Book Cover courtesy of Paul Sherburne
My learning about death and dying would take until I was older than thirty-four, then maturing for years beyond to arrive at a personal and fresh view of these events with the truth that I am an eternal soul that does not die but will take on a new body when my physical body ends this life. I was in my late fifties when I read these words of Meher Baba in Discourses,
Death inaugurates a period of comparative
Rest consisting in a temporary withdrawal
From the gross sphere of action. It is
The beginning of an interval between
The last incarnation and the next.
By then I was in my seventh year of spiritual training and recognized this truth. But the journey to there, begun in childhood, climaxed at thirty-four as unconscious memories emerged—a beginning leading me through experiences, with each changing me.
In 1949, my sister and I, three and six, in rolled blue jeans, white socks, and Buster Brown shoes sat for our dad’s slide camera on the back steps. I was eating an orange and she was spitting out seeds. Our black cat Penny sprawled across my lap. On a later morning, not finding Penny, when I asked my mother where Penny was, she told me that Penny had disappeared during the night. She had been run over, I was told many years later—a missed opportunity for an earlier experience with death through a pet.
My first real experience would not be until I was a university student when with my boyfriend, later husband Paul, I went to his grandfather’s funeral. As soon as I saw the casket I said I had to sit in the back. I couldn’t look at it—I was so frightened. Recently Paul wrote the The Box Boys, a story about his Grampa Joe when Paul was a boy, and I found the boyish view delightful and a release of my stored fear from years ago.*
When the Grampa I’d grown up with died several years later, my mother went to the funeral alone, while I stayed at my parents’ home, as asked, with my younger brother, who was about ten. In my twenties then I now realize in my seventies that this missed opportunity needed a new story. I journaled my few memories of Grampa Titcomb, of my grandmother telling him the barn floor needed washing (who washed barn floors?) and Grampa on his way to the barn with a broom and a bucket of water; Grampa in his chair on the screened porch, right leg out straight since his hip surgery, his chest draped in Grammie’s undergarment and wearing lipstick (my sister and I playing); Grampa playing solitaire at the kitchen table, looking up from his cards to the picture window and reporting on who was going by, as Grammie shaped a crust for peach pie, her hands white with flour.
My realization is, “In an effort by parents to protect children from death (with some who may not know themselves how to follow the steps to understanding, acceptance, and peace) a learning opportunity about an irreversible reality is missed.”
*Meher Baba,
Discourses
, eds. Eruch B. Jessawala, J. Flagg Kris, and Bal Natu, 7th ed., revised (Myrtle Beach, SC: Sheriar Press, 1987).
*Paul Sherburne,
The Box Boys
at
.