unusual at all. I think the dead kid talked to others besides me the week after he died; the difference is that other people did not have the natural ability to talk to him as easily as I did. The same is true for the dead historical figures.
Talking to the Ecosystem
Talking to yourself is common. My Dad did it a great deal -- he was a funny guy and would often speak funny, self-deprecating comments aimed at himself. I talk to myself. I don't think people who talk to themselves are actually talking exclusively to themselves. I had a schizophrenic neighbor who would yell obscenities and unpleasantries as he walked up and down the block. Sometimes he would run down the sidewalk, charging like a bull. Though modern psychiatry considered his ailing brain a faulty universe of one, I think he carried with him a host of malevolent non-corporeal beings who liked to torture him. Perhaps some of them were demons -- I don't know. Though I could be an exorcist in a future life, I don't think that is going to be my occupation in this one. My hypothesis is that we all have communities of beings who hang around us all the time and we are constantly conversing with those beings. When we become spiritual, we raise the vibe of conversation and leave behind the more hopeless and negative beings in order to "hang out" with some of the smarter, more helpful ones.
My friend's mother died at the age of 90 in her home a couple of years before the whole Coronatarian debacle. I was there at her bedside along with my friend with one of us holding each hand as she slipped away. Some deaths are fast and some are slow. In her case, her deterioration was slow but sure. In the end, she was sleeping nearly all the time. I visited my friend for one of the holidays and she had been sleeping and going in and out of consciousness all that week. Once I got there, she had a moment where she rallied, her eyes opened a bit, and she looked into her child's eyes and said goodbye. Her consciousness ebbed as we cried and watched.
I was grateful for that experience because I was able to see the signs when my father started to leave this world. When an elderly person is getting close to death, they become much paler and their mouths change shape. It becomes harder for them to smile; death seems to love a frown. Their chins recede. Their muscles become soft, flabby, and atrophied, like wet sand in a rubber balloon. For the sensitive, their energy is different. My father's life force weakened considerably after a series of prostate events and medical procedures that started about six years ago. His death was as much due to old age as to iatrogenic injury, but that is a topic for another time.
The etheric body is the layer of energy that animates the physical body. All physical beings have etheric bodies. In the case of humans and other animals, our etheric bodies are what make us alive on the physical plane. When we die, the etheric body takes longer to die than the physical body by anywhere from a week to a few months. When my cat Kiki died, it took a few months for her etheric body to die. If the dead person is cremated, the etheric body is obliterated upon the moment of cremation. The pyramids of the Pharaohs were attempts at keeping the etheric body alive by nourishing it with sacred and blessed objects (and often slain servants and pets) which also had their own etheric bodies. There is something about preserving the flesh form that seems to sustain the etheric body far beyond physical death, but those ghoulish arts have been all but lost in the modern era.
Dealing with the Old and Dying
In a civilization that fears, hates, shuns, and avoids death, it can be a real undertaking (see what I did there) to deal with the aged in a rational and sane manner. I love lists, so here is mine for handling the aging and dying process with an elderly loved one.
1. BE THERE. If you live far away, move closer. As much pride-swallowing as it took to move back in with my parents when I was at the ripe age of 41 and my husband well into his fifties, I regret absolutely nothing. Yes, it was humiliating to reveal to all the nice neighbors that my husband and I were fiscal idiots. Sometimes it was unbearable to be so childlike and dependent and that is why we ended up in our own house about 40 minutes away by car. The trend of atomized families makes sense only if the relative in question is thoroughly horrible and awful. Otherwise, living with or near family is a blessing.
2. Let them eat coffee cake. I have been an ethical, whole foods vegan since 2010 and I did my level best to change my parents into vegetarians back in the day, especially when I was living at their house. I cooked my parents lunch almost every day during a two year stint of living with them so much that my husband complained he missed my meals because he was at work! As my father became more aged and infirm, I walked away from trying to get them to eat healthy, in fact, I was the one buying them KFC and kolachky because that is what he enjoyed. Once again, I have zero regrets and I know letting him eat junky garbage was the smartest and best thing I could have done. The end of life is a hospice and if someone is eating the "bad" stuff or taking the "good" painkillers, it's too damn late to worry about their deleterious effects. If they have anything even close to the look of death I described above, it is likely they won't have much of an appetite. From what I have seen of the aged in my life, if the elder is anywhere north of 75, it seems like a good time to loosen dietary restrictions and get out the opiates and marijuana.
3. Start talking to the dead NOW. Chances are you are already talking to them. Talk to your dead grandma as if she was still there. Resolve the emotional baggage about the dead people now and those who die later won't be so difficult. When someone dies, he or she dissolves but does not go away entirely. His or her higher self, the self that made him or her incarnate in the first place, is still there. My Dad's higher self, with his compulsive generosity, excellent sense of humor, and cheerful helpfulness, is now part of my spiritual ecosystem. Whenever I choose generosity in the face of worried parsimony, humor in the face of fear-mongering, and helpfulness in the face of selfish greed, I invoke my Dad and his higher self lives through me. I can still talk to him without pining away in despair that he is gone. When you talk to your "ancestors" or in my case my adoptive ancestors, you are talking to their higher selves. When you die, it is my profound belief that like my Dad you will go to a place beyond space and time where you will hang out with the higher selves of the people you loved and who loved you in this and other incarnations. Your higher self is likely hanging out with dead people from your current and past lives right now. The more you work on your higher self by discarding greed, hatefulness, covetousness, and other deadly sins the easier it becomes for you to commune with your community of higher selves. You become conscious of them as much as a being trapped in Meatworld can become conscious of them.
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