Museum of my Ancestry
Dia De Los Muertos is this week, a two-day celebration that reunites the living with the dead. This year’s celebration seems even more resonant to me as my mother passed away last June. I have kept pretty quiet about her passing until now, dealing with the numbness that her absence has brought to me. I’ve taken this time to deeply sit with her passing and to explore what our new relationship in the afterlife might look like. I am so grateful for the spiritual path of my Ministery and the sacred plant medicines for helping to shepherd this new cosmic connection.
This connection started two years before my mother was even dying. I had traveled to the Amazon jungle to work with Shipibo healers doing ayahuasca ceremonies. During one of my ceremonies in the jungle, the medicine walked me through every cell of my body showing me where I came from. The medicine whispered “you are a museum of your ancestry” and made me realize my ancestral line was alive and well in every corner of my being. They had never left me. Their smiles, their laughs, their struggles, their heartbreak. Like trees with roots interconnected below ground, my nervous system was deeply connected to theirs cosmically above.
For most of my life, I had tried not to follow in my mother’s footsteps. My mom had suffered from addiction for most of her life and on her deathbed, some people were relieved of her passing. I was proud of myself for all of the internal work that I had done to want to continue our relationship. I was also so grateful for the connection that we had always had, no matter how trying at times, we loved one another deeply.
I could see past all of her trauma and could feel her tender heart through all of her suffering. Underneath her rough exterior, she was a deeply thoughtful woman with a ton of heart and charisma. There was also a very scared child who did not feel safe enough to show her true vulnerability. She used humor to cope and while I would have loved to have one last heartfelt goodbye with some closure, that was not in the cards for us. She helped me embody a lesson that had taken me my entire life to understand. You have to accept people for who they are and not force your will upon them. So we laughed. We talked about casual and easy things. We just spent time in one another’s company.
Most people would say that they would do anything to get that precious moment back with their loved ones. For me, I do not need that moment back because I have such a larger connection with her now. I see her every morning when I look into the mirror to get ready and her eyes are staring right back at mine. I get to visit with her when I make my friends laugh, or when I really laugh and cackle. I see her when I look at my hands, her hands that I used to hold when I was little.
I also get to revisit with her in the emotional realm as well. I get to visit with her when I do something I know she would be proud of and I can feel her love wash all over me. I also have experienced her reparenting me from the other side. Advice that she gave me for years is finally just now making sense because I can hear it from her higher power.
She is in every way a part of my Ministry. As part of my ceremonial container, I call in the support of the four directions and also call upon her and my other ancestors to help guide me in this sacred work. My mother’s name was Mary and now I suddenly see Mother Mary signs all around me. I was taking my walk just the other week and this beautiful Mother Mary light appeared on the side of the road just waiting to be brought back to be put on my altar. Our loved ones are all around us, showing us signs. It is up to us to be mindful and watch for them.
Altar with Mother Mary
I would like to leave you with a beautiful poem by John Roedel that really exemplifies how I feel about my mothers passing. I hope that it will bring you comfort and make you realize that your loved ones are so much closer than you think…
“People will deny anything these days. So, I have decided to join the practice of dismissing things that we’ve been told are true. I have decided to quit believing in death ~ it just doesn't exist for me anymore. Instead, I have a new theory that I’m working on:
When our dear ones depart their bodies and turn back into air and light they don't disappear behind a brick wall that separates us ~there are no bricks and there is no wall ~there are no barriers. There is only a grand window between us and those whom we have stitched ourselves to with the most divine of angel hair threads. We can see our beloveds in the heart-shaped clouds and they can see us as we kiss their picture goodnight ever so softly. Death doesn't exist. It's a debunked, flat-earth theology.
Where we are told that the people we love spill off the edge of the world and fall away from us into the endless unknown, that's not my experience. What I have seen is that when a dear one leaves me I don't feel the space grow between us, I feel us grow closer together ~ our entanglement becomes tighter. They travel with me to the store to buy garlic and they brush my hair out of my eyes while I cry in my car in an empty parking lot. They join me on my daily walk around a lake and they sit on the board of my conscious and offer me advice. They float above me while I write a poem and they laugh when I trip over the same chair damn every day. They catch my prayers and courier them to God and they write love notes to me with steam on my bathroom mirror. They play the right songs on the radio at just the right time and they have made a cottage in my heart. They have turned my eyes into miracle telescopes and they converted my lungs into a retreat center. They dance in the eyes of my children.
My loved ones haven't gone anywhere and neither have yours. They are just on the other side of the window, waiting for you to see them waving at you in their sundresses made out of stars and their tuxedos stitched by time. And someday I will be on the other side of the glass acting so obnoxious that you won't be able to ignore me. And someday I will be writing you love notes on the petals of sunflowers for you to find just when you need to read them. And someday I will help paint a sunset in the exact color of the way I felt whenever I was wrapped up tightly in your arms. I'm not a scientist but my research tells me that death doesn't exist. However, love does and it has no end, and neither do we.”
