A Light Has Left the Planet

Death Comes and Leaves Only Love

A friend I’ve known for twenty plus years had met with me earlier in the day for an online spiritual counseling session. We discussed her work, her career, and “how important is it all.” Doing what she really wants – her true craft as an artist – is no longer optional, it is imperative. No more putting it off for more practical pursuits that may seem to promise a future of financial security. She must do her art.

It is, I write in my client notebook during our session, “a matter of life and death.” It’s that big.

Gustav Klimt’s Tree of Life (Stoclet Frieze, 1909)

That call ended at 4 p.m. It is now 6 p.m.

My husband Keith is trimming the tree in the living room – cursing at the tangles and blown bulbs as he strings the lights around our Charlie Brown - Dr. Seuss crooked but beautiful fir that we bought by donation from the local kids’ 4-H lot last weekend. We’ve bagged the overplayed Christmas music and have now moved on to loud vintage hip-hop. Our own version of rockin’ around the Christmas tree with more funk and bump and mirth.

My phone rings. Odd because I usually have the ringer off in the evenings. I look at the caller ID – it’s the friend I’d met with earlier that day. She never rings me, we usually text or Zoom. I know instinctively, pick it up.

When I pick up the call, I can’t hear her for the loud hip-hop. Her voice is strained, garbled.

“Hold on,” I say. “I have to turn off the music.” I come back to her.

“My dad died!” she sputters. “My dad is dead!”

“What?” I reply. “Oh dear God.”

A flat-out shock. I sit myself down on the stairwell, shut up, and listen.

Her dad had died suddenly. Heart attack.

He was a young old man. Fit, athletic, trim. A holistic M.D. His entire life was oriented around the healthy thing to do.

My mind flashes on the famous running advocate Jim Fixx, who died right then and there of a heart attack while out running.

I’d been sitting in the hot tub with my husband that morning, in the wintry cold. Feeling grief, heartache, depressive feelings, with no reason. I could not peg a reason. As an empath, I had the fleeting thought it could be preemptive of feelings to come that day. The feelings of a client or student I might be working with. I’d cried a little. Then went for a run to clear my head and override the sadness. I had better things to do with my day besides feeling bad. Some version of a coping mechanism.

Now, I write this because I am touched. Touched by love. I write to honor this man and his life in my own small way. He helped many, many people as an alternative medicine doctor. He wrote books, taught hundreds if not thousands of other healers about new ways to approach medicine.

And he gave my friend great joy. They loved each other – father and daughter – so very much. They always will.

From someone – me – who has lost two fathers (my actual father, Uwe, in 2016 from leukemia; and my spiritual teacher father, Ramesh, in 2009), I know:

Love never, ever dies.

I want to honor this man, my friend’s father – whom I shall keep anonymous now. I spoke with him once, about ten years ago, when he went to India for the first time. He’d read my book and needed more tips on where to go, how to travel. We Skyped, discussed itineraries and his priorities. It was a good trip; he’d made it solo.

Another time, in a systemic family constellation workshop alongside my artist friend, I represented this man, held the role. Embodying his epigenetic history, I felt his life in my own body – like a shaman – and helped (I think) to clear some of the generational pain that needed to be seen, acknowledged. So I definitely feel like I’ve known him in a visceral sense.

But most of all I know him when I experience my long-time friend, this artist woman so filled with life and creativity and love. The one I’d met with just a couple hours earlier, likely during the time that the man was breathing his last breath on the East Coast.

I know him because this friend is filled with the eyes and gifts and lineage of her father – his genes, his conditioning, his love.

This love will never, ever die.

I acknowledge this man, this soul for what he brought to our planet. For the good works he gave to the people and his family. And to me.

As he crosses over the threshold or is dissolved back into Consciousness, may his spirit be at peace. May he know we loved him, we see him, we are grateful.

Something about the suddenness of it all, of a heart attack, amplifies the Great Matter, the great teacher, of Death. This is the third death in my periphery in the last month. My brother’s best friend – a sudden heart attack while walking his dog on the beach. And the father of my oldest male friend, also a brother to me – peacefully departed.

I acknowledge these men for the love and light they brought and continue to bring.

Love never dies.

For A. Both of you. ♡

Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

~ Garcia/Hunter