Sadly, my father and I had been at odds with one
another virtually my entire life. It is a situation that all too
many baby-boomer children and their fathers will recognize. We could never have a heart-to-heart or
let's-level-with-one-another kind of authentic discussion or
relationship; he just was not built that way. But he was a 'good'
person and had done some beautiful things in his life, including being
an excellent provider and a faithful
husband, which did not make it any easier to sort out his feelings
toward me. There was always present a kind of 'overcoming' to have
any kind of genuine communication with him.
I once asked how he felt about the subject of death and dying at some
time not too removed from when Mom passed [in 2001; he himself slipped the
bonds of this world 17 months to the day after she did].
They had been married over five decades, and she was one of the very few
people he allowed himself to be loved by. So her graduation
from this embodied life must have been very hard on him, though he never
openly expressed the grief he must have felt.
One of the things I had hoped to be able to do was to help my parents
and other loved ones with their own unresolved issues with death and
dying, if nothing else, by sharing some of the many, many spiritual
experience stories that have surfaced in the last two-three decades,
through which so many others had found great comfort and sometimes much
more. But with the merest pause, he said, "There's nothing to
talk about," which pretty effectively ended that
conversation.
Having felt badly misjudged in his eyes all my life -- that was the only
context I could come up with in which I could learn to finally accept
and love myself and also accept this incomprehensible behavior -- more
even than being loved, what I had longed for was finally to feel he
understood. If I have a philosophy of life, it is this: to
be truly understood means one's heart is fully revealed to / Seen
by another. So to be understood in this way is to be loved.
And an added note: I have long felt, when we pass over, we indeed
do eventually and fully understand, through the life review process.
On the day of my father's funeral, I was sitting in front of the
computer looking at this glorious picture, as if the viewer is standing
on the summit of a mountain and looking off into the untold distances
across a great valley to the rolling terrain beyond. It was spring
or early summer and the glow of sun-filled greenery everywhere was offset by a
rich blue sky. I was wishing him a most blessed Journey and
imagining Dad standing in such a way that he could see the fullness of
where he had come and the cosmic vastness hinting of unimaginable
wonders to be discovered in this new phase of his living, including a
lot of healing and wholeness-making.
Suddenly Dad was standing right beside me. I did not see him, but I felt him as clearly as if he
were physically present. He said two words: "I
understand." A moment later he was gone.
Needless to say, this did a lot for my own healing and wholeness-making.
The
computer -- literally and metaphorically
alluding to my vocation concerning these spiritually life-altering
experiences -- came up interestingly in a second
encounter with my father after his graduation from this
existence . .
