Evidence of life after death

It's never easy to say good-bye to a loved one. What if we didn't have to? My experience has indicated in a powerful way that bonds of affection formed in life are not broken by death, but only shrouded by in mists between two different stages of existence.

When my mother died in 1977, I was desolate. She had been my support, my encourager, and my best friend, especially during the previous eight years when I had been a single parent with four young children. She had taken them in when they were sick, nursed them through childhood illnesses, then shipped them home again. Because of her help, I was able to continue teaching and maintain a reasonably stable financial and emotional foundation for my family.

I know she worried about us during her final illness. She knew, better than I did at that time, the difficulty of raising four teenagers, three of them boys, within the context of a single-parent situation. And my chances of remarriage seemed slim. A forty-something mother, with four teens was hardly an appealing proposition for a prospective husband.

In addition, I worked for the Catholic school system. If I remarried without an annulment I would be excommunicated from my Church and lose my job. I believed that annulment from a marriage which had produced four children was impossible. My future prospects seemed glum, to say the least!

Could it have been pure coincidence that, within a year of Mother's death, I met a fine man who accepted us all with open arms and heart? He could not have been more suitable to be an exemplary husband and stepfather had mother hand-picked him herself. I am not, by any means, prepared to assert that she had not.

Even more remarkably, I was led to investigate the annulment process more closely. At The Second Vatican Council, new grounds had been established for declaring a marriage invalid. The advancement in knowledge of psychological problems caused additional grounds to be recognized. Fortuitously, my situation fit into the revised guidelines. Another happy coincidence, you think? I wonder.

And then there was the incident of the kilts.

I am not a particularly clothes-conscious individual. During the days when slacks were not appropriate attire for teachers, I acquired several kilts for school wear. They were warm and presentable when worn with a blazer and tailored blouse.

 One Sunday, I had repetitive urges to gather up the kilts for cleaning, even though they weren't really very dirty.

Usually, I waited until they were creased, with smudges that could be seen by a blind man at fifty paces, before taking such drastic action. However, all day the urges persisted and that evening I gathered them up. I dropped them off at the dry cleaners next morning on the way to school. They would be ready Wednesday afternoon after four.

Wednesday at school, during noon hour, I received a phone call, telling me that a beloved aunt, a sibling of my mother, had died unexpectedly in South River, a small town in Northern Ontario. We picked up the kilts that evening on the way out of town, cleaned, pressed, and ready to go.

Now, it's hard to believe that the Supreme Being would be overly concerned about my physical appearance at my aunt's funeral. However I know Mother would not have wanted her elder daughter to appear at a gathering of maternal relatives looking like Little Orphan Annie after a rough night. I'm firmly convinced she nudged me persistently into getting those outfits into shape for the upcoming family gathering. After all, time is a human invention to measure the passing of events on the earthly plane. The view from eternity must be all-encompassing. It would be just as easy to look forward as backward.

Death is a fact of life. If consciousness survives, in whatever form, those who precede us will no more forget us than we will forget them. I believe that, being close to the Source of all wisdom and love, they are in an ideal position to request and channel the help we need to successfully complete our own journey- enabling us to finally rejoin them in discovering and enjoying the greatest Mystery of all.