Hello Sundari,
My granddaughter is turning out to be a real character. She seems to be mostly recovered from her father’s death; a little PTS remains because the last year of his life had been so painful. It’s just around unexpected loud noises. Otherwise, she is great. My daughter is recovering too from the sudden loss of her partner. That was a real shock. From a Vedanta point of view, it was a fascinating test for me. I found the loss of my daughter’s future dreams a very potent temptation! I had a two-week period where I was using knowledge like a saber both for my own mind and hers.
With my son’s passing, I had let go of his future in stages over many years as it became clear that he was not going to seek help with his addictions. I deeply felt the rightness of the timing of his passing. Whereas with my daughter’s partner, it was not so easy at first, to see any ‘rightness’ in the timing of his death. His future and my daughters could not have looked brighter. Knowledge was imperative to distinguish the real from the unreal. I understood more deeply when Krishna shows Arjuna the dark side of creation. We really do not want to face that it too is perfect.
The very thing that attracted my daughter to her partner was his light. Love shined from him. It was the Self attracted to the Self. She understood that intellectually at least. I experienced this once before with an old woman I loved dearly the week before she died, she shone. The Jiva was retreating, and the Self shone through her as pure love. I knew I would not see her alive again. Mike was like that and had been for some years apparently. There was no way he was going to remain in his body, and the statistical chances of him dying the way he did were off the charts. It was exactly the way it was meant to be. As it is with everything.
Sundari: Thank you for this beautiful email, you express yourself so well. I am so happy to hear that you and your granddaughter are healing after your son’s death, though there are obviously still some scars. I think I may have mentioned this to you in one of our exchanges, and if I didn’t, I said this recently to someone who lost their son tragically at a very young age. Grieving is not about the dead one, it’s about you, the Self.  Grief is a deep form of praise because it is the natural way love honors what it is, and misses, even though as the Self, we never lose anyone, so there is nothing to miss.Â
In fact, what one does not fully appreciate at the time of the grief of loss is the experience of the deepest intimacy and love that is almost unbearable. Though we may deeply love the people closest to us when they are alive, it is when we tragically lose them that the full force of that love is known. It is a time when the truth of who are, call it the soul if one does not know it to be Who we are, swims to the surface of the lake of our being, of our ‘normal’ consciousness. The pain of deep loss creates a heightened state of mind where every sensory perception feels hyper-magnified, like every part of our being is a live wire. There is almost a sense of traumatic exhilaration, a bit like an epiphany, even though emotionally, we have been utterly slammed.
We think we are staring into the abyss of loss, but actually, we are looking at the reality of the deathlessness of love, which is who we are. We externalize the enormity of the truth of Love instead of recognizing it as the eternally living Truth of our own Being. The intimacy and love we feel are with our Self. Perhaps that is why the loss feels so great. For someone under the spell of Maya, this feels like a great burden instead of a release from suffering.
Knowing you are the Self of course makes the process understandable, even though it does not remove the pain. Ironically it is suffering over the pain that deepens the pain and keeps us from healing. Such deep emotional pain is hard, but it can be managed, especially with karma yoga and Self-knowledge. It removes the suffering from the pain. Pain is experienced as something clean, almost purifying because we know what it is, and do not conflate it with who we are.
I know exactly what you mean regarding your description of the light shining from your daughter’s partner before he died and your friend. It is like that for many as death approaches and the Subtle body is about to be withdrawn back into the Causal body. Apparently, some people who can read auras (which is the Subtle body) can tell when someone is going to die because their aura starts to fade. I think I told you that at 23 I lost my fiancé in a head-on collision. It was not my time, so I miraculously survived the accident even though I was badly injured. He was just such a light-filled being, he shone. As the saying goes, only the good die young!
That event was devastating and pivotal in that it ejected me from the life I had been living almost completely, and catapulted me into a whole new path, which led to where I am today. It was the defining event of this jiva’s life. It was tough, but also such a gift. Isvara never makes mistakes in the karma it delivers, as awful as it so often is for the jiva.
We are so fortunate to have the scripture as your shield.
In Love and Light
Sundari