Elysian Fields

I presented this Creative Thought as part of our Center's Sunday service in June 2008.

I was last scheduled to preside on May 4, which turned out to be the day of my husband Larry's Memorial Service. He has made his transition, and I have become a widow after 43 years of marriage.

Larry was journalist, a professor and a writer. I recently came upon an unfinished novel from his youth, called "In Adam's Fall."

He wrote of a 21-year-old man wandering the country with "an intensity, a rage, a life-lust, a God-hunger so powerful, so driving, so maddening, that the youth had been hurled, storming, eyes wide, fingers aching, heart-pounding, down the Atlantic to Savannah, across 80 to the Mississippi, up the waters to St. Paul where he headed West, into the sun-cracked dirt and rain-whelped wheat, to float down into the desert, to pass through the desert, to California, the State of Gold, where he swam into the Pacific, spit salt water into the skies, and turned around going North..."

"His was the odyssey of the God-seeker. He scoured the land, its people but never remained long enough to know what he had uncovered. To Know, to know, that is, to love."

His character, Martin, probably autobiographical, was intensely searching to find God, and was disappointed.

This writing was interesting because Larry, while religious in his youth...even to the point of studying with an orthodox Jewish Lubavitcher sect in Montreal...did not expect an afterlife, or some experience of consciousness after death.

I remember him saying he could live in a world without answers; or he could not fathom a God who would permit the Holocaust. He had no fear of death; had no incompletions concerning his life here on Earth, and was totally ready to go. In fact, he stopped taking his meds on his own, after a lengthy illness, when he decided he'd had enough.

The children came immediately when I called. Larry was alert enough to recognize them when they came, even little grandson Samuel, and then became unresponsive for two days.

We three were with him when he passed. I had never experienced someone dying before. As he took his last breath, his eyes popped open and he had this look--of amazement and surprise. I believe he saw the Other Side. He saw something he didn't expect. My son David, the mathematician, said it was perhaps a neuromuscular response, but later admitted: "I've been an atheist, but now I'm an agnostic!"

The children stayed awhile and then I was alone. After taking David to the Flyaway, I came home to the silence. And I grieved. Deeply. My grief surprised me. As I sat in Larry's chair and sobbed, suddenly an image of him flashed across my consciousness.

And he looked absolutely delighted. He was young, vital, no beard, a blue shirt, and he was exuding happiness. No wonder! I was left with all the minutiae of "maintenance mode." But what a wonderful image to replace the one of him wasted in his bed. What a wonderful gift to come back to tell me he was O.K.

I was telling this to a friend back East, and said: "Do I sound wacky?" And she said: "Yes!" To my friends in California, however, I'm not wacky at all. I'm glad I live here.

The last two months have demanded spasms of competency, as I deal with matters of the estate, interspersed with spasms of grief. I've had to come to grips with losing half of myself, as my social worker, Bonnie, puts it. I've had to go from 0 to 60 to learn to do things I never did before.

I realize I was truly taken care of, pampered...Larry did the nitty gritty stuff of life, while I was flitting about on my spiritual ministry, or doing creative expression through photography.

Now I make lengthy lists...the car insurance, the home insurance, the home taxes, dealing with his pension fund, social security, the health insurer, finding an attorney, learning about IRAs, getting the car registered and smog checked, getting my own cell phone minutes. Can you imagine? I didn't even get my own cell phone minutes.

I'm convinced there is an Other Side, another dimension beyond this one. I didn't always think so. But in addition to the writings of Ernest Holmes, I explored the work of Robert Munroe and his out-of-body experiences, and books like THE GOD CODE, and quite a few others.

It's not so far-fetched to believe, as Ernest Holmes says, "There is more to us than we realize. Man is an eternal destiny, a forever-expanding principle of conscious intelligence...the ocean in the drop of water, the sun in its rays. Man, the real man, is birthless, deathless, changeless; and God, as man, in man IS man! The highest God and the innermost God is One and the same God."

As Larry wrote in his early novel, "For no man, not even intense 21-year-old God-seekers, can find the superhuman in the human, can they? The Elysian Fields aren't to be found on a map of the United States, are they?

Not likely, I say, but I feel that Larry found his Elysian Fields. And that brings me comfort.

And so it is.