Celebrate - Part 1

The other night just as I was falling asleep, I heard a strange noise, followed by a crash in the other room. I got up to check it out. My little cat had jumped up onto a bookcase shelf and knocked a picture down to the tile floor, breaking the glass. Well, actually she knocked several pictures down, but only one broke.

It is a picture of my maternal grandparents when they were alive and healthy, yet not long before they both declined. They are sitting caddy-corner to each other on metal benches on their small front porch in the sun, my grandfather gazing lovingly at my grandmother. I’ve always liked the photo; it warms my heart in memories of the two of them who are now…well… dead. My Grandfather died in 2001; my Grandmother in 2007, and although I believe that they live on in another form in another realm, I miss them here – in this physical one.

Interestingly, I had the honor of being at each of their bedsides as they breathed their last breath of life here and then left it. And it was a concrete “leaving” that they did; I felt it. I felt the shift from life to death… to life… as if it were a gust of wind blowing past my body, only without the wind; an energetic swoosh or pull moving upward toward the sky and outward toward infinity. I felt it without feeling it, with hardly a concrete physical sensation attached to it at all. It was purely energetic, and in the end, it felt like what we call a birth more than a death… pure freedom.

At the time, I recall having an overwhelming desire to celebrate: “How strange!” I thought, “I feel like cheering and laughing!” Yet I couldn’t. Well, I could have, yet in the face of everyone else’s crying, I figured it might feel disruptive, disturbing, disrespectful, shameful, and maybe even a bit crazy at best. So I found myself squelching my desire to whoop and holler and celebrate each of their departures and newfound freedom; and I shifted my focus and shed tears instead. Yet I was aware that the tears I cried were genuine compassion for all the other grieving people in the room, and maybe even a few for myself; not for my Grandfather or Grandmother.

©2010 Cecilia L. Zúñiga. A Year To Live. All Rights Reserved. Reprints, copies or reproductions of any kind must be accompanied by copyright credit line.