TALES FROM THE BOBBI LAMA

I’ve been reading a lot of inspirational books recently as a way of lessening my grief. I do feel I’m turning the corner and have started focusing more on the positive instead of my loss. Yesterday I read that we should celebrate that our loved ones have successfully completed their lifetimes… that their physical end date was actually the start date of their souls’ eternal journey…a glass-half-full outlook. I had to stop and digest that a bit and picture my late husband as having been successful and completing his journey here in the exact right time. He made it to 74 and had a lot of failing from various serious conditions, but still had his sense of humor about him (even though he couldn’t sit up without passing out, extremely restricted diet, and needed 7 rounds of medications a day). For his wit, I am so grateful, and feel it hard to complain because so many other people have had to watch their loved ones fail even more.

After rerouting my thoughts to try to be grateful all day yesterday, I went to bed and asked my angels/God/my late husband to help me really feel more of that gratitude than the sadness that persisted to wash over me like heavy waves. I woke up early this morning from a bad dream in which I found myself in the hospice wing of a nursing home sitting vigil by my dying husband with tubes keeping him alive. This never actually happened, mind you, as he actually passed away peacefully in his sleep in our home. But in this futuristic dream, my husband was down to skin and bones, mouth open, rigid, unconcious, on extreme pain killers, and in much later stages of all of his conditions. The suffering I was witnessing tore at my heart for him, and the flash of that image was so disturbing that I woke up with a start.

It was suddenly very clear by that comparison that his body left at exactly the right time for him and did not keep going into that prolonged suffering. His life was perfect, right to the end, staying as long as he would have prescribed it to last if he could. Long enough to still “bust chops” with his golf buddies when they visited, and joke around with the nursing aide claiming “elder abuse” when she would declare it time to get cleaned up, and continue to make me laugh as we jokingly “argued” over whether he could still have a stiff drink of Captain Morgan knowing his many prescriptions and conditions couldn’t handle it. He was fun to the end, and I was suddenly so grateful for his perfectly-timed ending. That dream, projecting an image of him as it could have unfolded into the future, was so sobering and, at the same time, my perfectly timed gift. The prospect of him lasting into such a prolonged end made me realize how grateful I should be for him. It reminded me that we all “go home” to start the rest of eternity at our exact right time for each us. And I know in my heart that he is happy now, enjoying relief from his body and the wonder of his Forever Home.