Connected Preparation

I am aging.
You are aging.
We are all aging and there's one guarantee in life - we are all going to die eventually.

The older I get, the more it becomes a reality and that my youthful thoughts of living forever young are fading. I still feel young but I know that I'm no spring chicken. I still feel the invincibility of youth but the reality is that Father Time is ticking away.

I cherish all the connections I have made in my lifetime with friends and family. At some point, our friends play a larger role in our lives because we actually get to pick our friends. Whereas, we don't really have a choice with our family.

So, moving forward, I know I need to reach out to my friends and family more often. I need to make it a point to call for no other reason than to say hello and connect. There are very few that I trust to share the intimate details of my life for fear of judgement. I don't really care to hear EVERYONE's opinion on my life. And yet my life is an open book if you ask me the right questions. (I don't volunteer just any kind of information.)

Being connected and feeling connected is an important component in my life. Even with the thousands of miles between my immediate family and I, I still feel so connected to them and involved in their comings and goings. My nieces and nephews are my heart and my soul and I believe that connection that I have with them is because of my deep, unconditional love for them. Perhaps I can incorporate that unconditional love approach to all of the people I am connected to you.

I don't know.

What I do know is that we all need to get connected -- to our friends and family, to our innermost desires, and to what is most authentic to us.

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FOLLOW ME

Reflecting Death

The past two months have been such a roller coaster. With all the different funerals and deaths that I have dealt with in the past couple of weeks, I am emotionally overwhelmed (not in a bad way). Life is short. People I love will come and go in my life and just because they're gone from my presence doesn't mean that they aren't alive in me.

We buried Uncle Roy today. When my mother moved here from Samoa she lived with his family. He was a little boy when she came through but my mother always spoke so highly of his mother.  If I remember correctly, my mother left Samoa to attend the Church College of Hawai'i and to escape my grandmother's attempt to marry her off. I did whatever I could to assist in making the memorial services for Uncle Roy a success. From decorations to set-up and execution, ordering flower leis, following-up on food orders, making sure there are enough workers to assist in different things. **whew** I feel like I put in more work than when my own mother passed...but that's because others served me in my own preparation to send my mother off. I put in work in remembrance of my mother and my mother's love for Uncle Roy's mother. I wonder if other people think about the relationships from the past and serve in "remembrance of"...? Both my mother and Uncle Roy are gone from my presence but I know that their energy is out there somewhere in the great big universe. A piece of them are alive in me.

Death has a way of making people reflect on life and the people they love. Surely I have contemplated my mortality since the passing of my mother. I think of my father and how wonderful he still looks at 70 years of age. I think of preparing a living will to tie up all the loose ends and helping my father get his stuff together also. But most importantly I need to sort out the stuff that really matters and hold on to it; sort out the stuff that's just FLUFF and let it all go. Ultimately, the thing that matters most is my family and the people that are closest to me. I want them each to know how much I love them.

Perhaps this is a continuation of my previous "Letting Go" post. I have to release my feelings in some way, shape, or form. I have become so infatuated/obsessed with death, dying, and the "whatever" of life after death. I read through my most recent book, Proof of Heaven, in a day or two. It's a neuroscientist's account of his journey beyond death and back again. It was a short, simple read and I enjoyed it (for the most part).

I love to dream about tomorrow, about what life will be like after this dreaming. There are so many traditions in the world that discuss the afterlife and I think all of them have a measure of truth in them; from purgatory to reincarnation to multiple lives -- they all have something I want or something I hope is true. What if one lifetime is not enough? I wouldn't mind coming back through the ages to find my friends. It almost seems like the ULTIMATE game to play.... hide-and-seek through the eternities. **sigh**

When I wake from this dreaming, I hope to see my mother and my grandmothers there, grandfathers that I have never met, my uncles and aunts, cousins, and dear friends. I hope they will meet me at the beginning of my journey and help me cross over.