The death thing…Even now as I write this I am thinking to myself ”do I REALLY have to use THAT word?”…
DEATH. Just one little word and yet the EFFECT it has once we start to talk about it. Another challenge for me – and a good one I think.
Having passed over several times in this lifetime – only to return – I suppose I am in a unique position to write about the subject. The trick is figuring out WHAT I want to write about this topic because it really does change your perceptions and your thoughts in so many ways.
The way I see death now is not that different to the way my pagan ancestors did – and in particular my pagan Irish and Saxon and Norse (Viking) ancestors. They celebrated it as more like a ”graduation” or a ”coming of age” more than anything else. They didn’t see it as some terrible thing to be ”mourned” – it was rather something to be celebrated…
The thinking of more recent centuries past and not yet taken over and it wasn’t simply a matter of death, ”judgement” and an eternity in some heaven or hell… That sort of thinking came much later on.
The most recent time I died and passed over was (from memory) towards the end of my 20’s or the beginning of my 30’s… Whilst it was a significant event in my life at this time, I can’t remember the exact day or date or anything like that. I simply remember that it happened.
The exact details are perhaps not that important – the fact that I passed over for a short period of time is perhaps what matters the most here. What was happening to my body was actually not such an unusual or ”rare” thing. Like my mother I have always been one of those people born with multiple severe allergies who has always had to ”watch” what he ate etc. If I got unlucky and ate the wrong thing (peanuts for example), my airway would close up due to the severe reaction, I would stop breathing and I would die.
I’m not sure what caused that reaction back then – but it was obviously a severe enough reaction to close my airway and to make it progressively harder and harder for me to breathe. Naturally, even though I had been through a couple of NDE’s (Near Death Experiences) before this one, there was still a certain amount of fear and anxiety. This was because we are programmed in this way since birth I believe – to fear death – to fear the unknown – and depending on what sort of family we were raised in and their belief systems and so on, a lot of other stuff gets ”attached” to this as well…
At any rate as I was losing consciousness and knowing I had done the one thing I could do at the time (overdosed on antihistamine tablets lol). I could feel that it would not be long – whilst I was busy panicking it’s when more than one voice started communicating with me and telling me that I was going to be okay and it was not my time yet…
Could I describe these voices right now? Probably not. But this much I do know – they were extremely comforting -and I sense that if it HAD been my time then they would have been involved in the process of guiding me on to the next stage of my journey. It all happened so suddenly – my mum having been an ex nurse for many years seemed to hold it together rather well I think. She obviously realised at the time the very real risk of losing me permanently – but not having an epi-pen and having ensured I had taken a pretty full on dose of antihistamine there really wasn’t much more that I could do or she could do either (having become aware that I was in trouble)…
I ended up lying on the bed in the bedroom I had known so well for so many years – and even though my breathing and pulse and heart rate were obviously a bit of a mess and my airway was definitely quite constricted it was obviously not totally so… There was obviously a bit of air getting in and out – but the blockage was enough to make me pass out, lose consciousness and for a while to stop breathing…
Some of this I know because my mum had been there in the background all the time doing her ”nurse thing” and checking my pulse and my airway and the rest of it…
I think she said I had been ”gone” for less than a minute – from memory – but it’s not a topic we have discussed much since that day – but what I do know is this – from the normal human ”medical” point of view I was gone for a while – a very short time – but still gone…
The strangest thing about my death was that whilst it started out as stressful and worrying, “they” were there to comfort me, to tell me it was not yet my time and to help me get through it…
I won’t say who ”they” were because I believe that is a question that has different answers for different people – depending on where you were brought up and your belief system – but this much I do know, I was never alone… And I realised (and not for the first time) that there was obviously nothing to fear about the place I was going to. It was at that point that I was simply able to ”let go” and trust in my own fate and destiny knowing that I would survive this if I was meant to.
Its a difficult thing to explain really – initially a panic and worry and me doing everything I could to ensure I DIDN’T die (in this case grabbing my mum and making sure I had those antihistamine tablets) but then after that I found myself just ”letting go” knowing that I would be ”looked after”..
I wish I could say now that I have definite and clear memories of everything that happened on the other side – I know things happened there – but for some reason at that time I was not allowed to remember. That is fine however – I knew what I needed to know at that time.
I come from a long line (on my mother’s side) of Scottish Celtic witches and seers – it goes back many centuries – and like my mother before me and the old great grandmother witch I would share my birthday with every year until I was about 10 (and she was about 93 lol) I had ”the gift”… So for me seeing the ”little folk” around the house, hearing their noises and their pranks etc. was not such an unusual thing… (Apparently she would whisper things in my ear in a language that nobody understood – my mum related this to me much later on – and I can only assume now that it was a part of my preparation – the 10 year old boy and the 93 year old great grandmother.
I am smiling to myself right now as I write this because a few of them have been up to their usual tricks in the apartment today I think – but that is fine I think – life would be so much more BORING without them and their company
When I started thinking about this article and what title I would give it I was thinking of something like this: ”Death, the ultimate relationship enhancer” because I often joke that since my father’s passing about 6 or 7 years ago I now have a more intimate relationship with him now than I ever did when he was alive. But this is a joke of course and I am not saying that it’s exactly the same now that he has gone – of course there are things that I miss – but he for his part did his best to SHOW me (more than once) that he was still VERY MUCH here..
I will never forget that morning in the old house – about 3am or so – when he opened the sliding doors to the lounge room and walked into the kitchen in his dressing gown to make a cup of tea. This was something he did very often while he was still alive – at all sorts of strange hours – because he would often get up in the middle of the night. He had chosen to turn up in this way knowing it was something very familiar to me and un-mistakeable but also not a scary or threatening thing to witness… Just his way of saying ”I am still here”…
Its strange really – I remember the eulogy I did for my father at the time of his passing – and the prayer I read out – it was not a Christian prayer – it was a Viking prayer – a pagan one – a prayer my ancestors used many centuries ago:
”Lo, there do I see my father. Lo, there do I see my mother. And my sister and my brother Lo, there do I see the line of my people Back to the beginning. Lo, they do call to me. They bid me take my place among them In the halls of Valhalla Where the brave may live forever.”
These words are special to me even today – they mean a lot. They are not words of fear. They are words that remind me that ”death” is just another part of life – another part of the journey – and that death is not ”the end” of anything – its the start of a new stage of the journey – that is all. I know that when my time comes I will be re-united with the loved ones who have gone before me and will finally have the chance to meet all of those amazing ancestors I haven’t had the opportunity to know just yet.
Do I have ”all the answers” right now? No. Nobody does. But I know enough to know THIS much. Death is not something to be feared – nor is life – life is to be lived – without regret and without fear – to be lived to it’s full without regret and without remorse.
Just like I was unsure on how to START this piece I am equally unsure as to what the best way to FINISH it is… Quite often friends and acquaintances ask me what it’s like to be a professional psychic and medium etc. The idea that I deal with the dead on a daily basis seems to be both fascinating to them but somehow at the same time a bit frightening or weird perhaps. I tend to have a standard reply that I give nowadays – and it goes something like this: You have much less to worry about from the dead than you have from the living and most of the time the dead are far easier to get on with.
It’s intended as a joke – but there is some substance to it as well. There is nothing to fear in death itself or the dead as well. To have ”visits” from deceased loved ones is really not such an unusual thing at all. The way I look at it is that their deaths do not mean they have suddenly gone from ”someone” to ”nothing” – they have simply moved on to a different place – a different stage in the journey. You can perhaps look at it this way – you are sitting in the lounge room of your house and they have gone to the kitchen or the bedroom to do something else. You can no longer see them – they are not in the same exact location that you are in – but they ARE still (very much) there.
Well – this is my take on the whole ”death thing” anyway – all in all a much-overrated experience I think… but an interesting one.
Blessings,
Psychic Laurence
