When I began studying shamanism with Nukah, one of the first questions she asked about my background was if I've had a Near Death Experience (NDE). By that point in my life, I'd already had two. The first was in 1977 when I was diagnosed with a severe bout of pneumonia and teetered on the edge of life and death for several days. Four years later, while battling what the doctor's felt had become a terminal case of viral meningitis in our local hospital's Intensive Care Unit (ICU), I spent hours at a time outside of my body, crossing over to the spirit realm and interacting with those I encountered in both the afterlife and the realm that exists between here and there.
By the time I was eighteen, I'd almost died on three different occasions. Nukah's question about my brushes with death reflected the fact that NDEs are so common in shamanism that it's almost considered a rite of initiation. To a shaman, life and death go hand-in-hand, linked in an endless dance.
Death has been a regular part of my life since I was a child. I was three years old when my last surviving maternal great grandfather lost his battle with cancer and passed on. We gathered at his house after the funeral and I sat in the corner, coloring contentedly when one of my relatives came up and tried to explain that my great grandfather had died and that it was okay for me to be sad about it.
"Why should I be sad?" I countered. "He's not sick anymore. Grandpa's up in heaven and he's probably fishing right now."
One of the saddest aspects of living in a Judeao-Christian culture is the accompanying belief that the end of this lifetime is a moment of judgment, where our loved one will either move on to a place of indescribable beauty or a realm of unimaginable torture and agony. The last thing that the living need in a moment of loss is the fear that the person they love has met some horrible eternal fate.
I have this debate with my Christian friends on a fairly regular basis. If I'm "God" and I'm in charge of the afterlife and my only choices are giving someone a free pass into a place where they'll be loved, nurtured, and educated or condemning them to pain and torture, every single person gets into heaven. Everyone of them. I have enough compassion for my fellow man and enough love for the human experience that I wouldn't leave a single person out in the cold. And since I'm far from being a perfect mirror of divine love, I can only assume that "God" is capable of greater amounts of love and compassion. Whatever comes after the end of life isn't horrible - and it isn't the end.
From what I've seen through both of my NDEs and through shamanic work in the same area, the issue with dying isn't the fate of the person that's moving on, but the loss felt by those who are left behind. There are three ways that I know of to mitigate that sense of loss and many others that I'm sure you, the readers of Old Ways, could share if you cared to send an email this way.
First, never hesitate to let someone know you love them. Let the people that share your life know that they're important to you, that you cherish the gift they give you just by being who they are. So much of our grief is found in words that were left unsaid, in the pain of losing someone who filled so much of our heart but never knew what a profound impact they had on our life. As simple as it may seem, speaking from our heart and letting our loved ones know what they mean to us will go a long way toward making their parting easier to bare.
Second, you can let go of the pain through ritual. There's a very simple ritual that can help in this process:
Form three circles, one inside the other so that the smallest is in the center of the rings. You can draw in the dirt in your garden, draw on a board with chalk, or even use salt to form the circles on a flat surface where they won't be disturbed.
Next, find something to represent the person - or, if they were very important to you, a small item that symbolizes each of the key areas where they touched your life.
Place the tokens at the center of the circle. Each day, pick up a token and say, "Thank you [say the person's name] for the gift of you. You filled my life with so much love/joy/peace and I miss you now that you're gone. But my life is still good and I will live it fully until we meet again." Each circle, starting in the center and moving outward, represents the intensity of your loss. As you place the token back in the circles, think about whether it should remain at the center of the circle (where your sense of loss is the greatest) or whether you can move it further out. Once the token has cleared the final circle, you can keep it as a remembrance of the person or let it go in a manner that seems appropriate to the connection you shared.
Third, live life fully and well. One of my favorite books that I share with friends who are beginning to fully awaken to their spiritual paths is a novel called, "One," by Richard Bach. The entire back cover reads, "I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it?" If we can answer, "Yes," to the question, we're where we need to be. If we can't, then it should be obvious which adjustments we need to make.
I've taken this concept a step farther in my own life. First, I look at tomorrow as a gift that I give myself. While we will regularly do so much for a loved one, we often sell our own selves short. If you were going to give the "tomorrow you" a gift - the ability to play an instrument, a memory of something you've always wanted to do, a life without regrets - what would you do to create that gift? That's how we should live. If we do, and if we remember to let the people in our world know that we love them, when our own life reaches its end and we move on to the next portion of our journey, we'll leave less sorrow behind and more of a sense that they were blessed to share their path with us, just as we're blessed to share our own path with them.