My mother gave me a distinct nudging soon after she left this world
[2001] for Home. She was -- and
is -- such a beautiful spirit. I
have for the most part refrained from even hoping to get any
communication from her -- if anyone belongs in the molten core of the
heart of GraIS [Gracious Infinite Spirit -- my affectionate term for
God], this dear person does! I wanted her to GO, to FLY HOME!
As the years stretch the distance
between her being embodied as my mother and the ever-expanding
edge of Now, her love and beauty for its own sake, the spirit she is in
my heart, becomes ever more luminous and full of Grace.
Something that endearingly haunts me still is the memory of
observing her the night before her passing; she was slipping more fully
into the Great Silence of completion, as if feeling less and less the
need to be present here, and tuning in ever more deeply to the Otherness
that would soon welcome her Home. She
had grown so thin and frail, and for all the ravages of her illness, I
was struck by a major incongruity between that fact and her
appearance. Even though she was 72, she looked almost transparent
and like a young girl about 12 years old, wistful and far away.
I marveled that I was seeing her much as she must have looked at
about that age.
I asked her what she was thinking about and she said softly, not
so much to me as to express ‘where she was’ at that moment across
the widening distance, ‘I am going home to Jesus.’
It was not the first time I had been surprised by something Mom
had said. I had always
known, even though she had never talked about it as such, that she was a
deeply spiritual person. She
grew up back in the gentle
Appalachians
, perhaps the oldest mountains in the world, and there is a quality of
quiet reverence and love, associated more with 'place' than anything
like historical time, I connect between her and this holy land.
I have often thought she was an angel on the Earth a little while
in part just for me and a few other souls who needed a hefty dose of
Grace.
One day soon after she passed over, I was on my way home and
totally on whim decided to stop at a used book store that carried a lot
of secondhand CDs. I was
going to take a quick look for anything interesting, and I think I was
even a little pressed for time, so could not stay long.
I had been there many times and nearly my whole collection of CDs
up to that moment came from there. I
regularly checked the ‘new age’ section and had purchased just about
all the Enya music, which was very popular then, among other things; I
wasn’t fixated on Enya per say that day, but would have welcomed any
new titles by her and a few others just as beautiful to me. I
was in that deeper-than-thought place, wordlessly immersed in wonderment
about what it must be like for Mom now.
I was so glad she was free of her illness and just knew she was a
‘star’ welcomed from wide and far back to her beloved Home, and
surely with Jesus and cherished family she had been largely separated
from, since her marriage to Dad had taken her hundreds of miles from the
family she had always been close to, this cherished family she got to
see so rarely through all her remaining decades.
I puttered around in the CDs for just
a few minutes, briefly but thoroughly reading through all the titles,
but nothing looked interesting. I
was turning to go, when something told me to pick up a CD on the top
shelf that I had not remembered seeing in my initial look-through, and
it was Enya’s “Paint the Sky with Stars,” a real find for
my collection. 
I glanced inside the cover and was instantly riveted by the picture of a
woman [Enya] with artistic paintbrush and paint bucket in hand,
silhouetted against a sky-full of brilliant stars, her back to the
viewer, and musing at this heavenly masterpiece she had just created.
I could imagine Mom reflecting back at her Great Work in this
world. The whole thing
connected like electricity for me!
Like Enya, Mom was brunette, and without squinting too hard, you
could see her standing there with her paintbrush, taking in
simultaneously her own amazing creation, and also, her back to this
world now, taking in the Very Wonder of the incalculable extravagance of
the World Beyond.
In that moment there was no doubt I
had been guided to this store to get the answer I had been stretching to
know, to glimpse how she was doing and what she was now experiencing in
this OtherWhere, Home. That
was one of the sweetest moments of my life.
Oh and the music and lyrics were similarly – the only word that
comes to mind is – magical, as if truly derived from this other
‘place’, my mother’s new experiences unfolding for her now.
It was as if this musing, this wonderment was her own experience
conveyed to me through Enya’s song, created sometime before Mom’s
passing.
One last fascinating detail, as if to ensure that I got it that this was
straight from her heart to mine: The
release date for that CD, was 11/11/97; my mother’s 'death'
date was 11/10/2001 -- close enough for me!
The very mood / ambience of the song is so profoundly my mother,
so quiet in a light and accepting way, so poignant, which is how I have
often perceived her life and the way she lived it, so very beautiful,
this angel who has been my mother.
