Almost Nine Months After My Son´s Passing, I Caught A Quick Glimpse of Him

ALMOST NINE MONTHS AFTER MY SON’S PASSING,

I CAUGHT A QUICK GLIMPSE OF HIM!

 

Sunday, January 22, 2012 will be the nine-month anniversary of my son, Randy´s death. Last Tuesday, January 17, I had a strange, marvelous, surprising and, at long last, a deep and profound feeling of grief for him. I suddenly missed him so much and through tears and a choked throat, I called up to him that I loved him so much. This came completely out of the blue and served as a reminder that in less than a week his gestational anniversary, as it were, was coming up. 

I´ll describe this precious moment and then copy the blog I posted here soon after his death to introduce you to my boy.,

Last Tuesday, I practiced getting rather hopelessly lost in my new city of Santiago, Chile…a custom that I follow religiously, but not intentionally, in almost every foreign city I enter. Lo and behold, I passed a GOVINDA restaurant, the first I had seen since Lima, Peru, three years ago. These are the fantastic and healthy Hari-Krishna restaurants found worldwide, which can always be counted upon to provide delicious vegetarian food….always kind to the human body and to the animal and vegetable residents of the planet.

There were a few people sitting at small, round, ice-cream parlor type tables and chairs and I consulted with my waiter about what to order. This young man, maybe twenty years old, had the kindest, most serene brown eyes and we hit it off right away as personal friends. My order came and I happily enjoyed my meal.  A woman came in and my waiter went to her table for her order. For the first time, I noticed the back of his head.

Ohmigosh!  It looked exactly like Randy´s! Exactly! His fair skin and deep-brown hair color was just the same as my son´s and his unusual hair cut was a mirror of my own boy´s! How many times had I shaved that scalp close but left the long hank of hair growing towards his shoulders in the Buddhist way? Even the shape of his head was a mirror of the one I had lived with and cared for over the past eight years.

Sobbing quietly over my lunch, I sent up an earnest call to him. ¨Oh, Randy! I love you and miss you, but I wouldn’t wish you back in this life again! Thanks for this little visit!¨

Later, I confided in my waiter, DhanurDhar Das, whose birth name is Diego, and thanked him for the back of his head. His sweet understanding gave us a moment or two to absorb the privilege we had both been a part of. I hope to come back soon and admire his tonsure at least once more. Now, I´m going to repeat the tribute I wrote about Randy sixty days after he passed away.

June 26, 2011-

This entry is a departure from the norm and is one I wrote for my other website, www.heyboomers.com, but it sets the scene for future entries here. Since I am not a psychic and don’t want to interfere with Randy’s progress in the next world by focusing his attention again on this one, I have made no attempt to communicate with or about him. Still, I have received the occasional “news bulletin” that he is doing just fine.

The whole experience has given me great confirmation about the teachings concerning Death told to me by the Holy Spirit and contained in my book. I was calm and happy throughout and still feel buoyant about both his life and his death. Here’s the story:

Some time after 6:00 a.m., on April 22, 2011, (a combined Good Friday and Earth Day), my son, Randy, slipped away from his life on Earth just two weeks shy of his 48th birthday.  It was an easy passing if you ignore the difficult weeks leading up to it. None of us knew he was dying and we thought his symptoms of back pain, weakness, loss of appetite, constipation…. were just temporary – a pulled muscle, maybe sciatica – and all would clear up as it had before and life would go on in the usual way.

Randy was profoundly disabled with congenital Dejerine-Sottas Syndrome, a wasting disease somewhere in the MS/MD family. His boundaries had been closing steadily in on him all his life, but particularly in the past two years.  As a child, he had walked with a rolling gait but paid as little attention to his disability as he could. He was smart and inventive and a natural leader among his playmates. The crutches he needed in high school were not cool and he began to sense that girls didn’t go for guys like him. Still, he had good school friends with whom he was still in touch on the day he died.

His two years at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, were really happy but the snow was hard to maneuver about in, so he transferred to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where he graduated with a degree in Art History. Randy was a true artist all of his life and was working on some intriguing pieces using fluorescent paint and black light at the time of his death. His modern art is full of motion and color. It moves even though he was able to do less and less of that in his final years.

He didn’t believe the prognosis given at Mayo Clinic that he would only live “into his forties” but was always convinced that he’d outlive me, not finding it reasonable that a child should die first. However, Randy had a lot of “what ifs?” that gave him a hard time. Both his grandfather and his father had died very, very slowly and he dreaded that prospect. Or, what if he got trapped in a body that could no longer move, leaving perhaps only one finger to type out his thoughts? But his worst fear was not being able to remain at home within familiar surroundings if his care should become too hard for me to handle…which it almost had.

Death was both frightening and fascinating to him but was not something he applied easily to himself. It was a very good that no doctor gave him that certainty in his last days because he would have stewed over the moment-by-moment indications that he was approaching the edge of that yawning chasm and might have felt some fear and worry. He never had the casual coziness that I have with the subject due to my constant companionship with Somebody On The Other Side. The Buddhist Teachings aren’t exactly clear about the existence of God and get very complicated when talking about that rapid-traffic tunnel mentioned in the Tibetan Book of The Dead. Consequently, Randy kept the idea of death at a very great distance from himself and ruminated about the difficulties of life.

After a week of pain and very little appetite, he woke me at 5:00 a.m., asking for a glass-bottle Coke and a Cuban sandwich, which he enjoyed thoroughly. We talked for an hour and we both were sleepy again, so I suggested that we try for more sleep and we said goodnight at 6 a.m.  He seemed to still be sleeping when I got up and had my coffee and then the visiting nurse found him without a pulse, soon after. He had slipped away at dawn.

“Good on ‘ya, Randy!” I said. “You did it exactly right!” His funeral and memorial service were a happy farewell and a tribute to a life lived fully and creatively, though the walls had pressed in for more than forty years. He always adapted to the new situation, the new normal, and found things to cherish about his earthly experience throughout the whole long ordeal.

His best buddy, Kumpa, also a Buddhist, reported on the way back from the funeral service, that he’d had an inner glimpse of Randy, now in the Pre-Birth Realm, testing a new body by running it up and down the stairwells of a tall building, refusing to take the elevator and enjoying the sampling of an athletic reincarnation. I’m told now that he didn’t select that body, after all, but was reborn two days ago in a good body, in Altoona, Pennsylvania.  ????!!!!

How would you like to be born in a city called: “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold?” That’s what Altoona is officially calling itself for a two-month period (April 27 (coincidentally, the day of his funeral) to June 27, 2011) to promote a movie by the same name. What are they putting on the birth certificates, I wonder?

Randy would have enjoyed the joke, having found life pretty darned wonderful this time around, in spite of everything.

As a parent of a child with a disability, I can’t really tell you how it feels to have a disability but I can honestly say how it feels to stand by and watch someone you love suffer. Imagine that your beloved child gets his finger caught in a slammed car door. You’d do everything in your power to extract that finger, or that whole hand, and make it all better. But the medical experts all agree that:

“There’s absolutely nothing to be done. The hand will stay smashed in that car door for the whole life and the best that one can do is make the best of it. Granted, gangrene will surely set in as time goes by but there are little things that can be done to make such eventualities a bit more bearable… Granted, that gangrene will bring an early death…but, such is life!”

After nearly fifty years of watching that prediction gradually come true, wouldn’t you as a parent also, as I was, be tremendously relieved when the car door was finally opened and the hand could escape the vise?  Yes, you would!

That’s why you won’t detect the usual Mother’s grief in me, which many people feel when their child dies before them. What? Would I have honestly wanted him to hang around for even more pain and suffering just because I wasn’t ready to say goodbye? Not a chance!

I just call up to him: “See ya’ later, Alligator!” and wish him well in his new life in a great little town with a huge sense of humor.

About Linda J. Brown

Linda is a solo around the world traveler, having slowly explored the world's two hemispheres. A third trip around the equator has just begun, planned to last at least four years. After living for a year in the spiritual and beautiful town of Santa Fe, New Mexico, she has transferred to the beautiful and spiritual town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Feeling honored that the mysterious Hurricane Patricia paid her a call during her first week; she is none-the-less, eternally-grateful that this "worst hurricane in human history" decided to leave the planet alone, after all.
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