Where's Karen?
“Can I ask you a question?”
I just finished giving my narrated multimedia presentation,– “What does it mean to be healed?” to Lorie and Nancy, two longtime out-of-town friends of Karen.
“Where do you think Karen is?” Lorie asked.
I assume Lorie’s curiosity was triggered by my total emotional meltdown while showing the slides. I knew I was venturing into a minefield – especially the video of Karen being manhandled up the back steps by the ambulance transport team. But I managed to get through it – barely. Nancy wrapped her arms around my bawling, convulsive, wailing self (She is an ALS grief survivor). So much for my short-lived career as the speed-grieving expert.
I have since discovered that the key to speed-grieving is simple – avoid thinking about yourself at all costs. I know, good luck with that.
“I’m not very good at nostalgia,” I explained to Lorie. “When I get pulled out of the present moment, I get wiggy.”
“I agree,” Lorie replied, “but that scene was powerful. Do you think Karen is here?”
I gave my stock answer, “The Hereafter is Here,” which should blow your mind if you really dive into it. Whatever pearly destination you have in mind, it’s right here, at this moment. But I knew Lorie wanted more – especially with all the Karen “sightings.”
The initial sighting came via Shelly, the medical intuitive, who reported to my friend Suzy:
“Karen is like a Buddha – and she’s not going anywhere," Shelly reported. "Everything was going so fast, but now Karen is greatly relieved – really happy. Her job now is to help people sense the space between the veils. She wants people to feel like it’s not so far away; it’s really right here. That distance is thinning, and that filter between the veils has become more porous.”
A week ago, an acquaintance who barely knew Karen reported the same story. And a letter came in the mail yesterday from Cindalou, our cabin neighbor in Tennessee. She wrote:
“I must tell you that I was visited one night by our sweet girl. I woke up with tears running down my face because she looked radiant and at peace… but mostly because I got to envelop her in the longest warm hug and say goodbye. My own l’il precioous mama has never visited me!”
Today at yoga class, Mandy reported, “Bruce, when I was adjusting your arm, just like I used to on Karen, I felt her presence.”
My friend Eleanor called this morning, and she went further:
“Karen would spontaneously appear. It could feel like love, light, warmth, or caring. I didn’t invite it; I didn’t go looking for it. I would just be washed by it.
“I could feel Karen's presence anytime, anywhere she advised me in the past or during something we did together, like going for a walk. Karen comes up when I walk now because in the past, I was always chasing her pace. But now when she pops up, I’m like, okay, now I can walk at my own pace.
“I miss that love from Karen." Eleanor continued. "I really miss it – particularly when I’m with my mother, and there is none. At this point, right now, Karen would be on the phone with us, and I would feel her loving me through her voice, intention, and presence, saying, ‘I know, honey. I know it’s hard. But we love you.’”
Karen must have intervened at that moment because I replied, “Well, I love you, Eleanor. And WE love you because she’s still with me. So there.”
Another call came in, so I said bye to Eleanor and hi to Suzy. She had just completed a five-day Zoom course with Tony Robbins, so she was on a quantum high.
“You and Karen brought yourselves into the material realm and had this experience,” Suzy explained, “and now there’s part of you that will always be in union. With a death, grief messes with us because we also know we will always be part of that person.
“The hadith of the Prophet reads, ‘I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created the world so I might be known.’
"In physics, that’s the wave and the particle. The particle is the Creation experiencing itself -- because in Unity, it can’t have a particle experience where everything’s the same. The wave and the particle need each other; they need that appreciation."
I reflected on Karen and me as wave and particle. Then Suzy plowed into new terrain.
“Maybe, there are other versions of your life going on where Karen didn’t die, and you continue together. That’s what physics says. There’s probably a part of you in touch with her being a part of your life.”
“Hmm, it’s funny,” I considered. “I’m doing all this remodeling, house painting, and clearing out, which is something we dreamed of. And now I consult with her on paint colors because I’m clueless there.”
“Her energy is available to you because you draw it,” Suzy explained. “She still resides in unity with you.”
“I’m more of a mess than people think,” I continued. “They think I have it together with my speed grieving, fixing the house, my grief advisory group, and the writing…”
“No, no. But I can hear it in your voice, in the tenderness in your voice.”
“I joke that I’ve taken over the family business, which was Karen reaching out to people and loving them all the time.”
“That feels the best for you,” Suzy agreed. “Appreciation and love are the highest vibrations of grief. And when you’re in the highest vibration of grief, it doesn’t hurt in the same way. It hurts like in a movie that ends well. When you’re crying because of the deep feeling -- a movie you deeply enjoy. Stay there as much as possible. That’s where your neurotransmitters are creating this vast circulation.”
That is exactly what’s going on,” I said. “There’s so much love in me, it’s hard to find people open to it. It’s crazy, you know?”
The game of Cosmic Telephone shifted again as Suzy received an incoming call. Boomp, she was gone.
What’s coming back to me from the Karen sightings is that she is hanging around specifically to help me and others through this passage, for which I’m grateful.
I’ve been thinking about the Grief Advisory Board (no dating for one year), so I went back to the blog post and tallied the responses. A guy/girl thing is going on:
Tracey: “100 percent agree with your advisory board!”
Corinne: “Sounds like wise counsel.”
And contrast that with:
Christopher: “I came to a new deep love relationship in the month immediately after Staci died.”
Don: “I started dating very soon after my wife passed.”
And my favorite (sent as a DM from an old friend who was my photo booth Santa years ago in Los Angeles): “I think your advisory board is full of crap. I knew Karen (a hundred years ago), and she would not like her beloved to wallow in grief. A date is NOT a marriage. It’s a connection. I feel that you should follow your heart. Blessings to you, dear friend.”
Interestingly, Tom Hanks and screenwriter Nora Ephron had a similar argument in the shooting of Sleepless in Seattle. Hanks described the disagreement to The New Yorker’s David Remnick:
We were were working on their rehearsals and I realized one of the things that was driving me nuts is that Delia Efron and Nora Efron are sisters, but they also mothers! I said, “You guys are the wrong gender to understand what's going in this scene between me and my son.
“You have written a scene in which a father is undone by the fact that his son is upset about him going out with a woman. So no,” I said. “There is not a father on the planet Earth who is going to give a rat's ass what his son thinks.
“You know what that father wants to do? He wants to get laid. And that's what's missing from your little gender-ish scene.”
As a result, Ephron let Hanks bring that male energy into the movie, including the scene where Tom Hanks boasts about his upcoming date:
Hanks: I'll tell you what I'm doing this weekend, I'm getting laid. It's the 1990's and nobody's getting laid. I'm the only man in America who's getting laid this weekend and I haven't been laid that much. Six girls in college, maybe seven.
[The dad sees his son Jonah standing in the doorway]
Hanks: How long have you been standing there?
Jonah: Forever.
Hanks: What did you just hear me say?
Jonah: Six girls in college, maybe seven.
Hanks: Seven... EIGHT! Mary Kelly.
Jonah: [holding the letter he obviously read from Meg Ryan] This is the one I like!
So, Lorie’s question becomes more complicated: “Where’s Karen!”
We know from the intuitives that Karen wants me to be happy (whoopee, I get to date). But also, I’m a big believer in listening to what’s in the moment (no dating for you!)
Can both be true? The key to “where’s Karen” is that she hasn’t gone anywhere.
The lights in the house haven’t been flickering, nor are the window shades whizzing up. Understanding “where’s Karen” requires inquiring into the nature of love.
Bhagwan said, “We come into this world alone, and alone we must return.” I would add, “We come into this world from love, and into love we return.”
You can’t put a name on this love space; love is timeless and all-consuming. Suzy sees it in quantum terms; I use the language of love. Either way, we can’t think, visualize, or yearn a loved one in the hereafter into being because they live in the space where we disappear. Bhagwan calls it the Silence. That’s why people from the other side appear in dreams.
Let me share a dream from the other side. When I was writing my Rumi book, suddenly, to my great disappointment, several key people backed out of the project. That night, Reshad came to me in a lucid dream, and I wrote about it (excerpt here):
“To my surprise, Reshad seemed quite happy about the book. Having passed from this world, he couldn’t give a twit about his image. In his new world, he could see God’s work of transformation and redemption moving along as it should, all according to the Grand Scheme. Any nasty bits in his personal story were an earthly giggle at this point. I liked Reshad being so cool and real. Naturally, when I ran to get my gear to record the interview for the book, I woke up. It was 3: 00 a.m. At that moment, in the waking world, my phone beeped. A terse email arrived from another person backing out: ‘I have decided that I do not want to be mentioned in this book. Not at all.’ A few weeks later, Reshad’s publisher pulled the plug on the whole thing.”
Reshad’s “intervention” from the hereafter encouraged me to keep going. Had I not, the story of Reshad, Dede, and Rumi coming to America would have evaporated in the mist of memories.
So back to the original question, “Where’s Karen?
Nick Cave put it best when he wrote about losing his son. Nick wrote (excerpted):
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“I feel the presence of my son, all around,
but he may not be there.
“I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me,
though he may not be there.
“He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her,
but he may not be there…
“These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity.
“Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility.
“Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits.
“Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them.
“It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned.
Better now and unimaginably changed.”
With love, Nick.
That’s sweet and poetic, but I prefer Tom Hanks's response to his son Jonah in Sleepless in Seattle.”
Jonah: What do you think happens to someone after they die?
Hanks: I don't know.
Jonah: Like... do you believe in Heaven?
Hanks: [hesitates] I never did. I mean, the whole idea of an afterlife... But now, I don't know. 'Cause I have these dreams. About your mom. And we have these long talks about you and how you're doing, which she sort of knows, but I tell her anyway. So what is that? That's sort of an afterlife, isn't it?
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Thank you for hanging with me. I'm both fascinated and grateful that you all want to see me through this -- with or without a date.
Love you,
Bruce
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/communication-dream-feeling/