Love, Like Life, Never Dies

Below is the unedited version of the story I submitted to Common Sentience for the book, Mediumship: Sacred Communications with Loved Ones from Across the Veil. This story is about one of the first communications I had with a loved one just passed. I share this in the spirit of love.

Michelle

  I sat on the steps of the pink marbled mausoleum funeral home. Light filled the afternoon, making a blinding reflection off the stones. Sea gulls swept the sky and cried out, a soft heavy humidity full of salty briny air filled my nose and lungs.

         In the heavy dampness my skin felt open, warm, and though the day was hot, somehow the humidity and the nearby sea felt luscious. I never felt so present in my life…

         The light changed, and the definition that was bright and sharp suddenly was foggy with a dense brilliance at the same time sparkly. My deep, unbearable grief suddenly fell from me, as if disappearing down a dark shaft into the bowels of the earth, and I felt my body suddenly light and free. It was as if everything I felt and perceived was lifted up, still aware of my body but a lightness of being that wasn’t there a moment before.

I saw and at the same time felt Light: I am Light, and this Light is Love, permeating everything.

         An intense feeling of love filled me, swept everything else away, was reaching out as far as I could see, and as deep as I felt.

         Moments before this I had stumbled out of the Funeral Home, blinded by tears in a grief so heavy, so dark - it felt as if it could never, not ever, possibly end. I had gazed upon the gray, still form of my partner’s sweet sister and dear friend, someone I had hoped to know forever. She was brilliant, spiritual, incredibly intelligent and creative – one of those people who are so much larger than life –  no way she could ever disappear, ever not be here to take care of everyone, everything. That she would only grow in magnificence, inspiring us with her greatness.

But she was gone in a blink of an eye, another victim of motor vehicle accident – her entire family in the car she was driving. Her three young children and husband survived.

         It was clear that she was no longer in the small, gray shell, I tried to feel her there, but was met with a hollow silence.

         Now moments later, as I stepped outside, she was opening the doorway between the worlds, allowing me a glimpse to where she was, or traveling to, showing me she was more alive than ever. It was a glimpse that shook all my perceptions, erased my previous beliefs of life and reality, and of what was real.

         I heard her laugh, and felt her love, “You have to tell them I am alive,” she said. In this moment she was more real than real, this Light filled place more real than anything yet experienced in life as I knew it, proving to me that love, like life, never dies.

Evidence of survival...

  Later, I did share this with her mother, as well as some other moments she visited me, but it was decades later that her mother thanked me, for my “unshakeable belief Michelle was alive.”

The day before visiting the funeral home I visited her children and husband at the hospital. I was desperate to feel or sense her. Visiting the family in shock was unbearable, and I found I had nothing to offer, nothing to say, being in shock myself. No one was talking about it, or crying, and my constant tears seemed to only make everyone uncomfortable. I went into one of the hospital bathrooms, locked the door, and tried to communicate with her through my pendulum, something we had learned in a class we had taken together at Unity.

         “What is my yes? My no?...then, “Is Michelle here? No. Is Michelle in the building? Yes. Is Michelle in this room? No. Is Michelle upstairs with the kids? No. Is Michelle in the mortuary downstairs? Yes.” Hmm. Maybe I was being too literal. I knew her body was down there, but surely she wasn’t.

         Another time she visited me was probably a month later, back in Vermont, and I had asked her to give me another sign. That night I had an incredibly real and vivid dream, where she appeared in a bathroom and went in and out of the shower behind the shower curtain, each time appearing in a new body – black hair, then blonde, etc. It was a clear message from her that the soul is eternal, and our time here reincarnating into a new body is like an outfit we take on and off.

For a few days I was reeling from this dream, and felt her presence so strongly, and took out my pendulum to give it another try.

Immediately we began to communicate and felt her presence so strongly it was as if she was in the room. Our conversation was long, and emotional, and I began to feel myself slipping from normal consciousness again into perceptions that were rocking my mind and ego at a pace I couldn’t integrate – so I told her I had to go, “No!” the pendulum said. I felt her regardless, but I broke the connection, asked her to let me take it all in, and then I went out into the woods to walk and get grounded. It took me many days to get, “back to normal,” and I struggled to accept that life continued after death, that Michelle indeed continued to exist and our relationship was continuing…that I really existed in “two worlds” unmistakably.  It was for real, not just a concept or a theory – I actually experienced it, and my perception was truly and completely changed. Perhaps most of us will go through this as we awaken to our true natures…it is a process. We know this as children, then forget.

A few days later I asked her for evidence, that it was really her. She shared that her best friend in England was pregnant, and was going to have a baby girl. A few phone calls later, I found out this indeed was true, her friend was pregnant. A few months after that I found out her friend did indeed give birth to a baby girl.

  Grief's gifts...

         Grieving the loss of Michelle’s physical presence was one of the darkest depths I have traveled, but my love for her wouldn’t let me look or turn away.

         This grief pushed me to the core of myself, to the experience that the only thing that remains after grief’s dark tidal waves is our own sense of Self, our inner core, unchanging spiritual nature. Nothing else is left. Grief is a dark river, submerging everything until you feel you cannot possibly survive without another breath of light, or relief, and then its’ waters recede until you are ready to journey to the dark underworld yet again.

         It is darkness perhaps only because our sight must be covered, temporarily blinded, for it to work. For it to wake up the soul.

         How else could I have come to a place of meeting my essential core, come to a place of spiritual understanding? She and I attended and grew close in our shared interest and excursions to spiritual growth and awareness classes and workshops, mostly at the Unity church. That was my gift from her: helping me to return to my spiritual path through our friendship and activities, and then the awakening I experienced from the initiation of grief from her death.

Grief’s gifts can be transformative and catastrophic, and no doubt her gifts were different for other loved ones.

         Her death was a wake-up call. Never did I feel so embodied and present in this raw, excruciating existence…and I saw how my life was something I had barely embodied.

         I felt the possibilities – what if I jumped in, accepted that I was meant to be here, really own and embrace my existence… and live!

     The gift of knowing that we live in a multi-sensory world and can embrace and cultivate multi-sensory gifts of perception: this is Michelle’s gift to me, and now to you as I share our story.