From Beyond the Grave

A great deal happened in my life in 2015. Around Thanksgiving, my relationship ended causing me to move from the cute home with access to 1/3 of an acre of growing things, to an apartment with no outside to call my own. I hope to spend more of my time focusing on the meditational portion of my studies.

Secondly, my mother passed late in the year, only 3 months after she found she had two tumors on her pancreas. She had been living in an independent-living apartment, but while she was in the hospital, she stated at one point that she was never going to meet the minimum functionality to return there, so us kids should get all her things packed up and moved out. I think it was also clear to her, and to all of us, that she was not likely to live through this illness at all. So as we packed up her apartment, everyone asked each other what we should throw away, or divide amongst ourselves, or put into storage. Having not yet moved into my new apartment, I told everyone that I wasn't sure yet what I would be needing, so if they didn't want something, it should be stored so I could go through it later when I moved in. As we went through it all, I thought over and over again how little of it mom really used. She was quite a collector of stuff "for a rainy day."

Everything was stored for about a month; when mom passes, it got moved to my new home.

Last week, as I unpacked, I unpacked two lives. The first was my own, which I had integrated with my partner and now tried to pull apart. This was packed and transported one room at a time over several weeks, since I was moving just a couple of minutes away. The second was that of my mother's which was put in boxes as she was dying. In the new place, I have very limited space so I had to be very clever with where I put things. An old friend of mine once told me that the best way to prepare for a long trip away from home is to spend the month prior to the trip living out of a suitcase. If you find that you don't have something you need, you can then pack it. Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to do that, so my first few days in my new apartment was filled with lots of "I need to remember to go back and pack that."

Interestingly though, I thought that would happen much more than it did. More often, I found myself saying, "Mom had one of those," which I would then find in one of the boxes from her apartment. This began happening so often that it felt like it was more that just coincidence; it felt like synchronicity. It was as if my mother had collected all of that stuff for my new start. I became my mother's rainy day. Though she wasn't not present in body, I could feel her with me, helping me make a new start.

As my studies progress, I know my mother will be a valuable resource to me. I don't feel that she is gone so much as I feel she is transformed.