I’m editing old posts for a future book. If you’ve already read this, you get a pass on the reading assignment. For new readers, enjoy this glimpse into the hereafter. ~ Bruce
“Can I ask you a question?” Lorie asked. “Where do you think Karen is?”
I just finished giving my presentation,– “What does it mean to be healed?” to Lorie and Nancy, two longtime friends of Karen.
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I assumed Lorie’s curiosity was triggered by my emotional meltdown while showing the slides. I knew I was venturing into a minefield – especially the video of Karen being manhandled up the steps by the ambulance team. But I managed to get through it – barely. Nancy wrapped her arms around me (She is an ALS grief survivor). So much for my short-lived career as the speed-grieving expert.
Karen returning from the hospital.
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 precious 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 where there is none.”
I looked at Eleanor and saw how her grief was equal to mine.
“Karen would be on the phone with us” she continued. “And I would feel her love through her voice, intention, and presence. She would say to me, ‘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, and WE love you because she’s still with me.”
Suzy called. I call her “Quantum Girl. She had just completed a five-day course with Tony Robbins, and 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.”
“You know the saying,” Suzy continued, “I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created the world so I might be known.”
“Yes, that was Karen’s favorite line,” I said. “It’s a hadith of the Prophet.”
"In physics, that’s the wave and the particle,” Suzy explained. “The particle is the Creation experiencing itself. Unity can’t have that particle experience because everything’s the same. The wave and the particle need each other; they need that appreciation."
Suddenly, I saw Karen and me as wave and particle. Then Suzy plowed into new terrain.
“Imagine if 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.”
“It’s funny how I’m doing all this remodeling, house painting, and clearing out,” I reflected. “We dreamed of transforming the house. And now I consult with her in my heart on paint colors.”
“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,” Suzy countered. “I can hear it in your voice, in the tenderness in your voice.”
“Part of my Henny Youngman routine is that I’ve taken over the family business. It’s a tough act — reaching out to people and loving them like Karen did.”
“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 the same way. It hurts like in a movie that ends well. When you’re crying because of the deep feeling it’s like a movie you deeply enjoy. Stay there as much as possible. That’s where your neurotransmitters are creating this vast circulation.”
“There’s so much love in me, it’s hard to find people open to it. It’s crazy, you know?”
Suddenly Suzy received an incoming call and boomp, she was gone.
When I’m alone at night, I go back to the Grief Advisory Board’s admonition:
No dating for one year. I tallied the responses to my Facebook post on the matter and found a guy/girl thing going on:
Tracey: “100 percent agree with your advisory board!”
Corinne: “Sounds like wise counsel.”
Versus the guys:
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 “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.”
Tom Hanks and screenwriter Nora Ephron had a similar argument in the shooting of Sleepless in Seattle.
Hanks described the stumbling block to The New Yorker’s David Remnick:
“We were were working on the rehearsals and I realized one of the things that was driving me nuts is that Delia Efron (associate producer) and Nora Efron (writer and director) 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 be a guy. Here’s the scene where Hanks is on the phone boasting 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.
[He sees his young 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 has become 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 back into being because they live in the timeless space where we only connect when 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 Swiss people backed out of the project because they didn’t like my portrayal of Reshad, warts and all. That night, Reshad Feild, my Sufi teacher (1934 - 2016) came to me in a lucid dream that I wrote about:
“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 an interview in the hereafter, 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 Swiss 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 German publisher pulled the plug on the whole thing.”
Reshad in 1976
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.
Tom Hanks's response to his son Jonah in Sleepless in Seattle nails it.”
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.
