I haven’t been here for almost a year. The need to spew my guts has returned. Maybe I’ll explore what causes that compulsion later.

Or not. I mean, “now you see me, now you don’t” has been the modus operandi with my writing, whether in analog journal form since my youth, to today’s current digital form in my …dare I say, “old age”?…. I am pushing 60 after all. Don’t necessarily feel old, despite the aches in my healing broken patella. (Oh, yeah…that happened while I was out…)

Anyway, I was intending to do something of an update on the State of Our Union (micro and macro) but I got distracted for a moment scrolling back on this blog, curious about where I’d left off. I have to admit some of it made me tear up as it brought back memories of how I was feeling back then about stuff going on.

Then, I ran across an entry entitled “10/22/20”, which I actually wrote on 10/10/23….

And wow. I don’t know the right word to describe running across it just moments ago. I chose Deja Vu for today’s title because of the timing – the really weird timing.

Basically, 2 years ago, at roughly the same time of year as now, I was writing about something that happened 3 years previously at roughly the same time of year; and here I am 5 years out, at almost the exact same date as what I was referencing in 2023. And this was not what I had intended to ramble on about when logging in today. But, it’s….kinda weird.

Let me explain, if I even can be remotely coherent right now.

My father died of mesothelioma in November of 2020 after a long, rough, hospice at home. It was slow and painful and, therefore, pretty traumatic for him, my mom, and me. 5 years later, I don’t think we’ve really processed everything about it. It kind of remains a room behind a door that we rarely take a peek into. We know what’s there. We just can’t bring ourselves to look at the details for too long.

Anyway, I recall a book that I read and that I gave to my mom while we were dealing with taking care of my dad as his health slipped away. It was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book, “On Life After Death”. A book I highly recommend to everyone – even if you and your loved ones are in perfect health. I found it to be a big comfort and I think it was a comfort for my mom as well, because, you see, the author explores the common threads in dying and near-death experiences that she researched and witnessed throughout her career all over the world. And though it doesn’t necessarily come to some concrete, absolute declaration about what happens after we die, it most definitely offers hope. Especially for people who worry about things like religion and faith. Because while my dad was for the majority of his life firmly anti-religion, my mom had been steadily growing firmer and firmer in her religious beliefs. And when I did what they’d always encouraged, i.e. to choose what I believed, I chose Judaism. Which, I was dismayed to find out, didn’t exactly make them too happy. Anyhoo, you can well imagine that my mother, being very Lutheran, was worried (maybe even still IS, I don’t know) about her husband and daughter’s souls. But the thing about Kübler-Ross’s book was that she found that no matter what religion, belief, non-belief, race, country, age of a patient, etc., the experiences they had as they were dying, or returning from a state of dying, were remarkably very similar. The vast majority were experiences of comfort, joy, painlessness, fearlessness, acceptance, illumination. And that book kicked off a small fascination in me with near death experiences (NDEs), which leads to what I watched this morning on YouTube…..

So, my latest habit is YouTube. I watch it for news, information, entertainment. You name the subject, you will find it there. I’ll start my day with drinking my coffee, while maybe working on a project, maybe while cleaning up the kitchen, and I’ll have it going. And one channel I regularly check in on is, yep, one with testimonies from people with NDEs. I’ll admit, some stories seem a bit convoluted, maybe even a bit wacky, but I don’t dispute the experiences people attest to. Some of them even make me wonder if I myself may have died briefly in my sleep back in my late twenties, because several NDEs describe what I distinctly remember dreaming about once (my husband can’t understand how I can remember so much from my childhood or how I can remember dreams I’ve had in the past…but I do) And, I digress….

The NDE video I watched this morning was from a journalist who was raised without religion, and her experience and what she described gave me chills for a second. It made SO much sense to me. It resonated with thoughts I’d often had when contemplating the intersection of religion, belief and dying; it sort of aligned with Kübler-Ross’s book. And it was such a comfort. Because I also worried about my dad when he died. Not about his soul. Because his soul was – IS – a good one, through and through. But I could sense that he was maybe a little afraid in those last days. That he was apprehensive about what was going to happen next. I didn’t want that for him. Looking back I wish that I had told him about that book. I don’t know why I didn’t discuss it with him, because we always discussed things we’d read, news and documentaries and films we’d watched. In those last days, strangely enough, we danced around talking about what was going to happen, even though he, for maybe the first time in a long time, maybe ever, agreed to pray traditional end-of-life type prayers with me and mom as a family one afternoon.

I should have mentioned to him what was in that book! I wanted his anxiety to dissipate, to be relieved in his last moments…It’s the fact that we weren’t in the room with him when it happened that has tortured me ever since. That we weren’t by his bedside, holding his hands, but down the hall, when he passed over. So, we don’t know if he was able to relax and be pleasantly surprised in that moment. This is one of the details of his death that I have so diligently avoided voicing, deliberately avoided opening the door on for more than a second.

So this morning, I was watching a NDE video from a stranger on YouTube about dying and what they saw. Then, about an hour ago, I got onto this blog to deal with other unrelated stuff, and instead found myself looking at the posts about my dad and losing him. Each entry with coincidental October dates.

I’ll just say this: That video was a comfort. That video is what I needed to see before diving back into this blog and before diving into processing what’s happening in the world on a micro and macro level in my life.

Now that video feels like a distinct, personal, message.

And the message is this: Don’t worry. It’s all good.

Coincidence? Maybe.

But….

My dad worked in intelligence for a short time, before leaving the military and marrying my mom. People in intelligence tend to question convenient coincidences…a favorite joke is the classic “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they AREN’T out to get you!”. They learn about codes in communications. They pick up on patterns. I’m still very much my father’s daughter, I guess. And I’m definitely good with that.