barbtries a blog

Friday, July 05, 2002

first i'm going to read The Waking

If you know me at all you know I write poems. You may not realize that poetry serves as the spiritual touchstone in my life. I do not embrace or subscribe to any religion, and my concept of god is essentially the opposite of what is popularly believed.

When besieged by the intractable questions that torment and baffle our human race, I read poetry. It rarely lets me down. Of all the poems I've ever read, there are two that I love most of all. You just heard one of them. The other is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot. He opens this masterpiece with a quote from Dante's Inferno, and to paraphrase, "I tell you this fearlessly because to my knowledge not one soul has ever returned from where you are going."

I am speaking from that place, otherwise known as hell, or as I think of it, the desert of despair. Looking around I see that among this crowd of people I am quite alone here. That cannot be helped, because this place is reserved for mothers like me, those who have sustained what Shakespeare called "the unkindest cut of all."

I strive to make my way out of here and live again before I die, and believe that I stand an excellent chance of succeeding. For that I must thank my daughter, Bekah Zask, for going above and beyond the call of duty to let me know that she is with me, her love survives, and she is in a good place. A place that is so much closer to earth than the word "dead" implies.

Here on earth, we live in time, our souls outfitted with the trappings of mortality. In the great beyond where Bekah was sent before her time, souls live in eternity. Eternity is to the other side what time is to our mortal side.

During moments of appreciative epiphany, for instance diving into the ocean or watching the sun rise in the desert, we are allowed to partake of the same eternity that characterizes the dimension where Bekah lives. Likewise the souls who inhabit eternity visit time at will.

I am able to say this, and even believe it, because my daughter has demonstrated to me in a number of amazing ways that she is near, very very near, that she is still Bekah, and that she loves us in a vital, ongoing sense. I won't take the time to recite the catalogue of Bekah's post-mortem unexplained phenomena and incredible small world stories, but if you want to know or if you have something to add to it, see me afterward, email me, or call and we'll talk.

This catalogue enables my recovery from the most profound and painful loss. It includes the truly phenomenal occurrences where physical matter on this plane was affected by what I believe to be Bekah's post-death energy, and many other less striking instances, which a skeptic might charge do not constitute evidence of anything.

To know that Bekah is hugging me because I get the chills up and down my body independently of any observable physical cause is to apply faith to my experience. With faith my soul transcends this place where I am bereft of my beloved daughter, and Bekah and I are together.

Faith is a difficult thing to summon. For someone as logical as myself, who has looked around this world for almost 47 years and observed no evidence of a cognizant god, faith rests by necessity on people and is driven by love. Of many lessons taken since Bekah was killed, the first was that, of any and all faiths I had ever entertained to that point, the most deeply held of all, the one thing I believed one thousand percent unequivocally, was I will die before my children.

....

this is as of this moment the first paragraphs of the speech i am planning to give tomorrow at Green Hills Cemetery as we memorialize my dead daughter on her 22nd birthday

- posted by barbara @ 7/05/2002 01:45:00 PM

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