stonetosser.com

I just back from my grandfather’s funeral. It was a very nice ceremony, simple and heartfelt; an unassuming event to honor an unassuming man. And his life was worth honoring; he lived a full life of 94 years and along the way did phenomenal service for our country and touched so many people with compassion, discipline and strength that I doubt anyone could have kept count. He died on Thanksgiving day, appropriately for those of us called to give thanks for his life. Of course there was sadness and we all cried when the Air Force honor guard played taps over his grave, but those were passing tears to recognize the gap in our lives where Grandpa had always sat, now the residence of memory. They were not tears for his death.

As I listened to his life remembered, I was so thankful that in our family’s story - like my Grandmother and Father-in-law - Grandpa had left in the gentle way, the natural way that a life disengages from the earth when its body no longer serves it here.  He struggled in his final years with Alzheimer’s and was blessed with a loving wife and extended family to ease his passage, but it was clear that his time here was simply over. And when it’s time to move on, on any portion of a soul’s journey, it is simply time to go.

I believe this is true for any kind of death because I believe our souls don’t wink out when our life does.

Written this way, it all sounds very spiritual and gentle and easy, and in the natural death of older people it is a little easier. It’s easier for us to let them go because we can see evidence in their frail bodies that to keep them here would be little more than a selfish act. It’s easier for us to be unselfish for them.

The death of younger people is a harder shock to absorb. There is a special tragedy to overcome when children die or people with full lives yet to live leave us behind. Because I have no other way to understand it, I choose to believe that when this happens - as it has with my father and my Sister-in-law - the same principles are at work though their bodies do not appear to have failed as naturally. I choose to believe that their souls must no longer find this life on earth their best way forward.

It’s the rest of us that have trouble letting go, because it’s not our journey.

This belief comforts me as I read on the devastation of wars around the world, freak accidents, horrible diseases and violent outbursts that take young and old alike before their bodies have the chance to fail them naturally. In this sense, when I fall back on my beliefs to help me comprehend the incomprehensible I reinvent the purpose of spirituality since the beginning of time, praying along with the billions of souls that have gone before me and live along side me that our souls’ journey’s make sense on the cosmic level when they appear completely nonsensical from down here.

And so I come back from this reverie to look on my Grandfather’s death with awe and gratitude for the full life he lived and for the fact that his soul chose to be with us as long as it could have been. Selfishly, I hope that everyone else I love chooses to stay as long, but unselfishly I try to be prepared to let them go if they day comes that it simply can’t be.

Thanks for staying so long, Grandpa. I miss you, but I’m so very grateful for your memory and all the lives you touched while you were here. Be well “up there” and I look forward to the day we are reunited again on some other adventure.

Photo Credit: This picture of the White Light often reported from near death experiences is from a fascinating near death experience article at How Stuff Works: Has Science Explained Life After Death? Make sure to read the second page.