Always together

Recently several of my friends and acquaintances have lost loved ones: spouses, parents, siblings. I have never been married, so I can’t relate directly to the loss of a spouse. I had a much older half-sister who died a few years ago, but we had not been close, separated as we were by age and geography. On the other hand, both of the blessed souls who took me in in infancy and eventually adopted me–my parents–died some years ago: my father when I was thirteen, my mother when I was in my thirties. And there have been others.

The loss of loved ones is not limited to any age or set of circumstances, but as we age we know we will encounter more of them. Others, after all, are aging chronologically at exactly the same rate as we.

There are striking similarities and differences in the ways people respond to these events. In nearly all cases there is an enormous sense of loss, and sometimes of guilt over unresolved strains in the relationship that now seems to be severed. Sometimes there is a celebration of the life lived, the time spent together, and the belief that the loved one has gone on to a better existence. And sometimes there is a sense that the relationship is not, indeed, severed, for all time or even for the time being: that the loved one is literally still with us in ways that we can clearly discern.

Before I proceed, let me admit that for years I never quite resolved the loss of my adoptive parents. My father meant everything to me as a child. My mother never stopped missing him. Neither have my siblings. Nor did I, until recently. He has been gone for thirty-seven years.

My relationship with my adoptive mother was nothing like that with my father. We spent years at loggerheads. I always found some reason to be impatient with her. But as I aged out of my teens and she aged into her seventies, she became remarkably patient with me. At long last, as I entered my mid-twenties, we became friends. Not until then did I understand how, and how much, she loved me. And then, in too few years, she was gone.

From the mid-1980s to the turn of the ‘90s, my mother called me every night around 6:00. I was living in the Brighton section of Boston, she in Rockland, about twenty miles to the south. But since neither of us drove a car, it might as well have been half a world’s distance. In the early 1990s she became ill, her mental faculties declined rather rapidly, and she went into a nursing home. I was burned out of my apartment building in Brighton and moved to Quincy–to Quincy, just south of Boston, in particular, to be closer to my mother and siblings and still have easy access to public transportation. But my mother couldn’t call me anymore, nor I her. I saw her fairly seldom. She lost the ability to speak intelligibly, and it was never clear that she knew who her visitors were, or what they said.

My mother was hospitalized for a while shortly before she died. When she came out of the hospital for a few days and went back to the nursing home, my sister called me from my mother’s room. She put my mother on the phone, I don’t know why. To my sister’s prompting, my mother said, with perfect clarity, "I love you, Alan." I don’t know whether she knew what she was saying, or to whom, but they were the last words I heard her speak and the clearest and most coherent in years.

She died within weeks. It didn’t seem too hard to take at the time, because in important ways I had lost her already. But some months after her death, about 6:00 every evening for several days, I found myself thinking, "It’s time for Mother to call"–just as if she would.

In the years since my mother’s death, I’ve read a few books about the afterlife and the reported phenomena of contact between the living and the dead. I needn’t go into the details. They are pretty much what you’d expect. But latterly, as I’ve investigated the idea that all existence is One, a new idea has occurred to me. Of course, it isn’t a new idea at all, it’s thousands of years old, but it’s new to me.

The idea is that we have not, indeed, lost our loved ones. They have not been parted from us. We are always together because we are not, essentially, separate beings at all. It only seems so.

There are many varieties of Oneness belief, some ancient, some modern adaptations. Some depend for their validity on individual meditative and intuitive experience, and some on the evidence of quantum physics. Mine is a little different from all those of which I’ve read. It borrows from all of them, and from my years as an evangelical Christian. It is this:

I believe there is an eternal, infinite, perfect, knowing, willing Being who eternally wills all that is. In Its infinity, It contains all things within Itself: It is everything and there is nothing but It. It may be called the Ein Sof ("without limit"), as in Jewish Kabbalah tradition, or It may be called God as in Western philosophy. It may be approximately called Brahman, borrowing a name from Hinduism, or It may be called "the vastness" to borrow a phrase from an experience reported in one of my readings. It hardly matters. I call It the One. All that we are, all that we experience, is the eternal will of the One. All that we experience is the One willing, and therefore is the One, because Its will cannot be distinguished from Itself. Only the One truly and eternally exists; we, Its manifestations, exist only insofar as It wills us perceiving ourselves and everything around us. Not only we, but our world, the progression of events, the framework of space and time, exist within Its perfect eternal will–within Its infinity.

In the annals of death and survival, Oneness is little discussed, though there is much about closeness, presence, visions, voices, dreams, and other oddities. A number of psychics, forsaking the traditional, doctrinally based ideas of heaven and hell, portray a place called "the Other Side" or "the Invisible World" or (for reincarnationists in particular) "life between lives", where all who have lived and died dwell in perfect bliss. The ideas about this place are as many as there are proponents.

My mother had been a professional singer, in a small way, in her youth. In later years she still loved to sing and could accompany herself or my sister at the piano. She had a limited knowledge, but a definite love, of classical music and opera, and I have this love from her. Nowadays, when I think of my mother, I am less apt to think of her as I knew her, in her middle and declining years, than as a young woman, sitting at a grand piano before a packed concert hall on "the Other Side," playing music of her own composition that elicits instant transcendence in its hearers and enlofts the very heavens.

This idea of my mother began a few months ago, after I, myself, heard a "voice". As I lay in bed awaiting sleep, but not yet sleepy, I heard my mother’s voice in my mind’s ear (I don’t hear it often), saying, simply, "Hello, Alan."

I thought, "Hello, Mother! I feel that there ought to be music–but what music?"

"Orpheus in the Underworld," she replied.

The name originates with the Greek myth of Orpheus, who musically charmed his way through Hades to bring out his love, Eurydice. But it’s the title of an opera by Jacques Offenbach which, to my knowledge, my mother never would have recognized while living.

You must clearly understand that my mother lived most of her life in what used to be called reduced circumstances, but from her affluent upbringing she retained an almost aristocratic dignity and grace. She also had a wicked little smile that she showed whenever she enjoyed a good joke that was, perhaps, not quite of the loftiest character.

If you know of the opera, you probably know that it contains the music of the cancan, a roistering burlesque dance of the late 1800s. That, and my mother, simply do not go together–except with that mischievous smile.

I don’t know about life after death. I don’t know about reincarnation. I don’t bother myself much about them. And I no longer wish with a vain fervor to hear from my parents again. I don’t have to. I do know that there is no limit to what the One can will, what It can manifest in experience–but whatever that experience is, is One.

My parents and I, you and your loved ones, are always together–always One.