What I Had Experienced In My Volunteer Work

I was so very stunned. All the women were having an animated conversation. I waited for a pause in the conversation and then I told Maria that I was so sorry for her loss, and I asked if I could help in any way. Awkwardly, I rephrased the question. Again, she looked my way and said, Bill, ask all of the women here if they have lost a child. Leticia, who was sitting across from Maria, looked up and said, I lost a daughter who was five years old. Hortensia added, My son died in the army. Another woman, Gloria, said, I lost two. As they resumed their conversation in their Aymaran dialect, I couldn’t help but realize that these women’s relationship to death and dying was as foreign to me as the language they were speaking in. When I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, I enrolled at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and studied systematic theology and philosophy in an attempt to better understand what I had experienced in my volunteer work. The stigma of the disease frequently brought with it isolation and alienation and a sense of shame, guilt, and confusion. I met Brad when he was in his late thirties.

Holding Back The Years

With blue eyes, sharp cheekbones, and a thick mane of hair, Brad was homeless, living in a makeshift community with other infected men in an abandoned loft building. Anthony’s Foundation occasionally for food and supplies, and we started a rolling conversation that began with the mundane and gradually evolved to become more personal. One day, Brad humbly requested more food because someone in his community was actively dying, and everyone else was sitting vigil. Brad returned each day for a week and a half for food. During each visit, he would share a bit more about what he was experiencing. He had taken on the role of what we might call a death midwife, shepherding his friend’s death while holding the entire community together with the wisdom and knowledge he had acquired after attending other deaths. Anthony’s was opening, his eyes red and swollen. He said, Randy died last night. I invited him to sit down, and he began to describe Randy’s final moments. Randy was resting beside a small fire that they had carefully built. As the fire began to pulse, Brad saw a cascade of brilliant white light. At first, he thought the small fire had flared out of control, but then he realized that this was a different light, coming from above.

The Power Of The Dream

He looked around and realized each person in the group was fixated on Randy. In that moment, the building seemed to open from above, and he watched as a silhouette of Randy’s body rose through a column of light. The nonphysical Randy looked back at them, younger, healthier, and more vibrant than the newly deceased body below, and thanked each of them. Then he ascended into the light and was gone. As he disappeared, the cascading cylinder of light dissipated. The men formed a circle around Randy’s body, held hands, and wept. We didn’t even look for a pulse. It was clear that the Randy we knew and loved had traveled in his soul body to somewhere else, alive and well. I had no doubt that what Brad had shared was true. Something survives this horrible fate and goes on. Brad paused. I know there is a happy ending to our lives, and that gives me a great deal of peace and solace.

The Blanket of Night

I have faith that I will see my brothers again. I saw Brad a couple more times over the next few months, but his visits decreased after his community was evicted. But Brad left both an indelible mark on me and a series of lingering questions about the experience of dying. Death found me again a year or so after my experience with Brad. I found myself floating above my physical body in the intensive care unit at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. I heard one nurse describe a healthy, young adult male patient with a rare blood disease. She walked over to his bed. I looked down at his face and, to my utter surprise, I shouted to myself, Holy crap, that’s me! I remember a doctor, a hematologist, approaching my body in the hospital bed. He gently called out my name and I remember thinking as I watched the scene from above, Do I really want to go back into that body? As I pondered this question, I decided at least to try to answer the doctor. I felt totally exhausted, but my consciousness was back in my human form. It was abundantly clear that whatever I referred to as me had an existence independent of my flesh and blood. After this, my focus shifted increasingly toward the end of life. I joined the Zen Hospice Project of San Francisco as a volunteer hospice worker and also worked in the hospice unit at Laguna Honda, San Francisco County Hospital. It was here that I was graced with my first shared death experience. Suddenly I realized I was floating above my body. I glanced over and I saw Ron hovering above his body as well. This new Ron flashed me a big smile as if to say, Check this out. This is where I have been hanging out. Everything is wonderful up here. A few moments later, I was back in my physical body, rooted to my chair, and reading to Ron, as his eyes remained closed. He passed away not long after. I would have other similar experiences with the dying and their loved ones on the hospice ward. Like many hospice workers, I found that when the veil thins between this life and the next, it seems that we may enter another dimension, where space and time operate differently. In October 2009, I attended a workshop titled Soul Survival at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. I took the first bite of a turkey sandwich.