Through God’s Eyes

“If a Buddhist, Hindu,Muslim, Catholic and a Jew stood in front of God, who would you say he loves the most?  These three questions are really just one question, and it is this:  Have you actually convinced yourself that God plays favourites?”  James Blanchard Cisneros

My mother was a good mother who had all kinds of advice for her children, especially her daughters.   Her advice was always one of self-preservation and she use to make me laugh when she said things like, “when you go on a date, always have an exit plan, leave by the back door if you have to and always carry a quarter so you can call a cab.”  The one piece of advice that she repeated over and over again was, “never discuss sex, politics or religion with a group of people, unless of course you want to start a storm, throw in a comment about sex, politics or religion and then sit back and watch the fireworks.”  My mother did that at times, she would make a comment, innocent comment about sex, politics or religion and then sit back and laugh.  She had wit mixed with the most innocent face, so much so that when the fight was over no one knew who started it.

I was brought up Catholic and my earliest memory  was the Sunday morning ritual of getting all dressed up and joining my three siblings, my mother and father for Mass.   I was never afraid of God, I always felt welcomed in his home and I was in awe of his grace and acceptance of so many people who visited his house.  Through the eyes of a child, I thought everyone got God and that everyone felt him like I did. My parents divorced when I was a child and it was during the divorce that I saw what I thought was God’s plan begin to unravel.

There was much bitterness and resentment between my parents and my mother filled the house with hostility against my father.  I didn’t feel any of the hate and hostility toward my father that my mother felt and I couldn’t understand why my parents  turned their back on God’s love.  After time things fell into a routine and my father had visitation rights.  My father was a foodie and during our visits, my father and I spent a lot of time talking and eating.  My father was a smart man and I give him credit to this day that he never said anything negative about my mother other than that I was to listen to her and she was a good mother.

At the age of sixteen my father revealed to me during one of our conversations that he was a man of no religion and that he was agnostic in his beliefs.  He said to me, “I don’t believe there is a God and I’m sorry to tell you this Jo, but heaven and hell don’t exist either.  Heaven and hell are right here on this earth.  I’ve seen heaven and I’ve seen hell and when you die you are buried in the ground and that is the end of the road.”  My father served his country in the second world war and I knew he had seen devastation, but I didn’t realize how much the experience effected him until that moment as he was a typical ex-serviceman who didn’t talk about his experiences.

My childhood experience of sitting in God’s house believing that we were all in God’s presence was shot and his comment took me by surprise.  I asked him “why did we all go to church every Sunday if you didn’t believe, why didn’t you drop us off at the church door and pick us up later if you didn’t believe?”  Thinking back, I was grasping because I was sure that there was no way that he could sit in that church and not feel God’s presence in some way, he must have forgotten.  His answer was simple and in his answer I started to comprehend why my parent’s relationship crumbled into divorce.  He said ” I did it to please your mother.”

Several years passed and my father and I talked about many things but religion never came up again.  The year I was just shy of 18, I was visiting family in Toronto.  I had no plans to visit my father in Montreal but my brother called me and said he was going to Montreal for the long weekend and asked me to join him.  I jumped at the opportunity, not only to see my father but many of my friends still lived there and Montreal is a happening place for young people.  The weekend went by fast and I hardly saw my father as I was out with my friends the whole weekend visiting all of our favourite clubs and dancing into the early morning hours.  Finally getting a chance to sit down with my father, he asked me if I would stay the rest of the week so he and I could visit our favourite restaurants and hang out.

The house had been filled with activity that weekend as people were in and out and the Monday afternoon after everyone had left, the atmosphere took on a stillness.   The peace was welcomed after a busy weekend.

After dinner that night my father and I sat down together and he complained about a pain in his shoulder.  The way he was holding his arm, I gathered that the pain was shooting from his shoulder down his arm.  I suggested we get him to the doctor the next day because I didn’t like the sound of it, but he was insistent that he was fine.  Our talk that evening led us to many places and he talked about his love for his children, circumstances of the divorce from my mother, his experiences during the war and his lack of belief in God.  We argued back and forth about his agnostic view and I was able to meet his reasons of non-belief with my reasons for belief.  Before I knew it, the time was 3:00 am and I told him I was exhausted, gave him a big hug, declared our love for one another and turned in for a few hours sleep.

I woke the next morning with an odd feeling that something wasn’t right and when I walked into my father’s room he was lying horizontally across the bed and he was  a shade of grey I had never seen before.  His lips were blue and there was a smell in the air that I instinctively knew was the smell of death.  He was still breathing but I knew that death was imminent.  I realized his lips were moving and he was trying to raise his hand to reach out to me,  I bent down closer and he whispered that he loved me.  I told him that I loved him and before I knew it the ambulance arrived.  As I watched the ambulance attendants take my father away on a stretcher, a morbid feeling came over me as I realized that would be the last time I saw my father alive.  By the time I arrived at the hospital he was gone.

The week I was supposed to hang out with my father turned into a week of viewings and a funeral.  I was stunned most of the week, but when I came up for air I kept going over that last conversation that my father and I had.  He knew he was dying and to this day I believe he wanted to die.  My father had many personal burdens, burdens that weighed him down during his life, and I believe he wanted the pain to stop.  It was interesting to me that he kept  insisting that God wasn’t there for him that last night.  Ironically, I believe God sent me there to be with him in his final hours, his child that had a strong enough faith to insist that God loved him and was still at his side.  Unknown to my father, the final hours that we spent together was part of God’s plan.    Death is a part of life and how we live and how we love is through God’s eyes.

where there is death, there is drama

“In the end these things matter most: how well did you love?  How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?” Buddha

I’ve always been a straight shooter with zero tolerance for bullshit and I come by that honestly as my father was a straight shooter.   Where there is death there is drama – I hate to sound so cold but it’s true.   I remember my father talking about a man he knew that had died.  He didn’t like the man and according to my father, neither did anyone else.  Yet somehow in death the man became this great man and all loved him.  I can still hear my father’s voice as he said ” the man was an asshole, the only difference about him now is he is a dead asshole.” Don’t get me wrong,  I never speak ill of the dead but if I didn’t like someone in life, I don’t like them any better in death.  My father had a point and a lesson taken from that man’s death was to treat people like you want to be treated.

I believe that no one dies before their time and every life on earth has their own destination time to death.   Life is short and you have to take the time to make sure your loved ones know how much you love them.  In every death there is much to be learned;  how one lived their life, good or bad, is a lesson for the rest of us.   Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and not one of us is better than the other.   After all we all have the same destination – death.  We can’t escape it and sooner or later it’s coming.  How we treat people and how we love is what tells all about us in life  and in death.

Corinthians 13:4-8

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

A great musician died yesterday and I have no idea how he lived his life. I only knew his music.  He was a talented self-taught musician that defied human logic.  The video below is a look at just the man and his talent.  The world was blessed to witness his talent and the video below cuts through all the celebrity circus and takes you to the core and raw Prince Rogers Nelson.  I hope Prince’s life was filled with the same amount of love as his talent.  Enjoy…

 

THE WAY OF TRUTH ALWAYS WINS…

She walked into the room and she knew, she had never seen death before but the smell of death permeated the room.  As she got to the side of her father’s bed, she noticed that he had been stripped of all his clothing, the middle of his torso was covered with a bed sheet, he was lying vertically across the bed and his legs were dangling over the side.  Her step-mother woke her up a few moments ago and said “wake up your father says he’s having a heart-attack but he doesn’t want me to phone the ambulance.”  Standing over her father, she knew this was bullshit, his flesh was a shade of grey she had never seen before, his breathing was very shallow and the smell that filled her nostrils clearly told her that the end was near.  She knew that even if her father wanted to die, it was more natural to want to live and no human being wanted to be lying in their own filth barely breathing and in pain.  Slowly she turned to her step-mother, resisting the urge to scream, and said in a very calm but commanding voice “phone the ambulance now.”

Her mind was racing as she was standing over her father, how come the ambulance wasn’t called, how long had her father been lying like this, questions, questions, questions running through her mind.  Her mind was so pre-occupied that she barely heard it but when she focused again on her father, his lips were moving.  She bent down as close as she could and he said “where is Theresa?”  “I’m right here Dad,” she said.  She grabbed his hand and held on and she felt a tiny bit of pressure as her father squeezed her hand and through his shallow breathing she heard what was barely a whisper – “I love you more than you know.”  “I love you too Dad” she said staring at him in utter disbelief.    She looked up and saw that her father’s wife had entered the room and was watching the scene.   Theresa found it strange that her father did not ask about his wife, he asked the whereabouts of his daughter and made sure she knew that he loved her but never did he ask for his wife.

It seemed to take forever for the ambulance to arrive but finally they arrived and put an oxygen mask over her father’s face, rolled him onto a stretcher and rushed him into the ambulance.  Theresa and her step-mother raced to the car and were about to leave for the hospital when her step-mother suddenly stopped the car and asked Theresa to go inside and get a change of clothes for her father  because he would need clothes for when he came home from the hospital.   Theresa was a little perplexed because it was very obvious to her that father was not coming home.  Rather than waste time arguing, Theresa just did as she was asked – she went back to her father’s bedroom quickly put an outfit together for her father and rushed back to the car.

They arrived at the hospital where Theresa was greeted by one of the ambulance attendants and he came rushing up to her and said “your father looked good as we brought him in, he was talking, he seemed better.”  Theresa stood there and stared at the man, what a stupid thing to say to a daughter of a man who is obviously dying.  Rather than say what she thought, she kept walking.   They were ushered into a private  waiting room and Theresa was waiting for the inevitable announcement that her father was dead.  It couldn’t have been any more than 30 minutes before the doctor appeared and told her and her step-mother what Theresa already knew – her father was gone.  Her step-mother immediately started to yell “what am I going to do” and then sobbed.  Theresa was prepared to be told that her father was dead and she calmly asked the doctor if she could see her father.  As they walked into the emergency room and she approached  the bed where her father now lay, she could see that his skin was now  a blue/purple colour and he looked very puffy.  Even though the doctor told her he was dead she had to be certain.  She no longer felt his presence and from behind her she could hear her father’s wife crying.  One of the hospital workers pointed to a ring her father was wearing on his right hand and said that the ring was very tight-fitting but they would try to get the ring off in one piece and if they succeeded who should they give the ring too?  Before her step-mother could speak Theresa spoke for her brother.  “That ring belongs to my brother.”  Her step-mother went to say something but Theresa interrupted her and said ” Dad told me last night that if he should die, he wanted my brother to have this ring.”  Dad had been wearing that ring since he was seventeen years old and now his son was  about to turn seventeen years old and last night her father mentioned the irony of his son being seventeen, the same age his mother gave him the ring.  Now standing at the edge of the hospital bed where her father now laid, she was prepared to lurch anyone who dared to take the ring – it belonged to her brother, her father made that clear.

As her memory raced back to the night before, Theresa was now certain that something was different about her father.  He spoke of so many things he had never spoken to her about.  He spoke about the reasons and ramifications of his divorce to her mother ten years earlier, he spoke of his recent troubles at work, his time spent in the Navy during the war and he spoke of his love for all of his children.   She realized now that this was God’s gift to her – her last moments with her father.  She felt closer to her father that night than she ever had and now standing by her father’s body demanding that her father’s wishes be kept regarding his ring she looked down at the bag she was holding and she felt angry. 

All the while waiting in the hospital room to hear of her father’s impending death, she was holding that stupid bag and now as she looked down she could see the brown loafer shoes, the brown dress pants and the checkered sweater she quickly grabbed at the insistence of her father’s wife.   Theresa knew her father wasn’t coming home and she angrily thought as she listened to the howl of his wife “how could she not get he was a goner.”  As they walked out into the hallway of the emergency area of the hospital, her stepsister, Kerry, came rushing in asking the whereabouts of her father.  All three woman were  pulled into a private room where Kerry, was told that her step-father had died and immediately Kerry started to sob.  Through her sobbing Theresa heard her say “I knew when I got up for work at 5:30 am that something was really wrong, he was crying out in pain.”

Moments later in the hallway before the entrance way to the emergency room, Theresa pulled Kerry aside.  “Did you say Dad was crying out in pain when you got up for work this morning.”  “Yes,” Kerry said, “he was in obvious pain and very uncomfortable.”  Theresa’s eyes flashed an anger that she was sure her step-sister recognized.  Between the hours of 5:30 am and 8:30 am when her step-mother woke Theresa up to announce that she thought her father was having a heart-attack, her father had been lying in pain.  Did he try to get up?  Is that why he was lying vertically across the bed with his legs dangling over the side of his bed?   Did her step-mother leave and not realize he was in pain?  “Impossible” Theresa thought, she must have known he was in pain.  By the time Theresa was woken out of her sleep, her step-mother was all ready for work; did she sit in front of her mirror and fix her hair and make-up while her father was yelling out in pain?  The thoughts overwhelmed Theresa as she tried to push the horrible scenes out of her mind.

All three of them walked out of the hospital and as Theresa looked down into the brown bag holding her father’s clothes, she started to feel a numbness go through her whole body.  She couldn’t think anymore – her father was gone and it was obvious he had been deprived of a right that Theresa felt that everyone deserved – the right to die with dignity.  Theresa knew all too well what was next, she had to contact her siblings, and other family members, a funeral would be planned and she would greet her siblings and family as they arrived from near and far.  She tried desperately to push the thoughts of her father’s last moments here on this earth aside as she prepared to spend the next few days honouring her father.

The next few days during the viewings and the funeral were a blur to Theresa, she kept going back over the last conversation she had with her father the night before his death and it was clear to her he knew he was going to die.  Thinking about her father’s health, she was sure that if the ambulance had been called earlier he would have been more comfortable but she didn’t think it would have made the difference in the outcome.

Theresa’s life moved on but she found she was haunted by her father’s last moment.  Theresa felt if she had woken up earlier, she could have made the difference in her father’s death.  The constant flashbacks bothered her so much that Theresa fell into a deep depression a year after her father’s death.   Not sure where to turn she started to see a counsellor who told her that something shocking or devastating had to have happened to her.   Theresa continued to deny that anything shocking or devastating had happened to her unable to process her father’s death.  Several months into the depression, Theresa had a vivid dream.   In her dream she was back at the kitchen table with her father having that last conversation before he died.   In her dream she told her father that it was late and she was tired that they must really get to bed.  He walked her up to her room and gave her a kiss on her forehead and said goodnight – as she walked into the room he said “sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite” as he slowly closed the door.  Theresa said “no dad – don’t close the door, you know how I hate to sleep with the door closed.”  Her father said “I don’t want you to be disturbed by people getting ready for work in the morning.”  “It’s ok dad, I’m so tired a bomb wouldn’t wake me up.”  “Ok sweetheart, I’ll leave the door open – goodnight – I love you.”  “Love you too dad.”  In the dream Theresa watched as her father walked away from the doorway to his bedroom.   Theresa woke with a start as the dream was so vivid and the dream revealed the very last moments she spent with her father.   Theresa now understood what had been haunting her for the last year or so – when Theresa’s step-mother came in the room to wake her up to declare “your father is having a heart attack, but he doesn’t want me to call the ambulance.”  Theresa was already awake,  she was stirring from a deep sleep and now Theresa remembered clearly  – her step-mother came barging into her bedroom after she opened the bedroom door.  Someone had closed that door and she was sure it wasn’t her father.   Someone didn’t want her to hear the commotion going on in the house that morning.

Theresa believed the vivid dream was a confirmation of what she felt was true all along.  Her father was neglected when he needed his loved ones the most.  The dream also served as a message from Theresa’s father – it was time to embrace fully what happened, forgive and move on.  As Theresa slowly started letting go of the haunting she read a quote by Gandhi and kept that quote close to her heart – “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won.  There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall.  Think of it always.”

by momwhearingloss

CONNECTIONS

We all have a connection with our moms.  Some have more connection than others, but most of us have a connection.  I’ve always been close to my mom, not that we didn’t fight, we did fight, like cats and dogs.   The fighting was part of our connection.  My mother was very outspoken and she didn’t care who you were and if she had something to say, she said it.  I tend to be the same way so the two of us butted heads quite a bit.  However, we were each others best friend, always in each other’s corner.  If I needed her she was there, if she needed me I was there, we supported one another, we loved one another.  We shared many fights, but many more laughs.  We laughed all the time, sometimes until our guts hurt and the tears were streaming down our faces. About ten years ago I noticed the laughter slowly subsiding and mom seemed to be constantly pre-occupied.  Something felt wrong, she could not remember where she put anything and she seemed to be mad at me all the time.  When she couldn’t remember certain things, I would think we all have bad days  Maybe she is just having many  bad days, but the problems were consistent and what started off as every now and then became more and more frequent and then the laughter seemed to stop.  I said to my husband one night, “when was the last time you heard mom laugh” and he said he couldn’t remember.  Slowly the connection between mother and daughter fell away.  At times I felt like I was talking to a stranger, taking care of a stranger.

It was obvious to me that there was something seriously wrong with mom.  Mom and I shared the same doctor.  I phoned the doctor one day and relayed all of my fears and concerns about mom.  The doctor said she would talk to mom the next time she was in, but she felt that my fears and concerns were nothing to worry about.  She said that she had just seen mom recently and felt she was fine.  I kept saying to the doctor that she was not fine.  My mother was the best actress around, she had everyone fooled.   She learned little tricks, and manipulated everyone around her to the point that when I said something is wrong, people were thinking that I was being a negative daughter.  As time moved on, I pleaded with my family and our doctor to do something.  Finally my doctor saw that something was seriously wrong and we had mom properly tested.  Four years ago the medical community finally agreed with me that my mother had Alzheimer’s.  I wanted my mother to come and live with me, but she accepted my brother’s invitation to live with him instead.  My brother lives across the country in Niagara Falls and I couldn’t understand why she would move all of that way.  To be honest it hurt and it was a blow to me.  All I wanted to do was take care of my mom as I hope one of my sons would do for me.   My brother wanted to do the same thing, and I voiced my concerns of sending our sick mother across the country but he insisted that he wanted to do this.  So I stepped aside, I packed all of her things, shipped what she needed across the country, put her apartment up for sale and drove her to the airport and put her on a plane with a one way ticket to Ontario.  It was one of the worst days of my life.  My husband couldn’t be there that day so I had my two boys with me.  My oldest was seven years old at the time and my youngest was five.  As I watched mom walking with an attendant to the plane, mom turned to me to wave good bye and the tears were streaming down her face.  It took everything I had not to run up to her and grab her and tell her that she was coming home with me.  I turned to my seven year old with tears streaming down my face and said to him, “I think I’ve made a mistake.”  My son said to me ” mom Granny won’t remember who we are next year, it’s time to let her go and be with the other part of her family, and you haven’t made a mistake”.  Needless to say his comment stopped me in my tracks, my mother had two sons, one daughter and six grandchildren back east and my son was right, it was time for her to go home.

Due to work and just everyday life, it was  a full year before I saw my mother again.  My son was right, we got off the plane in Toronto and drove straight to Niagara Falls to be with mom.  She walked into the room and I could see it in her eyes, she had no idea who I was, no idea who my children were or who my husband was.  The actress part came out of her again, she did her best to try and please everyone and pretend she knew who we were, but everyone in that room knew that mom had no bloody clue who we were.  It was a weird two weeks, no connection to mom at all.  I tried, we all tried, we saw her every moment we could and it was like I was sitting with the woman down the street, the woman I hardly knew.  The day I left Niagara Falls, I drove by myself to the home where my mother was living.  It was just the two of us, I left the children and my husband at my brother’s house, I wanted the time alone.  Three hours and both my mother and I hardly said a word to each other.  We just sat outside in the garden just being together, the connection once again lost, lost a long time ago.  On the flight home I was trying to remember the mother that I once had, the laughter the arguments all the connections that I had with mom, but I couldn’t get the Alzheimer’s mom out of my head, the woman who didn’t know her daughters, her sons, her grandchildren, once again the connection was gone.

This past Christmas, my brother phoned me to tell me that my mother had taken a bad fall, broken her ribs and one of the broken ribs punctured her lung.  We didn’t think she would make it and sure enough she survived, at one point the doctors thought she might be getting out of the hospital.  One night my mother asked about me, my children and my husband.  My brother called to tell me that she asked for us all by name and he said for the first time in such a long time he felt like he was talking to mom.  My heart went cold because I knew that this was God’s gift, the clarity, the recognition, mom hadn’t remembered who I was for two years.  I remember my brother was so happy, I told him that I was thrilled that she had some clarity, however, I didn’t think it was a good sign.  The very next day mom fell into a coma and no one knows why.  The next 48 hours was a strange time because I was living across the country and not sure what to do. No one knew how long she would be in a Coma and I was torn, should I fly back east now or wait?  That night I felt the connection of mom come back to me,  I dreamt of mom and she came to me in  my dreams as my mother, not the woman I hardly knew but my mother,  I could almost smell her and she told me I needed to stay where I was.  I woke up with peace in my heart and I told my husband I would wait to see what happened.  Twenty four hours later, my husband and I took our children to a movie, on the way home from the movie I fell asleep.  I’m not sure how to explain it, but it was as if this energy moved through me.  The feeling was so abrupt, I woke up immediately and I said to my husband, mom is gone!  The connection was there and then it was gone.  When we got into the house I went to the phone expecting to see a message on the answering machine, there was no message but I knew in my heart that mom had moved on.  Ten minutes later the phone rang and it was my sister-in-law, mom had passed away.  I asked her at what time and she told me what I already knew about a half hour ago, the precise time I felt the energy move through me.  Mom had managed to re-connect with me after all.

by Johanne Fraser

Published in Miraculous Messages from Heaven – October 15, 2013