Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Liz Watkins's avatar

Thank you, Marga. ❤️🙏

Expand full comment
Jane Baldwin's avatar

This idea of sitting at the bedside of the ones we love as they are dying has so many layers that are related to how comfortable the family members are with death and subsequently attachment to form. I have four examples to draw from.

1) My grandmother kept my grandfather home alone and piously stayed with him (in anger) as he died and wouldn’t let any of the family say goodbye or come to pay respects.

2) My father’s death - he didn’t have a concept or language for death. So many men are programmed to be providers and to be do-ing. Feeling and the ephemeral were not something to be trusted so he dug in his heels, defiant of death until he took his last breath on the bathroom floor, after years of pulmonary disease.

3) My own mother in law who I spent the last 12 days of her life with. I went to the nursing home every day - singing to her and chanting and praying, rubbing her with essential oils and helping her to ease her grip on her physical attachment that kept her soul pinned to this earth. Deep into this process one of her sons, in denial of death, demanded she get up. He took her to another facility, he couldn’t tell that the veil had already parted and she was walking through. She died 24 hours later of a heart attack alone in a room without any family there.

4) My aunt Janie, my namesake whose 7 children and their children all gathered around her bed, candles lit, reading children’s stories, singing family tunes with guitars, love and golden light filling the air as she breathed her last breath.

That’s how I want to go- community, fullness, golden light.

Did I answer your question? I’m not sure. Though you’ve touched on something beautiful here.

This essential conversation around death is what is needed to fill the gaps and wounds of our past relationship to death. This conversation gives us a map to understand the benefits of being with our dying loved ones. It’s a a map to understanding that death is part of the purpose and meaning, rather than what happens after all the do-ing and attachment to form.

The formless as part of the form.♥️

Expand full comment
6 more comments...

No posts