Is Life One Big Synchronicity?
By fate, I’m about to find out!
I have always known, that deep down to the core of my being knowing, that my earthly departure is interwoven and fated with my mother’s death following my NDE.
How do I know you may ask?
It has everything to do with my NDE and the choice I made at that moment to return to my body instead of continuing in my death cycle and embracing my destiny.
This topic has just become somewhat of a mild curiosity in my life of late due to my mother’s recent quick decline and failing health, much to the chagrin of my life partner Bev who is having none of this talk of my impending death and talk of mine own death following my mothers.
Bev thinks I am going to have a choice in this matter.
I’m not so sure.
Why?
Because of my NDE and intention in returning to my body after my death 18 years ago.
I think I’m about to prove Karl Jung’s causal connection hypothesis is flawed.
You see, when my NDE started I assumed it was just one of those wild dreams one has on occasion. Outlandish in design, but no big deal in the life-defining moments’ category.
It was pretty cool outside my body looking down at myself.
The first thing I noticed, which I found it odd, was my blanket was not over me but heaped on the floor beside my bed.
This made me unsure as to the time of the dream because I knew the blanket covered me when I went to sleep.
Then I started thinking “how the heck am I going to get back in there (my body)?
Assuming this was all just a dream at the time, I figured I’d just wake up as usual and never really gave it much more than a cursory thought at that moment.
In any previous dream I had, I never felt this encompassing sense of acceptance, love and peace before.
This sense of belonging, understanding, and while these new sensations were baffling they felt extraordinary familiar.
As my experience continued, and every time I popped back in and out of one of those “wonders what it would be like to experience being a …. thoughts”, I instinctively always looked back towards my body on my bed to make sure it was still there.
The sight was an odd comfort knowing I could still return if need be.
After I cycled through consciously experiencing being the tree (amazing), then the blade of grass (boring), each time I popped out of one of these conscious experiences my body appeared further and further away.
After I returned from the shared horse-conscious experience, my body was no longer within view.
I was now shrouded in mist with just this umbilical cord stretched out below me disappearing into the mist.
I realized the only connection I had to find my way back to my body hung by a fragile thread that now looks agonizingly fragile which could break at any moment.
Panic took over when I realized I could now “see” the curvature of the earth and the shocking realization I was leaving the atmosphere of the earth.
How the hell was I supposed to breathe when this occurred?
As the fear arose in me, I frantically began to struggle hard to get back closer to my body.
Immediately, this reassuring “voice” filled my consciousness reassuring me that everything was as it is supposed to be.
This communication was not talking per se, but a thought arose in me and an answer immediately filled my consciousness.
“Do not fear, your journey is complete and it’s time to come home” said the voice in my head.
“Home?” I thought.
“What do you mean I can come home?
As my thoughts scrambled to catch up to the reality of what was happening to me, rapid-fired thoughts and fears filled my consciousness.
Every thought had an immediate loving and reassuring response and every fear that arose in me was immediately assuaged.
This instantaneous and loving reassurance that there is no need to fear my destiny.
I could come home if I want.
Once I came to understand that I died and was oddly calm and accepting about my fate.
At least I was relieved to be heading in the right direction….up!
Being engulfed with this total sense of love and non-judgment and belonging didn’t hurt either. I have never felt this all encompassing, non-judgmental feeling of being loved along with this incredible sense of freedom I was feeling of no longer being locked into my body.
The sensation was as euphoric as it was liberating.
Wait…back up the bus…
If I want?
I have a choice? **
Then my thoughts immediately went the other side of the coin, to who and what I was about to leave behind.
Suddenly, I felt this pang of regret for leaving my mother behind.
She already lost her daughter Brenda at the young age of 21, so that makes me her only familial emotional support remaining. (Financial was another matter altogether)
I debated with myself what leaving her would do to her when she lost both her children before she died.
This made my “choice” harder to determine than I would have thought.
In my heart I just couldn’t leave my mother behind, alone… can I?
Even after this voice without a voice re-assurances were given that she will be ok and surrounded and supported by people who will love her, I still could not in all conscience leave her.
I just felt I couldn’t abandon her and I wanted to be there for her, even if it was just knowing I was “around” and part of her reality.
Considering that my mom and I weren’t really close for years these sense of duty contemplations made my choice more puzzling.
Once my own conscious choice to return was decided there was no turning back.*****
BAM…..I was SLAMMED back into my body.
“Fuck…That was rude!” I screamed
A lot has happened in 18 years since my experience.
Immediately following my experience, thoughts of her death, and perhaps my fate, seemed so distant a proposition that I never really gave another thought that her death may be tied to mine.
With no apparent immediacy to it, I turned my time and attention in the months and years after to the process of trying to come to terms and understanding of my experience and developing ways to integrate these understandings into my new life that no longer makes any sense to me.
It doesn’t matter until it does, I guess.
My mother, at least the portion of her life that I shared with her and can speak of, has had deep-seated trust issues.
Perhaps it came from my father’s mental illness and all the years she stood by him and suffered in his peculiarities.
It may have come from her upbringing, who knows.
Everything seemed good in my childhood until the time that my father was announcing to the world his homosexuality during a startling family meeting two weeks before Christmas.
If that wasn’t hard enough on the family, soon thereafter, my sister got very sick when she was 20, and fought a valiant battle for a year and a half eventually succumbing to Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.
My mother was quite vulnerable during this period dealing with the divorce and Brenda’s sickness and death met Magnus, a freshly minted widower with 2 small adopted children, in the throes of his crisis of losing his partner and mother to those children.
The perfect storm was brewing, at least for me.
His parenting skills were non-existent and he needed a mother figure.
My mom needed to fill the void of losing a child.
Soon thereafter plans on moving in and marriage were concocted and implemented, a new home purchased and life plans devised…
Zoom Zoom.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was, to Magnus, a persona non grata, the interloper in his newfound fledgling family and my mother would choose marriage peace over defending her son.
My mother sat me down one day about a month following the “honeymoon” where two families joined as one to let me know my presence was creating too much conflict in her new life and family and that I needed to find different living arrangements.
I moved out 4 days before my 19th birthday.
Soon thereafter, pre-Covid social distancing measures became the norm and usually centered around holiday and birthday milestones only, and even then, never more than two hour increments.
Much to my amusement, during these brief “fly-by’s”, I noticed her house was slowly turning into a locked fortress.
Not from the outside world as one might assume, but from the inside.
Their bedroom, the fruit cellar, the office, the kitchen storage pantry and the treasured liquor cabinet, to name but a few, were all lovingly fitted with spanking new key locks courtesy of Magnus Dietrich Locksmith Incorporated.
For this newly designated family interloper, it was a sight to behold.
Watching my mom and Magnut, as I called him now, navigate the house like a couple of prison guards with a set of 15 keys dangling from their hips, fluttering from room to room, unlocking doors and then locking them back up again when they exited amused me to no end.
I wasn’t the culprit after all, apparently.
Who does that?
Hasn’t this fledgling locksmith guru heard about master locks?
Any burglar attempting to break into their house would surely have run screaming from the house in incredulous exasperation, I amusingly thought to myself.
There were times in her marriage to Magnus that her deepening mistrust and lack of interest in coming to my defense led to long periods of self-imposed isolation by me.
As long as she was happy with Magnus, who was I to object?
A couple of years after Magnus’s death, and never satisfied with living without a man, she married another man named Vern, who became her third husband.
At least he didn’t raise a baseball bat and threaten to bash my head in like Magnus did, so that was a marked improvement.
My mom was in her 70’s by this point and my relationship with my mom began to improve after the death of Magnus.
The breakthroughs continued…
For the first time in my life, a couple years into her marriage with Vern, she bestowed me with the “key to their house”.
But in life, all things can be short-lived.
About six months after I was rewarded with the keys, my now seventy-six-year-old mother and Vern had booked a wonderful three-week Mediterranean cruise.
The day before they were to depart I went over to the house to wish them well on their trip.
My mother used the opportunity to “give me the talk”.
“Now David, we have made arrangements for the neighbors to look after the house, collecting the mail, watering the plants, so there should be no reason at all for you to have to enter the house while we are away.
If you attempt to enter the house I will hear about it because the neighbors will be keeping watch and will let me know if you did.
Do you understand”
Oh, I understood….so much for this vaulted talk about trust.
I offered to give her the key back while they were on their trip if that would help alleviate her fears, and was secretly grateful when she agreed to take the key back for the duration of their trip.
She did offer to return it to me after their return, nor did she protest after I politely declined when she did.
By now I was a seasoned veteran to my mothers’ mistrust issues.
I knew, thanks in part to my experience, that this wasn’t about me at all.
Her “issues” all hail from a much deeper veneration, one only she can quantify.
To make matters more complicated, my mother has always hated being told what to do, and as she always likes to point out to me “ she is in control.”
She has steadfastly ignored any advice I would offer, preferring friends’ advice over mine.
She set up her personal affairs so that I was not her executor, nor was I to make legal decisions on her care or finances if she could no longer thru her granting me POA status even though I was her only living relative left.
In her mind, no one who will benefit from her estate will get the responsibility to take control of her affairs if need be, and as such, could not be trusted to act in her best interests.
All this is fine in contemplation, until the foot meets the road.
The past year and a half has not been too kind on my mother.
The Covid lockdowns and social isolation that ensued has made getting her the much needed help almost impossible.
Her denial, and her steadfast refusal to see her doctor because she feared losing her drivers license, didn’t help matters either.
How do you begin to help someone who can’t remember she can’t remember?
We first noticed she was missing some words in our daily phone calls to her as personal visits to the retirement home she chose to reside, a full hour and a half away from us, were Covid restrictions barring visitors to the premises.
This distance now went from a blessing to a curse, and a barrier to her increasingly needed care and support.
What started as missing words if we called in the evening to whenever we call now.
Ask her what she had for dinner and she needs to seek out the box it was packaged in.
Cooking has also become somewhat dangerous to her as she forgets she put something on the stove.
Her driving was atrocious to anyone who shared a ride with her behind the wheel, except her of course.
She was the safe driver and everyone else was an idiot.
She could never understand why people were giving her the horn or the finger all the time.
Any attempt by me or Bev to make an appointment with her doctor was swiftly rejected.
There is nothing like a woman who fears losing her drivers’ license over her health.
Denial had become her friend.
I would call her doctor myself and beg to get her to force my mother to come in for a physical, to no avail.
Nothing they could do but ask my mom to come in, which she swiftly refused.
Then came concerned calls from her friends and neighbors, who were picking up the slack because we could not be there, letting us know we need to get her to the doctor….like yesterday!
Deep down I knew things were getting worse, but never to the extent and level they had deteriorated too.
Watching my mother now, as she slides into the frightening grip of Alzheimer’s or Dementia, is that she may soon not even recognize me or Bev at all.
How frightening it must be for her to know you can no longer be in control but don’t remember why.
Thankfully, she finally relented and finally agreed to see her doctor who promptly took away her license as she feared, and we all knew would occur but added a new layer to our own lives.
We knew things were bad, but never to the level we now know they are.
Specialist appointments needed to be made, weekly visits to take her grocery shopping and banking. Driving her to her appointments.
All these things while struggling to maintain our jobs and own lives.
As we now scramble to catch up to her financial affairs and make appropriate changes, make plans to move her away from her familiarity and set patterns she relies upon, to some unknown destination so we can better watch over and care for her, has been challenging.
The harder she clings onto her mistrust and insistence “she is in charge”, the more it slips from her grasp.
It’s a slow process, back to the place of trust and love, and if the universe can be patient, so can I.
NB- As I was contemplating hitting the submit button for this story, this song final verse came flooding into my head from my favorite folk singer Harry Chapin.
Harry died tragically back in 1981, a scant 5 months after I saw him in concert at the University of Waterloo.
“Story of a Life”.
by- Harry Chapin
“Now sometimes words can serve me well
Sometimes words can go to hell
For all that they do.
And for every dream that took me high
There’s been a dream that’s passed me by.
I know it’s so true
And I can see it clear out to the end
And I’ll whisper to her now again
Because she shared my life.
For more than all the ghosts of glory
She makes up the story,
Of my life.
****Disclaimer:****
Please DO NOT use my experience, or anyone else’s experience as a reason to attempt to seek out your own experience of any kind, thinking you will also be granted a choice to return.