Death remains a mystery

A friend of mine shared an experience today that touched me deeply. It was about an upcoming move and how she will miss the people, places, and things she's become intimate with there. The crux of it was how strange it felt to know that they will all continue on without her when she's gone. She compared the feeling to how she imagined that of a dying person when visiting with folks for the last time: separate, disconnected, and "ghostly," knowing that you will soon be the only missing piece to the puzzle you are observing.

It opened my eyes to the truth that thinking, reading, studying, writing, and speaking about the kind of separation and disconnection that death brings is one thing; actually moving through it is a completely different thing...

Holding gratitude for what's come and gone from life is one thing; holding the loss of your own absence in death is another... Because it feels to me that although there is "instant" physical separation, there is not "instant" energetic disconnection in the purest sense. There always feels to be an energetic connection unless or until I break it, consciously, with a shamanic practice. And even then, in the most subtle realms of being, I feel we are all always energetically connected.

Will this feel different when we actually die? Will the energetic separation and "disconnection" be just as clear as the physical one, or will it feel in that realm - merged within the All, the One - the same as it feels in this realm... so that there is no true separation or disconnection in the end, energetically? Just physically? Or will it just not matter at that point? No body; no ego; no care...? It feels to me that this is just a non-issue in the energetic realm, but that's just a sense, not a knowing. I won't know until I get there.

What I do know is that in my own "Near Death Experience" several years ago, those kinds of things simply weren't a part of the mix. It was all about the beautiful feeling of whatever that Source was that was gently tugging at me... and it WAS beautiful. Part of me really didn't care about anything else but going there. I didn't though, so I can't say for certain what it is like once "there," wherever that is...

I am still here, in this physical realm, dancing with the concept of death, yet not able to really know what it is like until I die... So, onward through the fog of "life" I go.