Remembering my father

Yesterday was my father's yartzeit....that means it was the anniversary on the Hebrew calendar of the day he died last year. He was very much on my mind yesterday and a couple of rather coincidences happened yesterday that definitely make me pause and wonder.......I was out in the evening to run some errands and as I came out of A Market, I noticed a bumper sticker which said, "we are all one." This statement is obvious to me and yet I really know that if we all internalized it, we would treat each other very differently. I'll quote Krisnamurti here who said something like, "you don't take a hammer and hit your own thumb," ......we do not treat others as though they were part of us and yes, we use the metaphoric hammer often (just look at the state of our world).

That said, when I saw the quote I remembered a dream I had right after my father died. It was my father and he came to me and he told me he was OK and that, "he was with the All One." I had certainly never heard the expression the "All One" before and I certainly never used it myself but that is what my father told me in the dream and that bumper sticker made me remember that.

Then, immediately after I drove away, I turned on NPR and they had on a researcher who did research in hospices in England about people who had these "end-of-life experiences." He said about 1/4 of people had them and these experiences were that a dead relative came to the person who was dying and told them that they would be back for them. I was surprised to hear this because I had never heard of such a thing. The researcher said that it couldn't be attributed to drug hallucinations because drug hallucinations were very different in quality and rather than people finding them comforting, people found them unsettling. Most of the time the family members were dead parents and sometimes the dying person did not know that the person who was coming to them had died (family members had shielded the very sick person from news of the death). He also spoke about close family members who just knew when a loved one had died -- if they were asleep, people often dreamed about the person at the time of death. I do have a very close friend who dreamed about her grandfather the night he died. And for me, at the time of my father's death, my brother was about to get married and oh, I did feel him at the wedding.....he was part of the wind and the sky....and somehow it was very comforting that though he couldn't get there stuck in that sick body, he was able to make it nonetheless......

I'm sure now that I've written this that some readers might think I'm totally out there. That's OK. I'm remembering my father. I miss him so much and yet, in some ways he is closer than he's ever been. I loved him all his life, I love him now, and I'll love him forever.....