I mentioned that my experience of The Allness sustained me through grief, and that I didn’t experience Heather’s passing as a failure. This is not to say that I thought her passing was “for the best” or “what was supposed to happen.” Certainly there has been much soul-searching, much asking what we needed to know or do to have occasioned a different outcome. There have been different answers to that, and places of no answer. And there have been massive floods of tears. As people who have been there have attested, there can be a sense of being in a world where things are almost normal, where we can even laugh, and then we can fall, as if through a thin partition, into the place of drowning.
We are taught in Christian Science that death is unreal, that grief at death is without cause. But it was clear to me that I needed to be honest with what I was experiencing, and not to try to stifle or bring to quick closure whatever was happening as the tears stormed through. Sometimes I was completely under the waves; sometimes it seemed I could observe the weather system and notice things about it. And one thing I started noticing was how my identity seemed to separate out — the one that cried being a different person from the one who found peace in The Allness.
The one that cried was the one that is referred to in Christian Science as “personal sense.” But, if you’ve been studying Christian Science, try this: say “personal sense” with utmost compassion. This is the one who believes she is a separate entity, and that whether she knows God or not is her choice, and that she can make wrong choices, and will be punished for them. What she most deeply wants is the comfort of The Allness, just as we all do, and what she is starting to learn is that she can find it by simply abandoning the sense of herself as the entity she has thought she was.
In the presence of The Allness, there are no tears. And there’s no sense of being a person who can fail. In The Allness the sense of identity is as the beloved of the One, not separate from anyone or anything.
Let me try a different approach to explain this. After Heather went through the first iteration of her ordeal, in 2015, I started to recognize something about myself. It was that I viewed life as a process of attaining what I found myself calling “the plums of life” — the things that were supposed to bring happiness. Things like marriage, a good job, a good place to live, children, achievements, skills, experiences. And what I most wanted for my children was for them to attain “the plums of life.” So when I would meet new people, or reconnect with ones I hadn’t seen in a while, I would bring out my “plums”, and those of my children, to share. They were what made me, in my eyes, a worthwhile person to be around. Oh yes, I would say, Heather is learning to play the fiddle, and has a black belt in Tae kwon do.
So when Heather faced the next portion of her life with some big challenges, I realized that I couldn’t take for granted her eventual achievement of the “plums” that I hoped for her. More importantly, I realized that none of the “plums” that I or anyone could name could guarantee happiness for those who achieved them. Any one you named — marriage, job, children, home, skills, experiences — could as easily be empty, or full of heartache.
So I started to have a different view of what would get me, and my children, happiness and fulfillment. And it started to become clear that everything worth having in life is spiritual. Which doesn’t mean it’s ethereal. Actually, it means, instead of thinking, for example, that in order to have love one needs a relationship, I could see that love, the spiritual quality, is what we each have by nature of our identity as Love’s ideas. So we could have, as it were, the juice without the plums. It became clear to me that it was the juice that we really wanted — the sense of spiritual connection to goodness, of loving and being beloved. The plums might or might not deliver the juice; going directly for the juice was a much surer way to get my needs met.
This understanding helped me in my spiritual growth since that time, and helped me to have a better, and growing, relationship with Heather. It helped me to be fully in support of her doing what she most wanted to do, as we worked toward healing.
So here’s the thing: when I would be overwhelmed with tears, it was often set off by something relating to “the plums” — Heather was saving her doll treehouse for the kids she hoped to have … And when I noticed that dynamic, I often felt the tears and sorrow simply fall away. I could then, with a little contemplation, find my way back to The Allness.
In my experience, I found that if I was crying, it was good to let myself cry. At the bottom of all the tears is The Allness. And if my husband, Heather’s dad, was crying, it was good for me to cry with him. All tears are eventually cleansing.
Lately, I haven’t been overwhelmed as often, and I often feel a sweet sense of Heather’s presence. But just when I think they’re all done, more tears will come, and that’s OK. I have all of my life to learn spiritual being, and no sense of having any other purpose.
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