3P Random Reflections Blog

When my father died, I was 24 years old. He was out walking one day, and was accidentally hit by a teenager riding on a bicycle. The blunt force trauma from his head hitting the pavement, led to his death in the hospital a few hours later. It was all so sudden and unexpected, and in an instant he was gone.

I still vividly remember my feelings standing by the hospital bedside of what seemed only to be the shell of my father, covered with tubes and wires, and with the sound of a noisy machine pumping air into his lungs, before it was eventually shut down. I was looking at him, but I couldn’t see “him” there… no smile, no fussing with the dry skin and calluses on his fingers, no rubbing the day-end shadow of whiskers on his chin, no twinkle in his eye, no cheeky remark.

The grief was intense, and powerful, and all-consuming, and like a sucker punch to the stomach, and yet in the midst of it all, a funny and ridiculous thought popped into my head. I said out loud through streaming tears, “He can’t leave… I haven’t paid him back the money I borrowed yet.”

And for a few brief moments, there was an incredibly profound and powerful mix of both the horrific and the beautiful… of grief and loss and sorrow and regret… and of love and fondness and warmth and humour. At the time, I thought I was experiencing the loss of my father, but I see now how I was simply being given the incredible privilege of experiencing and feeling “life”… full out.

With my mother’s recent passing, 31 years after my Dad, it has been an opportunity once again to experience the loss of a parent. The feelings seem much the same, and sometimes just as powerful… getting hit with the little sucker punches of feeling to the gut, and the waves of grief and loss and sorrow and regret, and love and fondness and warmth and humour.

But this time, there’s a significant difference.

This time I have an awareness of how my feelings are being created through me and within me from the incomprehensible power of thought, brought to life by the surround-sound, technicolour, special effects department of consciousness. It’s not the passing of my mother that is creating my experience… it’s all somehow being created within and through ME!

And so besides just feeling, and having moments and periods of dwelling on my personal (and innocent) made up stories about the loss, about my Mom, and about myself... I also find myself often marveling at the incredible human capacity just for feeling.

After a gut punch of loss, or a rush of guilt, I’ve had many moments of sort of “waking up” right away, and marveling at the intensity of the feeling of it.

“Wow, that one was powerful.”

“Wow, that was pretty intense.”

“Wow, that was created through ME!”

“Wow, how amazing and miraculous is this human ability to feel.”

“Wow, how lucky am I to be able to see this. To experience it and to be able to watch it at the same time.”

And it’s not that I was feeling joyful in the experience of it. It certainly wasn’t what I would consider pleasant. But for the most part, there was no fear of it or concern about it, and there was an underlying foundation of peace. I could often feel the awful feelings while also being able to watch them as an outside neutral and fascinated observer. There was the “personal me” having the thoughts and feelings, and the “impersonal me” watching it all happen.

And that is just one of the marvelous side-effects of gaining insight into how experience is being created continually through me via Mind, Consciousness, and Thought, and gaining awareness of the “OK-ness” of life and “OK-ness” of me, under all the apparent chaos. With awareness of the “personal me” having the experience and awareness of the impersonal energy creating the experience, it somehow allows me to have all my “crazy” with a lot less craziness. I’ve got a ticket to ride the roller coaster of life… and now I also have the locked in, strapped down, safety-system of understanding the truth of how it all works so I can have all the emotions and still enjoy the ride.

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