I need to change my story that goes “My father almost died”. I was speaking to my friend Sam. I was sitting in the same spot in the garden that I’d been sitting in a few days earlier holding a dove that had flown into a window. A raptor was sitting in a tree opposite us. Waiting. I held the dove to protect it from a certain death. It was on the anniversary of my mother’s passing.
I was not with my mother when she died 6 years ago. I was sitting in meditation at home. It was 6.00 in the morning and I was telling her that it was ok to go. I did not hear my phone ringing upstairs to tell me of her passing.
I could not be beside my father when he died 10 weeks ago. He was in a Covid isolation ward. For five days he had lived up his name – the miracle man. Then he had a silent heart attack. He asked to go. The doctor said he died peacefully.
My father knew how to navigate the ‘tunnel of death’ as he called it. He told me had been there a few times before. He was not afraid of what lay at the end of the tunnel. He had come back from his previous journeys because he chose to turn around and come back to this world. We spoke of this in March. A week later he was admitted to hospital. My father almost died – again.
Yet I know I was with my father my when he died. I woke up at 2.30 am. I went to my healing room and sat beside the bed on which I had laid out a crystal grid for him. I felt his hand in mine. It felt so very peaceful. It was his time. It is the cycle of Nature – this life and certain death.
Yet knowing all of this has not made his passing easier. I feel like I need a manual on how to navigate grief. I know that when I open the manual it will tell me – give yourself space to grieve. Gift yourself time. It will tell me to remember his love, of our shared joy of spending time in Mana Pools. It will tell me to allow myself to feel his presence. It will tell me to embrace this life that my mother and father gave me.
I no longer need to change my story. My father changed it for me. It is up to me to create a new one.
