(Not) Understanding Death

​It’s amazing to me how my mind still, after 15 months, does not understand that George is dead.  He is dead, Jo!  He died.  You saw him dead.  His body without a George inside.  

What is it about Death that is so hard for my mind to grasp?  Is this a human condition, a cultural ineptitude, or my own personal denial?  I do not know how to hold my life with George, and my life after George, in the same hand.  I do not know how to see George’s life, and his death, in the same view.  When one seems real, the other seems illusory.  ​

​But they both exist.  I need to understand this, and my mind does not know how.

Perhaps it is not for my mind to understand.  When I found myself closest to the truth, closest to making sense of it all, I was at Shambhala Mountain Center in the Colorado Rockies and it was not my mind that made the pen move, that brought those words and ideas and understanding into the light.  I simply began writing, not knowing what was going to fall on the page, not using my mind to make the words appear, but simply being present with the moment, allowing whatever needed to move through me, to come forth and be known.  

It was not my mind.  It was something transcendent.  Perhaps it was my soul.  Perhaps it was George’s soul.  Perhaps it was the clear, calm, knowing voice of the universal consciousness that descended upon my human form that evening.  And for a moment in time, I knew.  I understood.  It all made beautiful perfect glorious sense.  

        George is here.  He is not gone, he is not dead.  I miss his beautiful body, but I have so much more of him now.  He, in fact, is so much more than he was when he was alive.  He has evolved and become pure light.  He has become the great Teacher he was always meant to be.  His death was his evolution, and mine.  It was our evolution.  Our awakening.

        George and I have known each other for a very long time.  We have been in love before this lifetime, and we have been separated.  We fundamentally understand the dance between this human existence and the flight of the soul.  The death of his body, this separation we are experiencing, is simply part of the plan, part of our work.  We are helping each other discover the Truth.

There was more, but I’ll spare you, for now.  That voice stayed with me for several weeks.  

I began telling people about it, because it was so consuming that any other answer to the question, “How are you?” would have been inauthentic and pointless.  As I’d hear myself tell our story, my rational mind would judge me and tell me I sounded crazy and delusional.  But I couldn’t hold it in.  It was too powerful.  Simultaneously I experienced abdominal pain, nausea, hot flashes, dizziness, headaches.  It felt like I was having some sort of spiritual awakening.  

I realized that I could continue following this path of spiritual wonderment and embrace the glory of understanding the death of the body and the immortality of the soul and teach of love and its infinite gifts, and how we are not bound to experiencing love in only this human form, but how love continues on, how our relationships continue on, long after we are dead… and I saw myself diving into this intriguing new world, never to return.

But then I made a choice.  I returned to my human experience.  Because I had not yet allowed myself to grieve for George, and I had not yet fallen to pieces, and I had not yet cried my heart out.  I had only been coping with his absence, learning to be a mother, and trying to return to school and resume a life.  I had not yet had the time or space to feel the depths of sadness that come with losing the human being you valued above all others in this life.  

I asked George, and the universe, for some space.  To allow me to be human, to allow me to feel the pain.  I wanted to make sure I’d done it, so I could fully participate in whatever came next.  

So I went, and I grieved.  Then I came back, and asked for George to join me.  
George, I am ready for you now!  Let’s do this!
Silence.

George?  Hey, I’m ready to receive your teachings.  I’m ready to embark on our new relationship.  Please come.
Nothing.
Hmm.
George!!

Day after day, life continues and I plod along on my human experience.  I have big decisions to make about the year ahead, I have my child to care for, and things feel heavy.  This is the point, I think, when I am supposed to start moving forward.  But I can’t find George.  He, in his new enlightened form, is supposed to come with me.  We are supposed to be doing this together.  But right now, I only see him in my past, and I cannot bear to leave him there.

I have wondered if I should not have stepped away from him in the first place.  Why did I feel the need to interfere?  To have my human experience of pain and suffering?  How could that be more appealing?  

But that is what I did, and therefore it had to be done.  

​I know that George will come back to me when he feels I am ready for him.  I know I have not lost him, not really.  But maybe…  I’ll be more careful, the next time I ask for space.  And perhaps my mind will never be able to understand death.  But my soul knows.