Getting ready to die

A poem and a story

Death is on my mind. Elisabet Sahtouris, another great teacher of mine, just closed her eyes for the last time. Perhaps she joined the magnificent set of elder women who’ve gone, as Hazel Henderson said, virtual. Hazel Henderson. Barbara Marx Hubbard. Emilia Rathbun.

Who else is on your list?

Where did they go?

We have beliefs, but they are only hunches. After years of study and teaching of the mystical Jesus and other religious thought, Emilia said to me (paraphrased): “I don’t know anything about God. I call God the Mysterium Tremendum. I get clues, only clues.”

We have reports from Near Death Experiences that the passage into death is full of love and light, but beyond? Perhaps you know. I don’t.

Father and son

Recently I had the glorious good fortune to sit with a father and son as they each reflected on his death, likely within a year. The father spoke of the falling away, sometimes painfully, of his identities, his fears, his questions and his probing for what the soul-experience of death might be. He’s collected stories of a whoosh of upward light as the being passes. His son reflected on journeying forward without a father who had loved him unconditionally his whole life, and with whom he had worked for decades. He spoke of the grief he feels and anticipates, and also of the responsibilities of carrying on the work - and perhaps presiding over its mutations, transformations and possible failure.

The room, for me, filled with light, and grief pierced my mind’s thick frameworks right into my heart.

I remembered this poem I wrote a year ago, based on a dream.

Getting Ready to Die

Last night a woman I barely know
died
in my dream.
Many of us were in a meadow with her as she rose.
The tethers of her light body
came undone and
She ascended
Radiant
like a great ship leaving a harbor into the night.

There was no more longing in her, or others,
for her life to go on.
It was like
She herself
Declared her ship ready to sail
And cut the ribbon.

She had given us every bit of herself
Memories, wisdom, details about the bills.
We all watched this version of the virgin
Old lady Irene
Rise from her body.

What would it be to die like that?
Everyone you know there in the light-filled field
Willing to take their piece of you and carry on.
You, free, with the stuff of life in order.
Insurance policies and your will in a folder on the desk.
Bills paid.
Every *thing*, from the car to the measuring spoons,
Tossed, given or assigned.
No back 40 with dreams not lived,
tasks not done,
promises not kept.

After she ascended
The field was full of light for a long time.
The people slowly wandered away
with only light memories to carry home,
which, if they misplaced them,
nothing would really be lost.

What would it be to die like that?

Something in me is clearing the decks
To get to my soul’s bucket list:
The songs not yet sung,
The pardons not yet given,
The poems still bubbling up
From the artesian well of creativity,
The last hurrahs of my warrior’s quest to
Get everyone to do something
So beautiful that ancient knots are loosened
And we all, all of us, are
in that golden field.

What would it be like to be intimate with death,
To introduce myself long before we meet,
To probe the mysteries
Turning this way and that
Like gems
Our human notions
Of karma, of the afterlife, of soul liberation
Just to see how the light shines through,
Until death is no stranger
And, at the end, cut my own ribbons
And ascend
As Irene did in my dream?