My parents each gave me a gift in their last hours - a gift that transformed something inside me and taught me a lesson that seeped into my whole being. 

When my father died, I wasn’t there. But as his time of “passing over” began, I watched my dad as he himself received a gift. I had been with him in the hospital for several hours as he moved in and out of wakefulness, struggling to breathe. After a period of agitation, my dad finally settled down some as I sat by his side. He seemed to rest for a while, and then suddenly sat straight up in bed. With a look of awe on his face, he stared off into the distance for a minute or two, never losing the look of wonder. Something in the room shifted at that moment, and while I can’t, of course, “prove” what was happening to him, I can tell you what I saw and felt. As I watched, I saw my dad finally understand that he was Innocent - that there was nothing he had ever done, or thought, or not done, that condemned him to guilt or sin or error. He was innocent, and free. As if a great weight had been lifted from his whole being, he then collapsed back onto the bed, and went into a deep sleep from which he never awoke. 

I had never thought of my dad as particularly “guilty” of anything, but I believe that he may have lived with a sense of his unworthiness or wrongness or lack, as so many of us do - feeling somehow fundamentally “wrong” - maybe based on sin and error models of many religions, or a misunderstanding of the ambiguity of being human. 

My mother’s gift to me was different, but no less meaningful. Shortly after my mother’s death, I arrived in Louisiana from Maine, and went to the house where my sister and I had grown up. I entered the room where my mother had died. The sheets were still rumpled; nothing had been touched since her body was taken away. There was a palpable emptiness in the room. But there was also something else. As I stood by the bed, I suddenly “saw” - as if floating above the bed - a vision of my mother standing in a doorway that looked like it was somewhere in Taos, New Mexico (which she had loved). The landscape was simple, but it was filled with light. My mom was looking out at me, and she was so happy. I then saw a kind of web, made of golden threads of light, that I knew had been my mother’s love for me. And I knew in that moment that my mother had always loved me, no matter how challenged our relationship had been. That web of light, of my mother’s love, had been a tapestry upon which my whole life had been woven. A reality I had not been able to take in as we struggled over time was suddenly very real, and visible, and true. 

A spiritual teacher once said to me that life is really only Yeses ultimately - only positive things. That the negatives don’t add up, but that the positives do. In a way, the gifts given to me by my parents in their dying hours proved that point. My parents were certainly, painfully,  “gone;” but the luminous reality of their benevolence and love lingered after their deaths, and was perhaps even more rare and treasured because they were no longer tethered to their personalities or roles, and I was no longer in the position of “reacting” to their imperfections. 

These gifts at the time of my parents’ deaths have never left me - they enabled me to stand - not just for that moment, but for all the rest of my life, in a landscape between worlds  - between  everyday routine reality, and the mystical reality that is never free of the Presence of the Holy. I have been reminded that every moment of every day is filled with the throbbing, generous, mysterious reality of the Sacred, embodied in all that surrounds us.

May it be so. And may we remember. Amen.