[Exploring Life] Closure means to find a resolution to a significant event in a person’s life. With respect to the loss of a loved one, closure ultimately means to find contentment and gratitude as the final and most significant outcome of death. This is the twelfth and final entry I will dedicate to the series On the Loss of My Parents. This is not to say that I have brought full closure to the grieving process, nor is it to say that I will no longer reflect on both the presence and absence of my parents in my life. It is to say, however, that this is the last entry I will dedicate expressly to the loss of my parents and as such it represents a form of partial closure. The meaning of their lives will remain a constant companion within me; death destroys physical presence and replaces it with spiritual presence. Grief does not want us to become lost and mired in a bog of suffering and pain over that which is now gone: it encourages us to emerge from the trembling and begin to inhabit gratitude. Ultimately grief is a direct extension of love, therefore grief is fundamentally an essential source of healing. The feelings and memories that surround the loss of my parents remains an impassioned interplay of absence and presence. They have died and are physically gone, but their presence remains. Through death, grief inspires emergence.

We know without doubt that our departed loved ones would not want us to become entrenched in mourning their death. The loss of a loved one invokes suffering because all grief originates in love. Mourning, the offspring of grief, only wishes to pay us a short visit in order to give us permission to express the intense emotional turmoil invoked by death. The death of my mother and father is an expression of the impermanence we all inexorably belong to. My father lived life according to a simple yet profoundly effective outlook, and that was to influence what he was able to, and not worry about things he had no control over. My mother lived life by actively seeking out enjoyment in life and sharing that enjoyment with others as much as possible. They experienced the unexpected onslaught of life as we all do, but were able to steady themselves through the rough weather with these perspectives.

As I embrace the union of both of those perspectives in the midst of their absence, I literally feel the touch of the spirits within. The inevitable veil of tears continues to fall within the privacy of my heart, yet I also sense the approach of a new landscape that lies beyond the vanishing point. Grief does not wish us to take up residence within it – we are meant to pass through it as if it were a portal to a new land. My parents would encourage this movement through grief, to find contentment in the midst of their absence, to inspire memory with their presence, and to inhabit a landscape of gratitude.

The Last Words

Making the decision to write “last words” about the lives of my parents presents a significant challenge for written expression. I pay close attention to my emotions, and through this experience have learned how incredibly powerful and overwhelming they can be. However, we shouldn’t become victimized by our emotions and denigrate our experience to rampant unrestrained outbursts. Throughout the process of grieving I have both invited and allowed grief to express itself, and have found its power and agility to be quite astounding and at times overwhelming. However, I hope to find a kind of sanctuary here in this writing that acknowledges the untamed and raw nature of these feelings within the context of being grateful for the lives of my parents.

I don’t feel that last words should be biographical either, and in any case some of the biographical elements of their lives are present earlier in the series. I can sense that there will be an underlying desire to not finish this entry, to invent ways to continually refine and improve upon it in order to avoid bringing it to closure. Writing these entries is one way I have “spent time” with my parents since their deaths. There is the obvious problem of making this final entry far too long as well so I have artificially imposed a 2,500 word limit. More than anything else, I think that the intention of last words should be to somehow reveal the essential elements that I will carry forward with me into and throughout the remainder of my own life.

As I struggled to find an approach to write the last words here about the loss of my parents it occurred to me that it isn’t loss or absence that is the focus. The last words should attempt to capture the enduring qualities of my parents that remain here with me; final written thoughts that express how the essence of my parents might continue to express itself in my own life. To do this I have decided to create three “poetic glimpses” that will hopefully provide some illumination into these enduring qualities. Though I am not a poet nor have I practised the craft, I know of no other means more effective than poetry for expressing a journey into the infinite thresholds of the spirit through writing. It is almost as if I feel I have been given no choice but to pursue the poetic now. Accompanying each poetic glimpse is a reflection that attempts to describe the enduring qualities of my parents as principles or perspectives on life and living. Taken together, the poetic glimpse and reflections on enduring qualities form what I have chosen to call a threshold, that mysterious meeting ground between the visible and invisible. I have placed a secondary limitation presenting three thresholds in order to help focus the writing on the essential.

Threshold One: Presence Endures Beyond Death

Death is not the opposite or the end of life. Death is a moment of transition and transformation within the omnipotent energy that is life. The physical reality of my father and mother has ended, but the essential energy that animated their presence remains within. I do mean this in a literal rather than a metaphorical sense. Religious notions of the afterlife and God remain completely mysterious to me. I do however discern an afterlife that represents some kind of energetic continuation; the energy that animates a human being does not merely disappear. I feel my parents’ presence, no longer a physical presence but instead an energetic, or more specifically a spiritual presence.

Though I can no longer feel your touch
Except through the breath of my spirit;
You gently inhabit a space within
And remain as faithful as when I was born.

The word spirit originates in the Latin “spiritus” meaning “breath.” Our spirits are literally the breath of life or that which animates our being. Our spirits inhabit the threshold between the visible and the invisible. Artists, in the deepest sense of that word, frequent this space for inspiration that gives shape to the mysterious. Even the most areligious of us will seek sanctuary in this space when the external realities of life become overpowering. There is no doctrine that can serve as our guide in this space, so we learn to navigate it simply by being in it. The spiritual threshold is the natural habitat of intuition, imagination, and wisdom.

Threshold Two: Care and Nurturing Survives

One of the most important responsibilities a parent has is to nurture the development of their children. In modern society, raising children has become immensely complicated. When we lose our parents we can become flooded with memories of childhood, of the most precious moments in which we feel immersed in the love of our parents. And it can be the simplest acts of companionship that illuminate their most enduring qualities. But these are more than childhood memories; they are an inspired energy that remains within me and endures into the future.

Your warmth and care does not cease with your demise
My childhood memories flourish in the here and now;
As your echo brushes against my awareness
From a silent distance you still console.

I recall my father teaching me how to throw a baseball and playing catch with me on the side-walk in front of our house. I remember my mother taking me to the Canadian National Exhibition every year and ensuring it was a day of pure enjoyment. I can still feel the moment my father let go of my first bike and I finally rode a two-wheeler for the very first time. Balm Beach, Ontario, became precious to me because my mother would decide to take me on a trip for a few days – just for fun. Eventually, my parents started renting a cottage every summer and I was initiated into my lifelong love of lakes and the natural world. I still feel and inhabit these places within. These memories are but a glimpse into a vast repertoire of moments and experiences that inspire a very deep sense of gratitude. What endures is their unique sense of caring for me that inspired these and many other cherished moments with them.

Threshold Three: Gratitude Prevails

Grief can lead us imagine things that are not there. And when we speak of the presence of someone who has died we risk entering into the realm of illusion and delusion. Both science and religion are currently unable to provide any meaning insight into the authentic reality of death. I can say that I feel the presence of my parents. But this sense of presence should not be confused with their person. My memory, imagination, thought processes, emotional landscape, and sense of creativity are all inexorably imbued with the spirit of my parents. In this sense, the essence of their lives literally lives on within me. Grief reveals to us, through the trial of pain and suffering, the immensity of gratitude. Grief wounds us so that we pay attention to the here and now. The experience of losing a loved one takes us on a menacing journey through all the mercurial workings of our own fears and anxieties about the impermanence we are all immersed in so that we can find sanctuary in the eternal wisdom of gratitude and beauty.

Your laughter dances with luminosity
A perpetual source of gratitude;
Your purpose now fulfilled
I stand in the midst of your glow.

My parents loved to laugh. Except during the excruciating experience of the end of days, I cannot recall a single visit with my mother and father during which laughter was not heard. When the laughter originates in pure enjoyment of life it seems to originate deep within the energy of gratitude. Of course there were hard times too in which laughter seemed strained. But there were so many moments in which laughter simply emerged naturally and often unexpectedly. The feeling of those moments still surrounds me. I can still literally hear their laughter, and I expect and hope that I always will. Hearing is touch; when we hear something we are quite literally touched by the vibration of it. The beauty of this is that the vibration of laughter approaches us from all side and angles; we cannot look at it or see its approach even though we remain completely immersed in it. When my parents laughed they left me with a tremendous gift, and that is the eternal feeling of their presence. I may not be able to see them now, but the touch of my parents will remain a constant companion and trusted advisor in my life.

Closure

There is and always will be so much more to say about my mother and father. It seems as though this writing has, in a manner of speaking, allowed me to continue talking with them. Perhaps it has been a way to converse with their lives in order to better understand myself and the turmoil that grief inspires. Grief is absolutely humbling: grief is absolutely transformative. There is no possibility of returning to what was, and we are forced to face the pure reality of what now must be. If my mother and father could speak to me now, I know they would want me to: use my creativity to maintain a sense of relationship and belonging to them; to embrace in memory and the present moment the caring and nurturing they provided by extending it to those around me; and finally they would want – no expect – me to laugh and encourage others to do the same. These are three of their enduring qualities that, for me, define their presence in the here and now.

One of the greatest sources of sadness I can imagine is a life forgotten. To remember a loved one’s life is to bring those qualities that have offered the most meaning and sense of purpose into the present moment. More than the common expression of, “What would so-and-so do?” is really more a question of how to “be.” My hope is that I can embrace the enduring qualities that both of my parents have inspired in me, those qualities that define the very meaning of mother and father. Undoubtedly I will falter along the way and continue to experience moments of sadness and loss. But I also know that there will be an ever increasing presence of gratitude for the life of my parents that will help to wash away the painful emotions.

And perhaps one day soon I will be able to laugh openly, freely, and with complete abandon again – as they so often did.