Helping My Mother to Die

[Bella]

Thank you for sharing all of this, Roberta. My heart goes out to you, as I understand how, even though the afterlife is wonderful for those who have graduated, the pain for us here is intense. That is such a great story about the Calla Lillies. I am so glad you made that call to your cousin in Colorado to help us better understand the process of these signs.

[ilovelearninhg]

Roberta, thank you for sharing your experience. That is really interesting about the calla lilies. It sounds like you were a great comfort to your mother.

[mokandi]

This is a very special story.

[Roberta Grimes]

It has been four days since my mother graduated, and two days since I received the calla lilies. Three things happened today that could be further signs from my mother - what do you think?

1) This morning my eight-year-old granddaughter handed me a lovely little clip of an angel made of gold and silver metal, about two inches long. Engraved in her skirt is "Your guardian angel is watching over you." I asked the child where she got it; she shrugged and said that she found it.

2) About noontime I found a nice bluejay's feather lying in the grass where I chanced to be walking. I have never seen a bluejay in Austin, although in Massachusetts bluejays are common - and we had a pet bluejay when I was a child.

3) This evening an enormous plant arrived here as a sympathy gift. It is a spathiphyllum - a common office plant - and it has white flowers that look like calla lilies. The lilies that my cousin sent me on Thursday are starting to fade. Conveniently, this plant takes their place.

Most signs from the dead appear to us as odd, serendipitous events. I don't know whether any of these were signs from my mother, although they struck me as signs when they first happened; and in case they were signs, I have thanked her for each of them. Can't wait to see what she might be sending next!

[Roberta Grimes]

It has been more than a decade since my brother-in-law died - the last time I lost someone close to me - so I had forgotten what a joyous distraction looking for signs from our loved ones can be. With Jerry it was easy: his signs were everywhere. Not only did he drive his family to distraction by messing with their lights and TVs, but some months after his death his ten siblings celebrated the birthday of one of their number, and there in the back row of their customary group picture - in the place where Jerry would have stood - was an extraordinary column of light that actually cast a gleam on the woodwork around it (so we knew it was not a photographic anomaly). Jerry has proven to be an unusually powerful being, and interested in the earth-plane even a decade later, so I suspect that he may be delightedly helping his otherwise clueless mother-in-law. But these little signs continue. Little signs! They know couldn't handle a full-body visitation:

1) Dragonflies! I had never seen dragonflies around our new home (we moved here about a month ago), but since my mother died I have seen them daily. Usually just one dragonfly. And almost always flitting from right to left, in about the same track across my backyard.

2) Butterflies! Again, I had never noticed butterflies here before, but in the past few days I have seen them repeatedly. Yesterday I came upon a big orange one (not a monarch, but about that size) beating its wings against a window to escape my garage. It let me catch it, and it lay so still on my hand that I thought I was rescuing it too late, but when I took it outside it spread its wings and flew straight upward out of sight. Lovely!

3) A card. My mother had decades earlier cultivated cuttings from her mother's lilac bushes, and for as long as I can remember those big lilac trees were important to my family. And my mother especially loved chickadees - nearly all her Christmas cards were chickadees against snow. Now, chickadees and lilacs don't go together: chickadees are winter birds in Massachusetts, while lilacs are in bloom in May. But a couple of days ago I got a sympathy card from someone who didn't know my mother (and so could not have known her proclivities), and it was chickadees perched in blooming lilacs. I gasped to see it. Now it sits on my desk.

Our beloved Mikey has lately told us that his biggest disappointment is that most people he tries to contact don't pick up on his signs. Give your own briefly-separated loved ones the gift of paying attention, and remember to thank them for any little things that might be signs from them. When you do this routinely, it feels as if little unexpected hugs keep coming from people we can no longer see for just a little while, although they are right here beside us!

[Carol and Mikey]

Signs. Signs. Signs. YUP!

[Annie]

I just want to give you a big hug Roberta! I'm happy for your mother though, she has let go of her aged body and is in better mental and physical shape now than ever. I know it must be hard for you, but maybe a relief at the same time. Thank you so much for telling us about the signs, I hope you keep doing so as they come because, since I don't have anyone really close to me in the afterlife, I love to hear when it happens to other people. It's just comforting.

I feel like my almost 96-year-old grandfather is in the same boat your mother was in, and if it wasn't for the many stents in his heart and cocktail of medications, he would have been gone a long time ago. He still knows who everyone is but has some dementia. I think a few months ago he had an exit point when he almost died of the flu and I don't know if it was his own will or strong medication that brought him back, but my instinct tells me it might have been the latter. I'm wondering what your thoughts on this are in case I wind up in this situation one day. If you're very old and taking a lot of medication, is it considered letting yourself die naturally if you decide to stop taking them? I've read spirit communications saying that a "do not resuscitate" is not considered suicide, and I'm wondering if forgoing medication falls into this.

Anyway, it sounds like your mother is doing well in the afterlife, I love chickadees and lilacs too.

[Roberta Grimes]

I just want to give you a big hug Roberta! I'm happy for your mother though, she has let go of her aged body and is in better mental and physical shape now than ever. I know it must be hard for you, but maybe a relief at the same time. Thank you so much for telling us about the signs, I hope you keep doing so as they come because, since I don't have anyone really close to me in the afterlife, I love to hear when it happens to other people. It's just comforting.

I feel like my almost 96-year-old grandfather is in the same boat your mother was in, and if it wasn't for the many stents in his heart and cocktail of medications, he would have been gone a long time ago. He still knows who everyone is but has some dementia. I think a few months ago he had an exit point when he almost died of the flu and I don't know if it was his own will or strong medication that brought him back, but my instinct tells me it might have been the latter. I'm wondering what your thoughts on this are in case I wind up in this situation one day. If you're very old and taking a lot of medication, is it considered letting yourself die naturally if you decide to stop taking them? I've read spirit communications saying that a "do not resuscitate" is not considered suicide, and I'm wondering if forgoing medication falls into this.

Anyway, it sounds like your mother is doing well in the afterlife, I love chickadees and lilacs too.

Hello dear Annie! Thanks for your hug - it is great to hear from you ;-). To answer your question, I have seen no evidence or suggestion that people who are weakening naturally (through either illness or old age) are supposed to take heroic measures to keep themselves going. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: if we are on a deathward track anyway, we seem to feel no post-death guilt at all if we shorten the dying process by taking our own lives. So surely foregoing medication - or even foregoing food and drink, which often happens - seems to be no problem at all. I am sorry about your grandfather's situation, dear friend, and if his condition continues to decline I hope that he can free himself soon.

Heh - yes, my mother does seem to be doing fine in the Summerland, right from the start! And that surprises me, to be frank, since she was not especially spiritual and she was terrified of death until the end. When the signs started almost immediately, I was astonished; but perhaps I should not have been. During most of her earth-lifetime she was a dynamo, so I imagine that as soon as she arrived there she immediately started working it through and figuring it all out!

[Annie]

Thanks Roberta, that's what I had been thinking too but kind of needed affirmation from someone who's done more research about that kind of thing. It seems so unnatural to take ten pills everyday when your quality of life is so low. I'd much rather die with dignity.

That is amazing that your mother transitioned so quickly, but I think that her near death experience when she saw her parents, plus everything you told her over the years, on some level were getting through to her, even though it didn't seem like it at the time.

[Roberta Grimes]

I seem to have had my mother's grand finale. Actually, I have come to suspect that all these signs so soon after the death of someone who (based upon my understanding) probably had to spend some initial time in hospital actually were assisted by her son-in-law, Jerry - they seem to have the feel of his wit about them. So what they did for a finale was this:

Beginning a few days after my mother's death, I started to see butterflies and dragonflies in my back yard, where I never had noticed them before. More and more every day. (I wish I had been writing this all down!) Then perhaps five or six days ago came a series of extraordinary events, beginning with the astounding morning when my back yard was full of dragonflies. Thousands! Not a single butterfly, but dragonflies all day long and for most of the day literally clouds of them. The next day there were thousands of butterflies of all sizes and colors for most of the day, flitting everywhere! But no dragonflies at all. I spent a good part of that afternoon just sitting on my back deck, dazzled by the unbelievable show. Then on the third day, incredibly, we were back to dragonflies again and I spotted not one butterfly all day - just dragonflies, sometimes a dozen or so and sometimes clouds of them all at once. At dusk that day it finally dawned on me how unusual those three days had been, and a thought crossed my mind: had that all been a sign?

On the fourth morning my back yard was empty of insects. Not even a beetle. Not until late morning. Then I spotted a few butterflies and dragonflies at a distance. I went in and then came out again, and as I stepped outside there flitted across my close-in field of vision from right to left a single dragonfly and a single orange butterfly, together.

In the couple of days since I realized that - hey! - those three spectacular days could have been a sign, we are back to a mostly empty backyard. A sign? Now I have such a wonderful memory that at this point it doesn't much matter....