You’ll be overjoyed by your homecoming celebration!
Take a few moments to think about this:
Imagine your child has been studying abroad, and due to distance and the cost of travel, you haven’t seen them for years—literally the entirety of their time at university! It feels like forever that they’ve been gone. While you’ve missed them, you know they have missed you, too.
Now, they are finally coming home! You are so excited you plan to throw the biggest homecoming party ever. All their friends and family members will be there, sharing their excitement, love, laughter and memories. They are all waiting with great anticipation to finally have the chance to celebrate the completion of your child’s education and overwhelming achievements. They have matriculated with the highest honors possible! They’ve learned so much and mastered their learnings.
It does really feel like forever, doesn’t it? Yes, you’ve had the chance to check in on them over the years, by phone, an occasional card, and of course, video calls now and again, but being in their actual presence to celebrate a job well done and feel their love is a vastly different thing indeed. We are all that child who has been away studying and learning at this University called human life.
Separated from our loved ones.
The pain and torment of being apart from someone we love often seem insurmountable. Why, we ask, did they have to leave us? Why now? When will we ever see them again?
In each of our lives, we will all experience loss. None of us are immune to it. It is simply part of the cycle of human life. When and how we leave, what we commonly refer to as death, is part of a bigger plan than we are often unable to comprehend fully, especially when it involves a child or a younger adult. Most of us think it’s unfair if someone leaves before they are well into their ‘senior years’ and even then we wonder why we couldn’t have just a few more years! One thing we know for certain is that every life will impact other lives, regardless of the duration of that life.
Some come here for what I lovingly call a ‘sacrificial life.’ They agree to incarnate but have their earthly life cut short for some greater purpose. Often that short life results in significant good being done in their honor for a group or even society as a whole. I personally know of situations like that from my own life. The loss of one person, often wiser than their years, results in benevolent acts and nonprofits being formed that serve great numbers of people and positively impact the lives of those served.
We all subconsciously know when our time is to leave. In my own life, my dad was only 58 when he died. It was amazing to learn the things he did prior to his death that perhaps helped prepare his way and get things off his longstanding ‘to-do’ list that the family didn’t have to deal with later. In my dad’s case, his own mom’s funeral mass card ended up prominently displayed in his workshop after his preparatory housekeeping. There are no coincidences in life.
What it means to go home and realize who we truly are.
Death, as we know it, is a human phenomenon. The word itself is actually a misnomer; we are all spiritual beings who never truly die, we simply transition back from our human existence and life back home to the truth of our communion with all things and our essence as energetic spiritual beings. There is simply nothing from the Universe’s perspective that could be defined as death, because the core of who we are will never cease to exist.
Many people today will use the word ‘transition’ to denote their soul leaving the human body and returning back to their True Self in spiritual form. As children of God, formed in the ‘likeness’ of our Creator, we are the same everlasting energy of our Source and will never die. No, likeness does not mean God resembles us in human form, despite the depictions of the white bearded old man in the clouds, it refers to our energetic likeness.
In thinking about our relationship with God, I like to think of the analogy of an apple tree bearing fruit, the apple seed once germinated will go on to ultimately bear fruit of its own and carry on the genetic lifeline of that original apple tree and fruit. So too may describe our close relations to Source. I know it’s controversial to think of ourselves as anything less than human, but you could make the point that much like an apple grown from the seed of the original apple tree, it is no less of an apple than the host apple, and we are no less than that offspring of the Divine than the Divine itself.
A friend of mine transitioned recently after a struggle with cancer. Whenever I send a sympathy card to the families of someone who has passed, I like to remind them that ‘death’ is only sad for those of us left behind. The family is feeling the physical loss of their family member or friend and are no longer able to hold and consciously talk to them. That is a loss that all of us will experience in our life, and feel that sadness and grief of missing that part of us and connection that they represented.
One of the greatest gifts we receive from our human life is the experience of returning home to the consciousness of who we truly are. No longer will we be bound by the amnesia we experience in the earthly realm. A business associate told me several years ago that another colleague had recently passed. ‘He was an atheist you know,’ she said. While I didn’t, I quickly replied ‘Well he isn’t any more!’
Years ago, when Princess Diana passed, I remember reading a saying that has remained with me. I’m not really sure who to attribute it to but it states: ‘Mourn not that they are gone, rather rejoice that they were.’ I love that simple reminder to celebrate, rather than mourn, the lives of those who physically leave us.
Signs from the other side are there if we are open to seeing them!
There are many signs that life goes on after human life. Likely most of us have had experiences that were reminders of that, whether it be a loved one coming to us in our dreams, or perhaps an unexpected reminder of a lost family member or friend in the form of a favorite song, bird, or flower, for instance. I’ve had several experiences that were instrumental in my own awakening to the relationship of human to spiritual existence. From receiving conscious answers to my questions, to knowing I was holding my dad’s hand one morning upon waking, to smelling his pipe tobacco in my smoke-free restaurant building, as only a couple examples. Reminders are always around us if we open our awareness to them, and cast aside our doubts.
There are times in life when we are ‘closer’ to our Truth, when we are young we often have so-called imaginary friends, and later when we are approaching our own end of life. When someone nears their own transition time, it is more likely that they will be receptive to seeing and hearing family and friends from the other side. One of my favorite true stories was one I heard from a friend at the time of her own mother’s passing. Just seconds before her mom passed, she clearly cried out ‘Vinnie, I’ve missed you so much!’ Vinnie, you see, was her deceased husband there to welcome her on her way home. What a beautiful homecoming!