Acts Of Generosity And Compassion

I was surrounded by people all the time. I felt like she had suffered a lot, given the cultural conditions for women. Like many women of that era, her mother didn’t have the opportunities she might have had. She was a free spirit, but her spirit couldn’t be expressed fully, in that life. We didn’t bathe for a whole week. We didn’t change our clothes. Our every need was cared for and we could just focus on our grief and our mother. That, she adds, was so beautiful and so meaningful. During that week of mourning, I came to understand and see my mother more fully. In story after story, visitors shared with us how she came to aid and support them and others, some of whom she didn’t know personally, through acts of generosity and compassion with emotional and material support. Ironically, although she never had the opportunity to become a senior herself, she felt she had a special mission to help seniors and established the first senior center in our community. I came to know that very personally.

If You Believe

Madelyn describes herself as feeling a complete sense of acceptance, of my mother’s death. I felt an elevation, a lightness. But when she returned to her home, I was by myself with my two kids. I didn’t have my husband, didn’t have my mother. I went into a deep depression after that. Madelyn did not speak about her own shared death experiences with other friends and family. I didn’t know how to talk to anybody about it, or what to say. Who would understand what the heck I was even talking about? But she did make changes in her own life, including coming to the realization that she needed to lead a more spiritual life. And this would not be Madelyn’s last shared death experience. She remarried, moved to California, and she and her new husband became friends with another couple, Chayim and Shamaya. Chayim was one of my closest friends. He was a psychotherapist, a spiritual teacher, a craftsman, a drummer, and an incredible adventurer.

That'll Be the Day

He was good at all of them. He had this incredible lust for life. But he was also a risk taker. Madelyn was still in her office, finishing the last of the day’s work. And I was in shock, and horror. I started to cry. Madelyn was so shaken she couldn’t bring herself to go home. I called one of my closest friends. And this message, like, It’s okay. I said to her, Tisa, I don’t know what’s happening right now, but I’m getting this feeling, like everything’s okay. The speed of the experience was very powerful for Madelyn. I could never, on my own, with my own consciousness, have moved myself from this incredible state of fear, and anxiety, and panic, and distress, and confusion, to this state of peace, and acceptance, and understanding.

When I Look at the World

The whole experience absolutely impacted how I mourned, how I grieved, Madelyn adds. It was a level of acceptance, that this was his path, this was okay, even though the sadness and personal loss is with me to this day. Madelyn has since dreamed about Chayim and describes seeing him on the other side. But she has also more recently dreamed about her mother. In that dream, she was just so beautiful, so radiant, and she had these strong legs, like a gymnast. I could see her so happy that she had moved on, transformed. I also felt my own grief, about having lost her. But to have that sense of my mother’s spirit, what I always felt she needed to be able to experience and express, I’m so happy. But what it does do is change the way that the living view their loss. Rather than be left with a sense of finite, irreversible closure, which completely severs a relationship at the moment of death, those who are left behind are enriched by the sense that their departed loved ones are alive and well in a benevolent afterlife. As researchers, it is interesting to us to see how both Carl and Madelyn, via different means, also began to shift their attention to a more spiritual life following the loss of their father and mother, respectively. This occurred despite their having grown up in different religious traditions and each having a different view of religious faith. As we have seen with both Madelyn and Chayim, but also with Alison and Wendy, sometimes it is not a spouse or family member who is the direct recipient of the communication from the deceased person. Who received the honor of accompanying the deceased varied by cultures and practices. Animal figures were also frequently singled out as guides. The Welsh and ancient Aztecs looked to dogs, ancient Greece looked to bees, and Japan and some South American cultures identified birds. Other cultures, such as the Alaskan Inuit and Australian Indigenous peoples, called upon astronomy, specifically the Aurora Borealis or Barnumbir, the Australian north star. Although in general, nonhuman creatures or forms are most likely to accompany the dead, in medieval Europe, some monasteries offered hospice care for the dying and placed them in infirmaries located next to chapels. The chanting of the monks became a form of palliative care, to ease their pain and suffering and guide them into the next life. If you think back to our earliest cases, Liz and Michelle, who both lost premature babies, each had very clear stories of accompanying those babies. If you think of him like a guardian angel, he’s like right there. At times, the shared death experiencer may be called upon to act as more of an actual guide, explicitly helping the deceased move toward the passage into the afterlife. This ability to act as a guide also can have a transformative effect on the person left behind. The youngest of four children, an unexpected child, as she puts it, who was born when her parents were experiencing a fair amount of economic distress.