Dates with Death

Watching someone you love die is an image you never forget.

In my opinion, as traumatic as death can be, the idea of it is far more scary and dramatic than the event itself. The average person isn’t going to witness a murder. Sure, it’s true, awful things happen every day and people see these things every day. But there are a lot of people who die in far less dramatic fashion than one would think. Though these grim scenes may be devoid of Hollywood flare, their traumatic impact is no less painful and potentially damaging.

My first brush with death was my aunt. It wasn’t so much a brush, but more of a whisper. I have faint memories of her. Far less than I’d like. Far less than I’m proud of. She loved animals. She’d never had kids, though I don’t know why. She was married. She loved her nieces and nephews with all her heart. She loved green eggs and ham - both the book and making them. Sometimes, when I really focus I can still hear her calling out her dog’s name.

I didn’t see my aunt die. I didn’t even know she had been sick. It was just something I had been told. I didn’t see her very frequently and it was a strange concept for my mind to comprehend, that she was gone and not just that it had been a long time since we’d gone to visit her.

My aunt was my first whisper with death. My first brush with death was with my grandma. I had been around eight years old when my aunt died and about eleven or twelve when my grandma died. My grandma and I had a much closer relationship than my aunt and I.

Not long after my aunt had passed away, my grandma started getting sick. First, she had developed emphysema, which is not surprising considering that she smoked for over fifty years of her life. She was moved from her apartment into an assisted living facility. This worked for about a year, but then the dementia started to set in. She needed to be placed in a nursing home or with a family member. My mom and dad quickly made the decision to take her into our home.

I will forever treasure that year when my grandma was still mostly with us. We watched Murder She Wrote and Walker Texas Ranger. She came to my school events. I couldn’t understand how grandma was so sick when to me she seemed so full of life. She had something the doctor called sundown syndrome. She would be lucid during the day, but dementia would set in and her memory would start to go at night.

After about a year and a half of living with us, her dementia symptoms gradually started to bleed into the daylight hours. It was slow at first, forgetfulness, irritation. Once it started to progress though, there was no stopping it. Her mind went quickly. I don’t fully remember the night that it happened. It was a weekend, thankfully for my parents. They had realized that grandma was declining and they were calling in hospice to come that night. With it being a weekend they were able to send me off to spend the night at a friend’s house, none the wiser. When I came home the following day, they told me that grandma was gone.

My grandma was my first brush with death. I didn’t see it, but I felt it. I’ve had dates with death several times since both of those life-shaping childhood events. Something about those early experiences fed into a fascination with death. You would think, with a child that young the only thing they would feed into would be fear - but not me. I wanted to know what death was. Was it final? Was it scary? Was it beautiful? Was it all of the above?

That’s how I became a hospice nurse - sort of. I’m a nurse in the sense that I’ve had the schooling and have the licensing, but I’m not a nurse in the sense that I refuse to poke anyone with needles unless it’s a life-or-death situation. I can and will administer medications through already administered IVs, but poking a needle into the skin? Hell no. Whenever I’m working, there’s always an accompanying nurse. I’m there more so for comfort. Yes, I am a licensed nurse, but the core skill I bring to my job is being a certified Reiki practitioner specializing in hospice and end of life care. Some people call me a death doula.

The best way I can describe Reiki or my understanding and practice of it, is it is energy work. Everything in the universe is made up of energy. When we have energetic blockages this can cause physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional ailments and can affect any area of your life and health. This can even affect a spirit at their time of death. In generally healthy people, these blockages can slowly eat away at their will to live, the only tool they have to fight back against the siren song of death. In those whose metaphorical time is truly near, it can delay the crossing over of their spirit after their body has expired. They stay energetically frozen, trapped, and tied to the lives they had been living. They become ghosts.

It’s my job to prevent that from happening.

I believe in ghosts. I believe in spirits. I also believe that they are two different things. Ghosts aren’t entirely here by their choice. Ghosts are prisoners of themselves. They refuse to face the unresolved issues of their human lives, by refusing to grow and evolve into a utopian afterlife they instead remain trapped as the shadow of their former lives. Spirits visit the earthly plane by choice. Spirits are just what their name implies. They are the spirits of people whose bodies have died. It’s the part of them that lives on. This fact they share in common with ghosts. Where they differ is that spirits have faced their earthly trials. Spirits have crossed over and live out their existence in their own, personal Heaven. Spirits choose to take trips to visit the living. They’re not trapped or bound. They have freedom and choice.

This unique viewpoint and understanding of death and the afterlife have helped me in my career more than any measure of traditional training could provide. Not only am I a licensed nurse and a certified Reiki practitioner, but I’m a spirit medium as well. I just don’t openly advertise that last bit. I’m able to communicate with a person when they are living here on earth, their body still alive, and also when they are crossing over from the physical world into the spiritual world. People who are dying have a window of time where they have a foot in each world. Their bodies are still here, still breathing, still technically living - but their soul is ready to let go of the physical plane. The soul has started the transition. This is the perfect time for me to offer my services.

Through energy work, I can narrow in on any energetic blockages a person may have, giving us a place to start and time to work them out, ensuring a clear, flowing path for energy and light, and allowing a smooth transition when the time to crossover comes.

When I’m working, I try to stay in tune with the spiritual world. It’s the easiest way to work with the client, the person preparing to cross over. I’m aware of the grieving family members, struggling to find closure, but my focus is always on the client. The living will have time to face, process, and overcome their grief. For the client, their time is now.

For me, most of the time, I find my job to be enjoyable. It’s a beautiful moment, what I see, what I experience when I help someone cross over to the other side. When I pass the hand of their spirit off to their loved ones waiting on the other side. The sense of peace, calm, pure joy, and love that radiates throughout the room. It’s addictive. It’s a high.

Then there’s the crash. The fall back to reality, where you’re surrounded by sobbing family members. I always do my best to try and comfort them but at times like these, there’s no amount of words or actions that can cause real comfort. A core memory is being formed and it’s far from the good kind.

Watching someone you love die is an image you never forget.

My first date with death was with my father.

By all accounts and memories, I had always been a daddy’s girl growing up. My dad was my best friend. I only saw the best qualities of him and liked to think I had those qualities in myself as well. He let me be who I was. Always encouraging and supporting. Always seeing the real me. My dad was my best friend.

He died two years after my grandma. That was a rough patch of time for my paternal line, losing my aunt, grandma, and dad all within the same decade. He had been driving home from work. He was working late hours. It was winter and snowy. I still don’t remember the full story, whether there had been another car involved that fled the scene, an animal, or something else, but somehow my dad’s car rolled down a ditch and crashed into a tree. My mom was called. We rushed to the hospital. Mom was taken in to see him first. I felt sick. It felt like a cement brick was sitting in the pit of my stomach.

My dad was gone.

My mom hadn’t said so. The doctor hadn’t told her that as far as I knew. But I knew. My dad was gone. He was gone and he wasn’t coming back. My head started spinning. I couldn’t quite tell if it had been forever or merely a blink of an eye since my mom had disappeared into a hospital room with a doctor, but she was suddenly walking back toward me.

“Come on,” She was sniffling, doing her best to hold back tears though they were already staining her cheeks. “Come and see him.”

“No.” The answer surprised her. She grabbed my arm, gently, and tugged, but I stood my ground. “No. He’s not there. That’s not him. I don’t want to see him - not like that.”

Her expression softened, her heart breaking even more than it already had.

“I don’t want you to regret not taking the chance to say goodbye.”

There’s a tug, a faint pain in my chest. The idea of regret. The idea that maybe I didn’t know what I thought I knew. Maybe my dad really was in there and all I had to do was walk in, tell him I love him and say goodbye. Whether I was right or wrong, what’s the harm in that?

Watching someone you love die is an image you never forget.