Awakening the soul – Death as a spiritual awakener
“Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even if they don’t know it, are asleep.”
– Anthony de Mello, Consciousness; the dangers and opportunities of reality
On the afternoon of Thursday, September 28, 2000, I had a discussion with my husband, John, a police officer, about my habit of procrastinating my writing.
We were at the dog park and I told him, “I’m so afraid that I’ll wake up twenty years from now and still not have finished writing a book.”
John turned to me and said, “You’re probably right about that…as long as you know that that would have been your choice.”
Oh.
But at the time, we had been together for twelve years… that’s a long time to listen to someone talk about their dream of becoming a writer, but do very little in the way of actual writing.
After the dog park, we went home and John took a nap before going to work at 9:00 pm Before going to bed, I promised myself, again, that I would get up early the next morning and write for an hour before coming back. to my regular job at 7 am. In those days, I worked as a civilian for the same police service as John. I was a report processor and would take incident reports from officers over the phone.
But when my alarm clock went off at 5:00 am the next morning, I reached over and hit the snooze button. I do not want to wake up. I don’t feel like writing. I don’t want to go back to work either. Why do I have to write police reports for a living?
Ten minutes later, the alarm sounded again. I hit the snooze button. I don’t want to get up. I can’t write today. I am too tired.
Ten minutes later, the alarm went off; Replay was hit. I’m so anxious! I do not like my job. I don’t want to go back there.
Me neither. Because during that exact same period of time that I was hitting the snooze button, John was lying on the floor of a warehouse dining room, dying of a brain injury. He had responded to a break-and-break complaint in a warehouse and was searching the crawl space for an intruder when he tore through an unmarked drop ceiling and fell nine feet into the dining room below. No safety railing had been put up to warn him, or anyone else, of the danger.
The complaint turned out to be a false alarm; there was no intruder in the building. My wake-up call, however, was devastatingly real.
My soul had been awakened to a new reality. I was a thirty-two year old widow entitled to receive my husband’s salary for the rest of my life. As an aspiring writer, this was a dream come true. As a woman in love, it was a nightmare from which I could not wake up.
Death took my soul mate; life caught my attention.
Two weeks later, I began writing what would become the book A Widow’s Awakening. It took 8 years, a dozen rewrites, and an ocean of tears to get it (and me) where it needed to be for publication. But I did it. And frankly, the process of writing the damn thing probably not only saved me, but showed me the way OUT of the grievance.
John’s sudden and easily preventable death made me realize how precious life is and how quickly it can end. We may think that we have all the time in the world to do what we are here to do… but that may not be the case.
Losing John almost killed me. There were days when I wished it were so. But it was not like that. In fact, his death gave me a beautiful new life, but not the one he had planned. And yet, from the moment I was first told of her downfall, along with the pain, shock, and fear, there was also a powerful sense of inevitability about everything that was unfolding…as if a little voice inside me will whisper: “And here we go.”
Maybe because:
“Your soul knows the geography of your destiny.”
-John O’Donohue, Anam Cara; A book of Celtic wisdom
Fortunately, loss is not the only way to awaken the soul to the reality that our time here is finite, so we better make the most of our lives, but it is certainly an effective way. Or rather, it can be.
Because at the end of the day (or of a life, a relationship, a career, a dream), choosing how to move on after a loss is always a choice.