Eyes of the Heart
This is a story about my mother's death in 1970. Actually, I want to tell you two stories about her passing. One that happened in ordinary reality, with a synchronistic twist, and another that could be said to be in the realm of vision or imagination.
Imagination is a complex matter, as it turns out. As students of shamanic healing, we are taught to allow ourselves to see with more than just our visual cortex. We are encouraged to notice everything that comes to mind, even so-called imagined or made-up stories and images. We are instructed to, “see with the eyes of the heart.”. In the Andean wisdom tradition we learn to do this from the teachings of the Eagle and the Condor. Do we know where imagination comes from? Fairy tales, bible stories, dreams, so called visions: what is their source? What does "I made it up" mean? Music, art, poetry--is there a bank or collective holding place from which we draw material, form, and substance?
Perhaps the following stories will appear to be a product of fantasy or wishful thinking. The thing is, the second story changed my life and my knowledge of where we go, how we die, what happens next. This story altered my experience of the abandonment, aloneness and loss that accompanied the death of someone I love.
Story 1
My mother died of complications of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in Madison, Wisconsin on the way home from visiting my sister and I at summer camp. I was 15 years old and my sister was 12. Camp Ramah is located deep in the northern woods of Wisconsin. Tall dense forest, deep, wide lake, nights and mornings so cold that we wore hats and scarves and mittens to bed in the middle of August. Delicious, given that the campers who came from cities were accustomed to sweltering in the deep summer heat. My mother had been to her doctor and told him that she did not expect to last much past the coming week. She informed him that she was determined to visit her girls, to lay eyes on us one more time before she died. My father packed her up, wheelchair and all, and drove the four hours from Skokie, Illinois to Conover, Wisconsin.
The week with my mother was an odd mix of sweet, unnerving, comforting and dissociated. We had never been informed of the specifics of her illness, let alone the likelihood that this would be the last time we would be with her. I saw her from afar as they emerged from the car at the top of the hill and only years later would I let myself know about the curious automatic click sensation in my brain that filtered out the horror of her almost bald head, wheelchair-bound wasting body and yellowish steroid- puffed skin. I ran to her and we laughed and teased in our familiar way. Later that day I told my father how much better she looked and how grateful I was that she seemed to be getting well. I truly could not allow myself to see what was right in front of me.
It was a Friday when they packed up to leave and return to our home in Illinois. I had spent an hour with my mother, lying side by side with her on the bed while she scratched my back, listening to me whine about my insecurities and my latest crush on a boy in my group. I remember getting up, kissing her goodbye and beginning to walk out the door when I looked back to wave once more and saw her tears. "I'll see you in just one week, Mommy...what's the big deal?" She waved me off, shrugging with an attempt at a smile…’never mind’, implied by her gesture. Those were my last words to her, my final image of her. She couldn't tell me and I couldn't let myself know what I saw with the eyes of my head or my heart.
On Friday nights, the whole summer camp would pour out of the dining hall and form concentric circles where we would dance and sing to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath. On the night my mother died, the sky was a bowl of stars...endless, fathomless, dizzying in its depth. I remember feeling compelled to spin off from the group, walking by myself to a quieter area. Seven o'clock or so it was. I leaned my head back, looking at the night's electrical display of shooting stars when I felt a strong sensation at my back. As if a wind had swirled up out of nowhere, I saw a milky, cloudy stream of air. I felt something touch me briefly, like a wisp of a finger. Looking up into the night sky, I found I was filled with a giddy joy. Teenage drama queen stuff. I went running to find my counselor in the bunk to tell her and saw that she was squirrelled away in the corner of her little room crying. I decided not to bother her and rejoined the group where I no doubt carried on to my fellow drama queens about my close encounter of the ultra-meaningful kind.
The next day, I felt a warm hand on my shoulder and awakened in the semi-darkness of just after dawn. The whole room was full of sleeping campers. Both counselors stood with wet eyes next to my bed. I looked at them and then spoke matter-of-factly into the silence. "My mother is dead.” They had been instructed to say that she was very sick in a hospital in Madison, where my sister and I would be taken as soon as the taxi arrived. It seemed I had always known my mother was dead. Childhood was over and I was one hundred years old. The story came out during the week of sitting shiva (the seven-day Jewish home ritual to mourn the dead). My parents had gotten as far as Madison, Wisconsin, where my mother was admitted to the hospital nearby their hotel. She died at just around seven o'clock p.m. I knew that she had stopped to touch me as she went on. I understood that I had felt her joy at leaving her sick human form as her luminous energy body was set free to return home.
***
Recognition and retrieval are some of the goals in all forms of healing-- shamanic or otherwise. As I consider my history in this light, a pathway emerges with increasing clarity. From observant Jew, cantor's daughter, cantor's wife and mother of two sons I have become the woman who dances around the fire at the fullness of the moon. I call on the Ancient Ones, the Eagle, the Jaguar, Pachamama (Great Mother Earth) and the Apus (Mountains)and I am a mesa carrier who has come to know her place in an ancient lineage which is ultimately no different from all lineages.
Story 2
Is it important to tell you that I was on my Nordic Track exercise machine as I was every morning? Or that I was missing my mother, although I truly don't remember, but perhaps it is so. She had already been gone so long, most of my life at that point of 47 years old. As I moved, legs going back and forth, I had what felt like a memory or a vision. It was as if I were watching a movie unfold before me during my meditation.
I enjoyed meditating while on my Nordic Track. Nordic Track walking, or the use of specific forms of bilateral stimulation coupled with various protocols appear to unstick memory and experience from the places it has hidden out in the unconscious mind. Bilateral stimulation of the brain is the defining component of the technical part of EMDR, the technique which had changed the face of trauma treatment and had also become one of my most important tools as a clinical psychotherapist. I had many experiences of the logically nexplainable kind on my Nordic Track, but this one has its own special place in my story.
In this vision, which felt as real as any clearly remembered event, I was in the hospital room in Madison. My mother was hooked up to all kinds of tubes and electrodes as she lay dying in the sterile bed. Several family members shadowed in the background, but what I remember most vividly were the machines beeping and the sounds of the liquids entering her veins via intravenous suspension--non- heroic palliative care of the terminally ill. My mother and I were looking at one another without speaking and yet, we could hear each other's thoughts quite easily. Feeling her growing weaker, beginning to leave me, I reached to touch her, to hold onto her for just a little while more...please don't go...my mind grasping like a small desperate child, completely selfish as she lay there struggling with each breath. Her voice in my head was clear and strong. Laury...it will only be for a moment, don't be afraid. This voice did not match the woman who lay there dissolving before my eyes...and yet it was hers unmistakably.
And then, she was gone. Whatever it is that animates the human form had slipped and flown, soundlessly and breathtaking in its ultimate simplicity. What happened next is hard to pin down with the words we have available in human language. Several loud, stunned heartbeats later, I felt a sort of popping sensation, like the first feelings of fetal movement in the belly of the expectant mother. It was like a bubble rising from the depths of a small pool, the popping appearing to occur outside of me but somehow also inside my body. My mother was gone, and then, she was not. She was nearby, behind a kind of veil, which I had never noticed before. Shimmering, gossamer. Her face, herself. I could feel her all around me and it was in that moment that I understood. There is no separation. She was with me and always would be. All I ever have to do is look and feel.
‘Where’ did this occur? What sort of ‘when’ are we talking about? Can we be both here and there at the same time? Part of our shamanic training includes something called destiny tracking, where one can engage in glimpsing alternate destinies which can inform our growth and momentum in this lifetime or the next. Quantum physicists are beginning to evaluate what has been understood by the shamans for thousands of years. That there are multiple dimensions all existing simultaneously. Experiencing these phenomena while learning to know the non-ordinary world begins to shatter the confining constructs by which most of us live and brings limitless dimensions into our lives.
