Little Joys and Gentle Interactions While Loss is Nestled Firmly

So, I was doing morning prayers - albeit a bit late but I got started at just a tick or two before noon so -- close enough. (slept in after being up late playing a new game that caught my attention) . I have been trying to keep to the offices of the day as part of my process of healing, as well as part of my 'distance' assistance to the AJC as an Oblate in their Order of St. John 

Anyhow ~ the passage for today is Mark 16:9-15 . A passage I've read quite a few times because it's a passage often discussed. It is thought to be a later addition to sort of soften the very abrupt ending of Mark. I was contemplating how very abrupt death feels when that person leaves. Thinking about Caitlin and how suddenly lost and abandoned I felt. Yes abandoned. - not her fault. not intentional but that is the 'feeling' that sinks in. The sudden pain and emptiness. I let my mind play over the different reasonings for the addition- was it originally left off because the rest of it was already known and wasn't necessary to say? Was it left off because it didn't happen? etc ~ in some ways the same manner in which I would ponder the ending of any story - especially a story that had such a profound affect on history to follow.

 

I thought again about Caitlin's passing. How I LONGED to have some sense of her presence after she left but I didn't. I had a forced vision once - because seeing her in the casket had crushed me like a ton of bricks. Literally making it hard to breathe each day afterward. I had forced myself to see her in a different way - make a new 'last vision' of her. And I turned from the sink where I was doing the dishes, stared at the kitchen chair, and saw her. long blue sweater, jeans and t shirt bent over her 3DS, playing animal crossing, saw the smile. And suddenly that last image of her in the casket was erased.

But to have an actual non invoked feel of her presence had not happened.

 

I did start finding dimes everywhere, and often in places right as I was thinking of her - on the sidewalk in front of me while thinking about how I used to run into her as I was picking up the kids from school and she was coming to babysit, or in her totebag that said Follow your Heart that I opened just the other week, or really - everywhere. Dimes have become abundant....

 

So I sat in that feeling of 'suddenly gone, the emptiness left behind, those who loved Jesus and followed him on the journey we read about, now he is gone and they are alone... makes sense that the stories would arise afterward about seeing him' --- So suddenly i thought, 'you know, im going to go grab my Jewish annotated New Testament and compare the passage notes ' - even though I have read on this troublesome passage many times.

 

So - regardless I got up from my prayer stool and went to the book shelf in the livingroom, pulled out the Jewish Annotated New Testament and out fell the Animal Crossing Amiibo cards that Caitlin had bought for me , for mother's day? My birthday? Can't remember -- can only remember that it was in the months before she  died and i was CRUSHED that I wasn't able to find them. And there they were... I was pondering my feeling of abandonment at her death, wondering about signs and sadness and it prompted me to want to read more, to understand and there was the last gift she gave me... the cards, in their cute cheerfulness, falling from the space where I pulled out the book. I hadn't seen those cards in almost two years... saw them the one day and put them away - stuffing things away in 'safe places'. What a perfect time to find them.

 

Coincidence? Sure. Did my subconscious know they were there and THAT is why I felt driven to get the book? Maybe. IS Caitlin's essence here, somewhere - within me, within the air, the wind, reunited with source and able to break through and interact as part of that source from time to time? Very likely.

 

I don't understand death. I know what it means when the body stops living, but death itself I have no idea what, where, anything. I read many various things and try to stay open so that the divine can leak into this realm from time to time and remind me that this isn't all there is.