Skateboard culture video

Lornelle’s tribute

>Reconnecting with life after bereavement

>In this post I want to look at the irreplaceable loss of bereaved parents. I had planned to complete my account about meeting my spirit guides but, for whatever reason, I am being led to do this post.

When someone dies a void opens up in the fabric of the family and the community. The community is able to respond fairly quickly in replacing the person – the boss hires a new worker, the team recruits a new member, etc. The family’s response is usually much slower, and even then, varying members are affected differently. I remember thinking about this concept weeks before Andre was killed, when I heard the news of the death of a popular, young football player. The team and community were distracted with grief, and I remember saying to someone, “In a few months they will have moved on and only his family will still be there to grieve him.”

I have had time to reflect on the issue of replacement, or maybe a less mechanistic word would be ‘reconnection’. I remember consoling Andre’s girlfriend shortly after the funeral, and thinking, “At least she will one day meet someone else. It is I who will never have another son.” I also know that if young Josh gets a loving father he will be able to reconnect easily to this relationship and not have to grieve the absence of his real father all his life.

But it is harder for the parents and grandparents who must sit and stare into the void for a long time, if not forever. Yet, the idea of reconnection, at some level, would seem to be an important part of our recovery as it gives us an outlet to redirect some of the love we hold.

In his book Ritual – Power, Healing and Community, Malidoma Some notes. “When love exists it must continue, or it will turn dangerous for the person who loves. Human feelings are an energy that can turn dangerous, negative, if not honoured. So when a loved one dies, those who survive must reconnect the ‘plugs’ from the dead person to people who are still alive.”

I guess this explains why so many survivors feel the need to get involved in trying to help others who have suffered. It may also explain why persons who lock themselves away, physically or emotionally, tend to have a harder time moving back into life.

So, how do parents reconnect the plugs? I guess the answer to that will be very specific to each individual. For me, it was very important to develop a relationship with my grandson, but also to reach out to other young people. There is such a great need for parents in the world, persons who can mentor and guide. I see parents in conflict with their kids over what they want for them, as opposed to what the child feels the need to do in order to express him/herself in the world, and I just want to say, “Just enjoy the fact that they are with you.” Maybe, if nothing else, this is this perspective that we, bereaved parents, can provide.
I found an article called ‘How Grieving Can have a Positive Effect on your Life’, that has some useful tips on reconnecting with life after the loss of a loved one.

>Spiritual Emergence

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I haven’t quite yet been able to define my spiritual orientation and a part of me says that’s okay.  It keeps me learning, but I also realise I am developing a personal relationship with spirit that is over and above anything I read, hear or even believe. The way it works is that I have an experience and then in my readings, or my everyday life, I come across something that validates or emphasises the very thing I had experienced.  I will try to give an example.   In my last post, in which I wrote about my experience following Andre’s death, I mentioned being struck by the silver flecks in a little white orchid in my garden, and remarking on how beautiful the flower was, seeing it as I had never seen it before.  The next day the flower was back to being an ordinary, boring white flower.  I couldn’t believe it.  I even got myself a magnifying glass and still I was unable to see what I had been carrying on about that day.

Then, sometime later I was reading the book, When the Impossible Happens, by Stanislav Grof, and came upon a section in which he recounted an experience his mother had after recovering from a serious illness.  One day she remarked to him that she had never before noticed how beautiful his property was, and marvelled at the beauty of the pine trees, with silver flecks.  I remember it was 10:00 one night when I read this and I immediately got on the phone and called my cousin and said, “I’m not crazy…listen to this.”

Grof refers to this sort of experience as a spiritual emergence, a state which often manifests at a time of stress or loss. This reassurance that I wasn’t crazy seems to have served as a turning point for me, because I reasoned, “If I’m not crazy, then I really experienced what I thought I experienced, and that means there IS something beyond death, and if there is something beyond death, I want to find out what that is.”  In that space, I began to grow from Lorraine Jones, limited, materialistic, to something more open to exploring.  It was a tremendous shift, because I had always been concerned about being ‘normal’.  Now that I look back at it, I realise I was always aware of a wilder, deeper side to my personality that I had felt compelled to manage and minimise. Also, looking back, I realise that, left to my own devices, I would never have taken on this journey of exploration if it had not been for the loss of the thing dearest to me.

For someone who had grown up in a conservative Christian home, mysticism was not a word with which I was comfortable, and I had studiously kept clear of its trappings, except for my attraction to Reiki which just felt right.  But suddenly, here I was, not just believing in the afterlife, but knowing, with certainty that there is an afterlife, and that the resurrection seemed not to be the future event promised by the Church, but something that was occurring everyday. I was also convinced that I hadn’t happened upon this experience by accident, but that this was being offered to me as a learning path if I chose to take it.  I attribute the ease with which I shed my Judeo-Christian inhibitions to the fact that this glimpse of another reality had been associated with Andre, and Reiki, two of the things I trust most.

The next experience that propelled me onto this path, was a guided meditation by another Reiki master, Roz Walker.  I had been to see Roz once before for a Reiki treatment, but I had been hearing her name for some time from the people with which I studied Reiki and reflexology.  Anyway, when I couldn’t seem to shake the sense of wonder  I was feeling when I felt I should have been grieving my son more appropriately, I felt the need to talk to someone face to face.  Call it a hunch, but as someone who has some experience with grief counselling,  I didn’t think a visit to a psychiatrist or family counsellor was going to yield any diagnosis beyond either that I was still in shock or denial, or maybe a combination of both – shocking denial?

Anyway Roz seemed like my best option, and it turned out to be a tremendous starting point.  I remember we talked about a lot of things, including the uniquely human expectation that parents should necessarily precede their children despite the experience of the animal kingdom, where the death of offspring was more the norm than exception.  But the most profound outcome of that meeting was a guided meditation that she did for me, during which I met my Reiki guide.

>Angel 54: How many more of us are there?

>After having agonized for so long about posting about my spiritual experience following Andre’s death, I finally did so in my last blog, and found that I was not as alone/unique as I had thought.  That same evening I read online, the experience of another mother who had experienced an even more dramatic spiritual breakthrough.  So maybe this isn’t so strange after all.

She’s written a book called, Angel 54: A Mother’s Sacred Journey from Grief to Healing.  I haven’t read it yet, but I have read her story on another internet site. Her son died in a car crash at age 18, and this precipitated her spiritual awakening.  I am hoping that we will be able to connect.  But I now wonder how many more parents have had this experience.

>Have we really grieved our dead?

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Talking with the Ancestors:

Initiation and the Purpose of Life

Excerpt of An Interview with Malidoma Patrice Some’

by Michael Bertrand, 1995

In your culture you have relations with the ancestors. That’s something that we’ve basically lost touch with in our culture, not only how to do it but even why or even if there are any.

   That is again a very important point that is tied to the reason why there is a need for initiation. How do you practice something so ancient when you are disconnected? It’s just an irony. The connection with the ancestors is a primary requirement for the reconnecting with initiatory practices. It is one of the conditions for the healing that needs to happen for the modern world. We cannot go forward until we look back at those who have preceded us, in an attempt to produce a reconciliation between us and them.

   Otherwise, the perpetuation of denial is fostering all kinds of illnesses that indeed are encouraged by the very ancestors that we’re forgetting, because that’s they’re only way to keep ringing the bell in our psyches about the necessity for this connection to happen. It is just as useful to them as to those caught in western phenomena. It is not something that can be avoided. Therefore, it’s just a basic acknowledgment of life to acknowledge that one has ancestors.

   I’ve discovered over the years that people prefer to look forward because when they look back they find the memory they have of their ancestors is not that good. Those who can remember are connecting with crime, violence and pain.

With the colonialism…

   That’s right. With colonial violence and so on and so forth. It may then feel very uncomfortable having to relate to figures in that manner. Yet, what we must understand is that being alive at this time makes us the prime healers of the very ancestors who were remembered in this time. Unless we’re able to reconcile with them we can be of no use to ourselves as well as to them, because our relationships start in a dysfunctional compost. It is that dysfunctionality that those of us who are alive are therefore able and qualified to fix.

   This is why I like to talk about healing the ancestors. In this context it means eventually returning to them with a humble heart to let them know that indeed we’re here to help do whatever it takes to repair the energy that has been broken through time and space. We are, therefore, opening ourselves to our suggestions as to what we need to do in order to reconnect or to open the mind with them in a healing fashion.

   It doesn’t mean we have to invent something. They know from where they are what needs to be done. It’s up to us to tell them we’re open to receiving that knowledge so we can take the proper action, because we’re still caught in a human body. They don’t have a human body so they can’t do what it takes to fix that problem.

So, we’re saying that problem, or the healing of the ancestors, implies that we have to do it because we need their help as much as they need ours.

   That’s right. It’s reciprocal. They need our help because they need to produce a situation where there’s continuity. We need their help because we need to resolve the turmoil that we get ourselves into in this modern world. The turmoil in the downtown and the inner cities, the violence that’s going on, is all connected with the fact that we’re disconnected from the ancestors. They can fix that because they know where it’s darkest.

   It is mostly in our interests and in the interests of those coming after us that we do that. Otherwise when we die we’ll join them and attempt to continue to complicate the (–vision?) here hoping that eventually people will remember where they need to go in order to get a solution to the problems. This is why I insist that it’s a reciprocal thing, something that helps both parties.

So, in essence too, you’ve implied in your book that the ancestors need to be helped along their way so they go where they need to be in the afterlife.

   Yes. Unless this happens we’ll not have the kind of benefit that they also seek. One thing we need to understand is that their constant interference in our day to day life is motivated by the fact that it would pay us to allow them to join the place that they need to join in order to feel complete, which is the land of the ancestors. Otherwise they will keep sticking around in our cities and creating the kind of turmoil that they think is the only way for them to remind us of what we’re here to do, of the necessity of our relationship with them.

   Consequently, of course, this is an opportunity to take back and learn from existing indigenous cultures where this leads to a lot of ritualized grief because that grief helps in that journey across to the land of the ancestors. As long as we know that it is in our interest that they go there.

   What they’re saying here is we are robbing them of their right to journey where they belong, where they can also be a proper source of help to us.

So, one of the way to heal the ancestors is to grieve them. If there were some way in which a day were taken where everybody in a given country spent it in grief for the ancestors so they could go to the land of the ancestors would be positively useful to us. I’m sure that several million tears, a double billion people shedding tears for the same ancestral pool would be likely to make a difference.

   This is the kind of thing that eventually will have to happen. Maybe this is the only condition that will help us break into the remembering space that allows the understanding of what kind of initiation is needed in order to bring out the birth of the kind of community that people feel comfortable with.

>Messages from the Universe

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I didn’t always have a spiritual philosophy in which to anchor my grief.  In fact, for many years I had deliberately stifled what I felt were the stirrings of consciousness of another reality.  It was my son who was the active seeker, and I worried about him thinking about things too deeply, because I didn’t want him to become some sort of  misfit.  I remember when he was about 16, we were reading about labyrinths and, ahead of a trip to the US, we made plans to go walking a labyrinth in San Jose.  In the end he went walking the labyrinth and I went shopping. Am I the only one who finds the malls in San Jose irresistible?

Andre was the first person to tell me about the chakras, and the gnostic gospels, and the Knights Templar.  I only exhibited spectator interest, serving as a kind of librarian/cheerleader, and ensuring he didn’t get ripped off by snake oil salesman types on the internet. Actually, the closest I had gotten to any form of mysticism was Reiki training.

So when I had my first experience of non-ordinary reality I was sure I was going crazy.  What follows is an excerpt from an email that I sent to my Reiki teacher three days after Andre’s funeral:

“I don’t know if you remember me. I did Reiki 2 with you in 2007 – I was the only one for that session.  I am having an experience which I am careful not to share with very many persons because I don’t know if it is Reiki related or I am just going quietly crazy.

 My son Andre was murdered a few weeks ago, and on my way to the emergency room, without knowing that he had already died I sent him Reiki. When I got to the hospital, I was just in time to see them covering his face and they allowed me time with him. I was totally distraught and crying and touching him.  On returning from the hospital I noticed the burning in my palms which I get after I have given Reiki to very sad people. I could only figure I had picked this up off him. Later that night I sat down and turned my palms up and outward, without doing the symbols, just thinking about him,  and I distinctly felt a strong concentration of energy in each palm, not like I am used to feeling it, but this time I could feel the texture of the energy, like the curve a ball would make in my palms.  The next day I went onto the Internet and looked up sending Reiki to people who have passed. I found an article which said I should visualize the person standing there and bathe them in light.  So I used the symbols and summoned him, sent him Reiki and told him to go in peace.  

That night was when I got the first of a series of ‘between sleep and wake’ messages. You know that thought that occurs to you between sleep and wake and jolts you awake?  That thought was ‘Wildfire has rejoined the host’. (Wildfire was the stage name he chose for himself.)  I remember coming awake with a feeling of excitement which stayed with me throughout the entire day.  My senses seemed heightened, especially my visual senses. For example I was looking at a white orchid in my garden, and I could see a kind of glittering in the texture which I had not noticed before, or since for that matter.  All that day I had a sense that a powerful force had been liberated, and I understood that this was the being that had lived as my son, but who was not anymore my son but something ageless, and timeless and immensely powerful.  But what I felt more than anything was his joy at returning, and the even greater joy of those receiving him.  It felt like he had returned successful from an assignment, and I was very aware of myself as being very small and mortal, experiencing something that I was  being privileged to share.  I know I didn’t actually see or hear anything, I just had a sense of this wonder and excitement almost like I was experiencing it in the energy field.  

Since then this feeling has stayed with me, and I have had such a sense of peace and happiness. Peace for me, happiness for him, I guess.  I do not have a sense of my son existing in the way I knew him, but I do not feel a sense of absence.  I would really like to know what your take is on all this.  Any feedback or insight you can share would be much appreciated.”

I was pathetically grateful for his reply in which he expressed joy that Andre had been able to make it through to let me know he was okay.  Funny, I had always figured I would go first, and had always wondered if I would have been able to find a way to communicate. 

>Not too young to grieve

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For the past two weeks, I have been embedded with my grandson who is two months away from his third birthday and I am all at once physically drained and spiritually enriched.  I have never been so active in my life, not even when I was his age.  I guess the saying is true, careful what you wish for.  This all started when I encouraged his mom to enrol him in pre-school.  He lives in a neighbourhood where they don’t necessarily screen conversations for kids, and like a little sponge he was soaking up everything.  So even though he is tiny wee, I said, “Just send him to school and get him out of the house.”  And anyway he was pretty pumped about the idea of going to school.  Well it turns out he got enrolled in what in Jamaica is called a basic school, and, in many cases, the emphasis should really be on the word ‘basic’.  Like most basic schools it was in a church building, but I visited one day and found out that the tiny tots had the smallest area, kind of like a holding cell with small desks, with no play facilities or toys, and only one door. Each day I would drive by and feel intensely guilty about having gotten Josh into that situation.  And you could tell from talking to him that school had definitely not lived up to his expectation even though he seemed resigned to making the best of it.

So the first thing I did when I quit my job was to spring Josh from basic school, and for the past two weeks, we have been spending our weekdays together.  Let me first say this has been a blessed experience because Josh is a pretty easy going guy.  He has a good command of the language and would much rather swear than cry.  We’re working on the swearing. However, I must confess I have never so looked forward to my weekends.  I can’t remember ever spending so much intense time with his dad as a baby, and somehow Josh has managed to set the agenda, because I don’t think I would have scheduled so much outside play time. But he really loves books, and we spend a lot of time looking at pictures and talking about them.

Anyway, the point of this post, believe it or not, is my observations on how he grieves for his dad. Josh was 16 months old when his father was killed, and too young to understand the concept of death.  But he did react to the absence, especially since Andre was a devoted father who spent a lot of time with him and provided a whole lot of stimulation.  I used to look at them horsing around and hope that nothing would happen so Andre would have to leave him.  At that time I wasn’t even thing about death as a possibility, more like the way I had migrated when Andre was a baby, leaving him in Jamaica for almost a year, before we were reunited.  Anyway, after Andre died, I didn’t quite know what to do for Josh because I figured he didn’t have the language skills or the concept to facilitate any kind of helpful discussion.  His mom was distressed because he kept asking for his dad, and I told her to keep saying he was gone, and that after a while he would stop asking so much.  But I still felt I should be doing something to help him process. 

This March, on his dad’s birthday, Josh came up with the answer.  I had been planning to do my own private memorial in my mediation room where we keep the urn with Andre’s ashes, and I had been toying with the idea of inviting Josh over to join me.  However I was a little apprehensive because I didn’t know if I would be stirring up memories he couldn’t handle. Anyway, he did come over to visit but I decided against mentioning anything about the birthday, which is what makes the rest of the story so unreal.  Josh was sitting around colouring after lunch and we had the radio on when this DJ comes on, and he looks up and says, “That’s my Daddy.  No, that’s not my Daddy. I want to hear my Daddy’s song.” His dad had been an aspiring reggae artiste, and songwriter and I had actually put away some of his creative work for Josh to have when he got older but I had never shared any of this with him before.  So, now he’s insistent and I’m scrambling around trying to find a CD.  I stick it in the player and Andre’s voice comes on and Josh just stands there with his face in his hands.  At one point I wondered whether this was distressing to him, and asked if he wanted me to turn it off, but he said “no, no.”

So I decided that this was as good a time as any to do the cake thing I had planned to do alone so I took him to my ancestral altar and I said, “Andre, your mother and son are here to celebrate your time with us”, and I said some other things that I don’t quite remember.  But what was really cool was that Josh sat on my lap and punctuated all my statements with a “yes” indicating that this was truly a joint approach.

Afterwards we lit the candle on the cake, and he blew it out, then he made me keep lighting it so he could blow it out.  We did this like 20 times and had lots of fun with it. I kind of figured I had taught him a bad lesson about playing with matches, so I gave him a little lecture on the subject for good measure. Then I showed him some of his dad’s stuff, and one of them was a T-shirt, which he insisted he wanted to put on, so he wore that around the house until I got him to take it off by agreeing that his daddy’s shirt belonged to him. He asked me where his daddy was and we talked about him being dead and not being able to come back, and it was really a relief for me to be able to talk with him like that.

Now, most days when he comes over, he insists on ‘going to see’ his dad, and he makes me play the one song over and over – he practically knows all the words – while he tosses my stuff all over the meditation room. So that taught me that everyone will work through their own stuff if given permission. It also made me more determined to get a grieving child program up and running.

>Are we programmed to self-destruct?

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I read something years ago to the effect that even the most buttoned down individuals among us are deep down inside just as insecure as the rest of us about fitting in, and we are all, in one way or another, dealing with our own shit. Without pre-judging Dominic Strauss Kahn, I just want to say that the exposure of vices in high profilers and those who we consider role models seems to prove this point. Could it be that those who court and wield power are the ones dealing with the most shit?

In recent times, in Jamaica at any rate, there has been an undercurrent of panic about the Second Coming and the end of the world, much akin to the pre 2000 hysteria in some circles.  Have we so internalised the idea of our unworthiness that we are willing to believe we deserve to be punished?  Maybe this is what drives powerful and materially successful persons to self-destruct in the most bizarre ways.

I am coming to the conclusion that this idea of Original Sin, and the unworthiness of mankind is itself the demonic force that threatens to destroy us.  If we are really ‘born in sin and shaped in iniquity’ as some would have us believe, then there is obviously a threshold above which we can never rise.  And if, according to this teaching, we are dependent for our salvation on a vengeful God who permits the most horrible atrocities against the weak and helpless, then we begin to suspect that we are truly screwed.

This philosophy has installed an internal self-destruct button in our psyches which fosters what psychologists call the impostor syndrome – the nagging feeling that we will never be good enough- forcing us to cover our nakedness with the trappings of wealth and power.

The Gnostics seem to offer the best Christian answer to the dilemma that I have seen to date.  Not to confused with Agnostics who have no interest in matters godly, Gnostics believe that an understanding of the Divine comes through individual and direct experience.   According to the Gnostic creation myth, the worlds in which we live are actually a replica of other worlds created by the original creative force.

The female aspect of that creative force, in her vanity gave birth to a son, without the knowledge of her male counterpart – apparently simply because she could. Anyway, the being she created had all of the power and none of the goodness of the original Divine Light and was banished from the higher realms.  This discarded offspring decided to create his own realms based on the innate knowledge that he inherited of the divine realms, going as far as to create a replica of the original divine first man, created by the original creative force.  But he was tricked by his repentant mother and others.  After putting the various parts together to produce a human male, he found he couldn’t quite get him up and running, so he was told to breathe into him.  What he didn’t know was that by doing so he would pass on to the man whatever spark of divinity he had inherited from his mother.  When he found out he had been tricked he set about trying to sublimate the man’s understanding  of that divinity by creating distractions including gold and money.

Of course my account is an extremely simplistic, and possibly careless, rendition of the story but you can read it for yourself in the Apocryphon of John, also known as The Secret Book of John.

According to Gnostic tradition, the mission of Jesus and other great teachers was to point us to that divinity – literally the Kingdom of Heaven – within us. However, early Church fathers such as Irenaeus corrupted the message, and  taught that we were sinful beings whose only hope of salvation was through belief in the divinity of Jesus.  For the Gnostics, what is needed is more than belief, it is persistent action to revive the spark of divinity in us so that we too can achieve Christ consciousness.

 

Interestingly Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology seems to have been a strong proponent of Gnosticism.  A synopsis of the philosophy of Gnosticism is available on the website www.gnosis.org  under the heading ‘The Gnostic Worldview – a brief history of Gnosticism’.

>It takes a village to grieve

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Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. – Invictus

The first time I heard the second stanza of Invictus was early this year.  I had been familiar with the first and last stanzas, but I was sitting at breakfast at a retreat when someone began reciting the poem. The second stanza nearly brought me to tears.  I thought of how hard I had struggled to keep from breaking down after my son’s death, and my pride at the fact that very few persons had ever seen me cry.  Yet the very burden implied in the words, “I have not flinched nor cried aloud”, hit me suddenly and I realized how lonely it felt to not share my pain openly with others.  Interestingly,  one of the persons at the breakfast table was Malidoma Somé, elder of the Dagara tribe in Burkina Faso, who has written extensively on the cathartic benefits of tears.   

Recently a friend called to ask my advice about a family member whose son was also murdered.  Apparently she has carried on life as if the incident never happened, and those around her, while aware that this could not be healthy, are at a loss as to how to help her.  I gave him my opinion, based on the literature, but what I did not say what that I understood her silence.  Even now, it is hard for me, as a grieving mother, to conceive that anyone else could even begin to fathom the enormity of pain that I hold.  I look into the eyes of other parents commiserating with me, and all I can see is terror that this might happen to their child.  And I feel the futility of trying to lay my head on this other person’s shoulder.

Yet, pain privately held is pain unhealed, and maybe that is why I have been finally moved to share my pain in such a public way. In his book, ‘The Healing Wisdom of Africahttp://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=thehea0bb-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0874779391&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr’, Somé writes:

“In indigenous Africa one cannot conceive of a community that does not grieve.  In my village people cry everyday. ..Grief must be approached as a relief of the tension created by separation and disconnection from someone or something that matters.

“…Many Westerners are beginning to see that there is also danger in remaining stuck with rage, anger and sadness , they are the directionless vehicles of a grief that remains hidden. When these emotions are not allowed a fluid catharsis one is left in a state of incompleteness. The end of the domination of one’s life by such emotions requires an outpouring of liquid.  You cannot truly grieve within and remain composed without.  Emotion is an extroverted phenomenon, and it cannot find its much needed release if expressed only inwardly.  Denied an outward expression, grief grows stronger and organizes itself like a hurricane that can rise up and sweep us away.  I have heard many times people express their fear of grief because they feel that if they even begin to release it, they will be overcome, eventually drowning in their own tears. Indeed, this is how it feels, but this is not what actually happens.”

What is certain is that we all grieve differently. In my case, I do not celebrate an overcoming of grief, but that finally I have given myself permission to share.