The Beloved Come

Life after death. Our Ancestors and beloved ones are always so very close. At birth and death a veil parts, and a bridge that has crossing souls upon it, appears. And in the work that I do now I attest to it. I help people recognise those whom they have lost by seeing and feeling the subtle signs of their ever-presence. I know this and offer this solace as truth, because I have seen it. We arrive and we return. Farewelled and faring forward, we are a Soul moving through an infinite caravan of lives. And those we love travel with us, sometimes together, sometimes a little further apart.

My first family holiday, arm on my mother’s shoulder, held in her gaze.

I spent the last night of my mother’s life with her, sleeping and waking and watching on her bed. Just like when I was a little girl. The years, after the pneumonia nearly claimed me at three, when I would leave my bed next door and climb in with her. Here is where I used to look with love and reverence at the print of Mary appearing to St Bernadette on my mother’s wall. Here is where I used to feel infinity between my finger and my thumb. Here is where, one shimmering night, I saw angels in the left hand corner of the room, descending and ascending as columns of benevolent grace - on an unseen ladder, up and down.

This night she was restless. The cancer that had returned eight months earlier, had ravaged and distended her liver. The last five days she had gone and come back. The angels were showing her the way. This night she was facing her Soul’s dark night. The swab of glucose the palliative care nurse had given me to moisten her lips was beside me, at the ready. Its sickly orange smell so artificially sweet. But each time I held it to her lips, it was a last sip, a thirst quenched. And then she would fall back into the review of her life. The reason her Soul had come. She thrashed and shouted, finding a strength she had not had for months. I felt she was reliving all the aching terror and tragedy of her life. The midnight knock at the door. The Russian soldiers telling the family to pack their bags and be at the station by sunrise. The nights of starvation and sickness in the Siberian forced labour camp barracks, the loss of sisters and brothers, the release, the death walk. The mudhut floor. Her mother’s wound that would not heal. The crawl under the blanket, emaciated, listening to her mother’s last breath.

Her breath laboured and then strong, words that erupted, fighting off both the nurse and me, who tried to calm her and keep her from harm. Her second child lost after carrying him for six months. Her husband’s death from pneumonia, 10 days after brakes failed, being pinned inside the burning cab of his truck in a collision with another driver. And then my father and the fighting and the leaving and the long nights increasing - where she would write and write her visions of terror, praying endless rosaries and supplications to St Michael to defend us all in the day of battle.

At dawn, she had passed through the pain that her Soul had chosen to endure. She was finally calm, as the light rose. Her breath was slow and soft. And the peace that descended felt angel borne. She woke, lucid, and turned first to the nurse. “I am sorry I was so difficult,” she said. “I understand now.” And then she turned to me, and having been a mother who had not said many words of love - stopped as they were in her throat by her life’s grief - she whispered, “You are a beautiful girl. Thank you.” All those nights I’d come to sleep in her bed once my father left. All those nights I had kept watch. Here is where and why they were, so I could witness this great passing Soul. My mother, who had accepted and was now surrendering her life. She came. It was hard beyond belief. And yet, there was also great Love.

Those were the last words she said to me. Her last day, after that dark night, was a windy, fine and warm Spring day. It moved with the sun across the blinds of her bedroom. My sisters were there with me. And her three remaining brothers arrived in those last few hours.

I had held on, not wanting to leave her side, sensing, knowing that these were her last breaths. She had held one eye open and one eye already closed all day. As if she was still watching us, checking on us one last time, not yet certain she could leave us safe. I rushed to the bathroom and ran back into the room just as the light and energy changed. She sat up, looking to the Northeast corner and said, “He’s there, they’re all there… Fanfare.” And as she reached towards him, the cords of light that carried her Soul moved across the threshold as her body exhaled and fell softly back onto the pillows, and she was welcomed Home.

All those in the room had heard it. My sisters, my uncles. And we knew. All those she had loved and lost. Her first husband still so young come to meet her in his immortal form. Her mother, her father, her brothers and sisters all come. That moment, when the veils between were so thin, we had watched a Soul leaving to return. The pressure in the room, so intense the walls seemed to squeeze in with our focus, released. And everyone left the room. I stayed. In the silence. Holding her hand and stroking her hair.

Outside, all was silent. The wind had dropped and yet, in a moment I will never forget, as the light faded, the Venetian blinds rattled and a subtle pneuma, a loving embrace of air, held me one last time. No longer her physical arms, but her not yet gone. Sweetheart. The wind encircled me once, moving clockwise from East to Northeast, and left.

She had seen her Beloved come for her. Her family waiting with open arms. The Heaven she had prayed for lined with angels and their welcome of trumpets. The Saviour and his Mother to whom she had prayed each night of her life, there also, to welcome her home. We had felt them, too. As we experienced her conscious death.

…

My sisters and I then cooked, ate and talked through the night about my mother’s life, and of the miracle we had witnessed. The felt and seen revelation of the end and the continuing of Life. We felt the one she had loved so much returned. That she was not lost to us, but found.