Every Ending Is A New Beginning- Personal Reflections On A Momentous New Year EP 326

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Hey there, today's episode is deeply personal to me. I record this on January 2, 2024, a day after my mother-in-law Margaret made her transition from the physical into the spirit world. I'm going to make this a bonus episode available to everyone. So for my premium subscribers, I really appreciate you supporting me. I know I've been a little bit remiss on getting you some episodes here toward the end of the year. I shall try to get back on a weekly schedule as we go forward, even though I never promised you that. But I'll try to get back to that as soon as I can. But I wanted to make this episode available to everyone because as I said, it's deeply personal to me and I, but I think it also will apply to everybody who's listening. So what I want to talk about is endings and new beginnings. And of course, this is a perfect time of year to talk about it. The second day of the year, you know, the joke is, I remember 2023 as if it was yesterday. So as we come to the end of the calendar year, the Gregorian calendar year, it's a time that we kind of mutually agree to reflect and to think of the close of one thing and the opening of another. And I experienced so much of that in the last couple of days. So this weekend started with my nephew Adam's wedding. He was marrying his bride Emily in West Virginia. I live in Ohio, it's about a 4-hour drive from us. So we were going to make the trip and we made the trip. Thank goodness we made it successfully because this time of year in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, all the places we were going to be, You never know what the weather is going to be like. The weather was cooperative, the traffic wasn't bad. So it was a great trip. But it was also the end of the football season. And for me, I am a huge football fan. I love when the football season starts every year. I mourn when the football season ends every year, regardless of the outcome. And the outcome this weekend was not great for me, by the way. I'll get into that in a little bit, a little bit later. So On Friday, we make the trip over to West Virginia to Morgantown to be there for the celebration of Adam and Emily's wedding. And they had the rehearsal dinner Friday night, which we went to, and I left to go watch my Buckeyes play in the Cotton Bowl. And the Buckeyes let me down again after they lost to Michigan earlier, and they let me down in the Cotton Bowl. They played terribly. So that was my Friday night. But as we were driving to West Virginia, we got a call from the facility where my mother-in-law is living, Margaret, and from hospice saying that she had taken a turn for worse, and they were going to up the visits from hospice. And in case you don't know, hospice, they, they don't want anyone to die alone. So what they try to do is, as someone's coming closer to the end, they'll send people more often, once a day, twice a day, 3 times a day, and then up to 24 hours a day to make sure there's someone from hospice there when the person makes their passing. So we're getting calls, and the wedding was on Saturday. And my wife's getting calls during the reception, where they're saying, okay, well, we're going to put her on once-a-day visits, we're going to put her on twice-a-day visits. Oh, she's doing better. She's actually eating now. And she's been interacting some. So that was a really back and forth thing, even during the reception on Saturday. So on Sunday, we get up to make the trip back home. And my wife kind of prayed a little prayer, I guess, to her mother and to the universe please don't pass during the time we're gone. Please don't pass during Adam and Emily's wedding. So we're all out of town, and we're all, you know, we're kind of on pins and needles, especially when we're getting these calls during the reception. But we're driving home, and everything seems to be okay. Margaret seems to be hanging in there. And I was listening to a podcast, as I often do. I was listening to— it was actually Next Level Soul. And there was a guy on there, the guest who had had a near-death experience. And he, in his near-death experience, he had visited with Jesus. And he talked about understanding kind of the meaning of life, and more importantly, the meaning of suffering. And he talked about— I thought this was a beautiful way of thinking of suffering, because I've thought about it as like, okay, the suffering is over once we cross over. But he talked about the fact that Jesus kind of took his suffering and, and transmuted it, transformed it into something that's glorious. And so he actually embraced his suffering. So I was thinking about that in terms of Margaret, and what she's gone through the last several years. Since her husband Felton passed away, I think about 10 or 11 years ago now, I'm not really sure. All she's wanted to do is go be with Felton. All she's wanted to do is to go home. And so we've kind of wanted that for her, to be really honest, to be really frank, because she's not the person that she was. Her body has been failing her. She had dementia. So her mind was failing her. She had severe arthritis. So she hasn't walked in a while. And, you know, we're thinking about Margaret and thinking about, you know, her passing and knowing that it was coming up and thinking about that feeling you have where, you know, a day is going to come, you just don't want it to be today. And so I remember, you know, thinking with my wife, it's like, okay, well, at least it's not today, maybe. And then just as we're pulling into Cincinnati, we're about 15 minutes from the house on about a 5-hour trip. The phone rings, it's hospice again. And they use the words actively dying, that Margaret is actively dying. So Tawana starts to call her siblings and, you know, I'm taking this in. I'm like, okay, I guess this is it. This is, it's going to be, you know, pretty soon. And as she was talking to her sister, And she was trying to explain to us what Margaret was going through. She started to cry, and I started to cry, which kind of surprised me a little bit because we've known for a long time that this day was coming. And we've known for a long time that, you know, it was something that Margaret was really looking forward to. So, we got home and my wife decided to go, you know, be with her mother. We didn't know when it was going to be. We probably know it could still be days. So, I stayed home alone and ended up watching my Bengals lose also. So, a terrible end of their season. Which knocked them out of the playoffs, that loss. And my wife spent several hours with her mother, about 12 hours with her mother, and her sister came to town from West Virginia, from where we'd just come from. And her brother drove in from Kentucky, and they spent all this time with her, and Margaret didn't pass. So about, I think about 1 o'clock in the morning, my wife came back home after midnight on New Year's Day, which was the first New Year's we haven't spent together, by the way, in 20 years. Wow, I don't even know, close to 40 years, probably. So she comes home and 3 o'clock in the morning, we get the call that Margaret has made her transition, that her body has stopped functioning, that she stopped breathing. So we go over there and the people come to transport her. And I'm talking to my brother-in-law, Rod, and we're talking about, you know, Margaret's life, which has been an exemplary life, the best mother that anybody could ever hope for. Faithful to her, to her husband James, to, till and past the end, faithful to her 6 children that are living here, and her 7th child in spirit. She had triplets. And one of them, William Jeffrey, was born stillborn, but has always been included as part of the family. But so Margaret was just an incredible woman, made an incredible impact at the facility where she was. They called her Miss Lily because her first name is actually Lily, but everybody calls her Margaret or by the family, but they would call her Miss Lily. And we were just amazed by even some of the workers who were off duty and knew that she was about to make her transition came back to the facility to see if she was still there. So as you know, Tawana and I were reflecting yesterday on her passing and the way we felt about it, and the grief that we were going through. You know, of course, we contrasted it with with losing Shayna. And what I realized, and I think we both realized together, is when we lost Shayna at the age of 15, the grief was just— I don't even know how to explain the pain. I mean, it's beyond belief. And it's because you're grieving losing the future, the anticipated future, the memories that you're not going to be able to have, the experiences that you're not going to be able to have. You still have the memories of the things you've had together. And you're always going to have those. But you really grieve is the loss of the future. And when I think about with Margaret, we've known for a long time that there was no real future memories with her. We haven't spent a Christmas with her in, in years. We used to bring her home over here for Christmas after she felt in the past. We used to spend Thanksgiving with her, of course. But because of her physical disability, her bad knees, she was wheelchair-bound the last few years of her life. And the fact when you would take her out of the facility that she was in, she would actually get agitated. And all she could talk about was going back. We stopped taking her out of the facility during those days. So those days of, you know, the Christmases and Thanksgivings and those types of things you look forward to, we haven't had in a long time. And we did try— we did not try, we did celebrate her birthday in April, her 86th birthday, and the whole family came to the facility where she is or where she was. And she slept through most of the time that we were there. And she did kind of come around a little bit toward the end of the time. But it's just been— she hasn't been herself for a very long time. And so when people pass, what I've realized is we mourn the loss of their physical presence. We mourn the loss of them being in the body. But she hasn't fully been in the body for a very long time. And the way I think about the body now, I think of the body as, as an avatar. And if you remember the movie Avatar, what they would do when they wanted to get into the tall blue beings, I can't remember their names. I think there was a Na'vi. But when they wanted to get into the bodies of those beings, they would go into like a little pod, And the pot was the interface to that, to that avatar, and it would animate the avatar, and to experience the life through the avatar. That's the way I view our lives here and our bodies here. So our spirit is kind of plugged in. And some people say it's through the pineal gland. Some people think it's through the brain in general, maybe it's through the chakras, we don't know what that interface is. But there's some sort of interface between the spirit and the body. And when someone passes away, Shayna did, for example, that's a sudden breaking of that interface. It's like interface is strong one moment, and then, you know, the body fails and the interface is broken the next. The way I look at it, the way that Margaret declined, it was the slow kind of crumbling of that interface, where it was like sometimes she was connected here, sometimes she wasn't. Her spirit always being strong, always being healthy, always being whole. But her body not being able to embody that spirit, for lack of a better word, her body not be able to function the way that we would like it to. So we were losing that connection, even as her body was still here. So that difference of the way that she transitioned, and I remember my wife saying something I thought was very profound. I think it was yesterday, had to be yesterday, because that was just the day her mother passed. She said, I've cried almost every time coming back from seeing her for the last fill in the blank, I don't know, year, year and a half, 2 years, because she knew that the person, the body was not representing her mother was and her mother wanted to be free of that body. So we have this mixed thing where it's like, we want our loved ones, right? We want them with us. But we can't have them with us the way that we really want to have them with us or need to have them with us. So we want them the way that they were.. And the thing is, even though people say there's no time, and time is an illusion, there's no time on the other side, etc. In this experience, in this game, in this virtual reality, whatever you want to call it, there is, there is time, and it only moves in one direction. So we can't go back to the Margaret that we once knew. So we knew the only way out was forward. And that meant for her to actually leave her body. So when that happens, again, just at this point, a little over 24 hours ago, very, very mixed emotions about it. Because while we know that we won't see her physically again, we haven't seen her physically the way we wanted to in a very long time. Anyway, so the grief is very, very different between Margaret and between when we went through with Shayna. So I was thinking about this, and in terms of the reality that we live in. And I've been working with my friend Cal, and I'm gonna be working with her more. And she's going to be on the podcast. And I'm hoping to have her in my community that I'm building, discussing these concepts about how this, this reality we live in is really a lucid dream, and that our loved ones are the ones that are awake, and that we are the ones that, that are asleep. Now, it doesn't mean that this isn't, isn't real in a certain sense. The experiences they have, the pain that we have, real, the love that we have, real, the memories that we have, real, we will take those things with us. But the reality itself is not so real. It's not the ultimate reality. And it's certainly not the permanent reality. So as we think about our loved ones in spirit, who can still, who can sense us as we're going through this dream, it really helps to me to cope with the the grief and the loss. And I think I might link again, or I can't link to it here in the podcast. But there's a song called Home by Stephanie Mills that was in the movie The Wiz. So it's, it's Dorothy, the Wizard of Oz, that whole thing. And she's talking about her friends who are home versus the reality that she's living in, you know, that Oz reality, which is not the real reality. So check out that song by Stephanie Mills called Home. And it'll explain some of these concepts to you. So this morning, I was taking my walk, and I haven't walked in several days because I don't take it every single day. I'm not like fanatical about it. And I was taking some time off over the holidays. And then we were traveling and stuff. So I was taking my walk this morning for the first time in about 4 or 5 days. And I walked for about 2— about 4 hours and 45 minutes. So I'm walking and I'm trying to go into my my heart and feel my feelings. And like, how do I feel about this? Because, frankly, I haven't cried a lot of tears since Margaret passed, even though I feel like Margaret is and was as close to me as a biological mother. I'm very, very connected to Tawana's family. I've known Margaret for nearly 40 years now. She's been my mother-in-law for over 33 years. But as I was thinking about my grief over her, I was expecting this sadness, but it was really a different emotion. I can't really describe it as sadness. It's really— every time I felt sad, I was like, but what about her? What about her perspective? Every time I felt sad, I'm like, what is it I'm sad about? I'm sad about— I'm not going to be able to have those Christmases with her again. I'm sad about that, you know, all the memories I think about, like going to their house, memories of bringing her to my house, the memories of her and with the girls. But I wasn't going to have those here anyway, and haven't experienced that in a very long time. And even though I've seen Margaret, I remember it was about a month and a half, 2 months ago, she was in the hospital. I thought she was going to die that night. And I remember looking at her even then and thinking, that's not her. It's like, that's her body. But that's just, that's not her. That's not who she is. And when I saw her body as they were getting ready to transport it on— what morning was that? Monday morning. On Monday morning, it had the same look as it did that night in the hospital. It was kind of like she wasn't there. I don't know exactly when her spirit left her body. I expect, or I think that during these last several months, it's probably been coming and going. And I think there have been times when it's been there and times when it's not there. And this is backed up by people that have had NDEs, or, and people that have come through mediums that have said when the spirit starts to go back and forth as we near the end. So I see Margaret's body has been gone for a while, or spirit has been gone for a while, wanting to go for a while. So I didn't feel that profound sadness that I kind of expected to feel. And as I would try to tap in and feel Margaret and connect with her, and I'm not a medium, I'm not intuitive like some people are. All I kept getting was Margaret and Shana and Felton dancing, just having a big party. And I kept thinking about how Shana was probably planning this, this homecoming, this reunion. And as Margaret was going through the last several months, you know, or years, talking about her parents, talking about Felton, you know, her finally being there. And that just kept coming back to me that that vision over and over again. And as I wrote a tribute to her yesterday, and I was thinking about, you know, her homecoming, the words came to me, the bell of the ball. And it kind of came maybe from Lisa Jones describing when her husband passed over, them having this big party and them announcing him. And I could see Margaret coming in. And, you know, we were having New Year's parties here, of course, on this side, and them having a party for Margaret on the other side. And that was the image that just kept coming to me. So I— those are the things I wanted to talk about today. I want to talk about how every ending is a new beginning. And that we only have one life, we have one continuous life. Now we have phases of our life, just like when we're in the physical body, we were, we are infants, and then we're toddlers, and then we're, you know, children, then we're teenagers, then we're adults, and then we're old people. And we have these phases in our, in our like one life where we come into the body and out of the body, and we're, we're home, or wherever you, if you want to call it that. And then we're back here, maybe on Earth, and then maybe we're in other locations. And so we make these transitions, but we have one continuous life. And this is, again, backed up by what people have NDEs say, for example, that's like, I didn't even know I was dead, was what some of them say. So I want you to think about your own experiences with endings and beginnings. And when we go through an ending, you know, it's okay to be sad about something ending. But also, we should be excited about something else beginning. And why should death of the body be any different? And I say very distinctly death of the body, because there is no death of the spirit. Only from our perspective has someone, someone died because they've again, broken that connection. That's designed, we're all going to go down this road. And that's not to be morbid. That's not to be sad. It's actually to be grateful because these bodies aren't designed forever. And we're not intended to be here in this life forever. So those are my thoughts about what I've gone through, what we're going through. I'm happy, happy, happy for Margaret, for Felton, for Shayna, for Margaret's parents, for William Jeffrey, who gets to be reunited with his mother again. I'm very, very happy for them. I can say that in all sincerity. I am going to miss the woman physically, who was my mother-in-law. But as I said, I've been missing her for a while. So I'm looking forward to 2024, to sharing with you guys, to continuing to grow this community, continuing to grow this perspective and help share with other people. Hope you'll share with other people. And let's make this place the best place we can while we're here. And then we'll go have our party. Thanks for listening and have a wonderful day. Hi there, I'm really excited to tell you about my latest ebook. It's 4 Lessons That You Can Learn From the Near-Death Experience Without Going Through All the Trouble of Dying to Learn Them. I've been studying NDEs for several years now. I am completely convinced that not only are they 100% real, but that there's some very universal wisdom that we can get from the near-death experience. And I've distilled that down in this book into 4 short lessons And I've also given you all the reasons why I believe the NDEs are absolutely real. So go to www.grieftogrowth.com/NDElessons to pick it up for free. www.grief-the-number-2-growth.com/NDElessons. I hope you enjoy it.