A Gentle Goodbye Pt 1: Grief didn’t come as expected. Something else did.
They said I’d be crushed. Instead, I became spacious...but why?
I’d like to welcome the hundreds of new subscribers who have joined me over these last couple of months. I’m so grateful that you’re here.
This blog is the first that I’ve written in the last couple of months and it will be a completely different kind of posting than usual, as I process in writing my most recent life-altering experience.
If this kind of sharing isn’t necessarily your kind of thing, I hope you’ll hang with me until after part 2 of this one. I just need to sort some things out and get them out of me right now.
This isn’t a sad story, it’s a healing hopeful one that might enhance your journey with some takeaway nuggets of perspective, optimism, and hope. It’s a different kind of story than you’d expect under the circumstances. This isn’t about death; it’s about life that leads us all ultimately to that place.
This is the most personally revealing sharing I’ve ever done. I feel so very vulnerable about it yet still feel strongly compelled to share. So here we go…
Come bear witness to my journey.
~Alecia
”When the heart is full, grief has room to breathe as love co-exists right next to it in the same space.” ~Alecia
My recent journey…
It’s been several weeks since my father passed. He made his transition on Spring Equinox, a symbolic day of re-birth.
How appropriate since we shared memories of making a pilgrimage together to the Yucatan in 1997 during Spring Equinox. We did ceremony with Mayan elders and Daykeepers at sacred sites every day for that week.
This was during the time when the Hale-Bopp comet passed overhead so close to the earth that we could see it with our naked eyes. Such an auspicious time indeed!
I hope you don’t mind that I share with you. It won’t be from a place of sadness but from a place of unexpected fullness.
I have learned so much, and yet, on other levels, I’m still opening in the understanding that there may be a multitude of layers yet to reveal themselves. I’m up for that journey too.
There have been so many thoughts, questions, and emotions that have run through me since his passing like…
Did I possibly have an awakening on the same day that he was experiencing a new birth into another realm?
Butterfly goo & interesting, strange expansions
Since my father’s transition, I feel a strange sense that I’m in that interesting in-between “butterfly goo stage” rearranging my molecules from the inside to manifest a higher purpose on the outside as a new me emerges. I’m not even clear what that is yet exactly, but I have some inklings.
I believe I’m headed into an expansive state of be-ing in a way that I never have seen before. That seems strange to say so soon after the passing of my father whom I loved so dearly.
Why?
The signals that society sends are that I’m supposed to be in a life stage of deep grief, mourning, and constriction, but I’m not…yet.
I ask myself, why would I wait until after he’s gone to experience such a new sense of expansion, possibly the likes of which I’ve never seen?
That’s saying a lot because I’ve experienced many expansions and transformations throughout my long life for I am a consummate seeker and I thrive on them.
Yeah, I’m not afraid of change.
The shape of my grief (or lack thereof)
Maybe it sometimes takes the loss of our loved ones to shake things loose to clear the sleep from our eyes for us to more fully step into ourselves in a way that we couldn’t while they were here,
But why would that be?
Why would that happen when I had the most supportive, loving, encouraging, non-judgmental father standing by my side to assist me in celebrating my triumphs while bearing supportive witness to my challenges?
Is it what I am when he’s not present that leaves me independent to more completely stand within myself?
Is it clarity that’s rising after living several years under the dark constricted cloud of covid immediately followed by supporting him as the keeper of his day-to-day while his body slowed down and his world got smaller?
Have I been living in such a wormhole of constriction that, once it all broke loose, there’s not much option other than to expand with the newfound freedom of it all?
I think it’s ALL of those things…and this is exactly how he’d want it to be for me.
Processing the details while watching for energetic snags
We shared an unconditional love, he and I. The kind that makes r o o m and allows. The kind that doesn’t grip for personal need. The kind that f r e e s the other one up with nothing less than full support even when it may not necessarily feel so wonderful on our end.
People have told me that felt some things healed in themselves as they bore witness to the love and deep connection in our relationship.
I’ve never lost anyone super close to me who was in my life on a daily basis.
I lost my brother-in-law —whom I adored— back in 2021. It broke my heart knowing that we wouldn’t be up to anymore shenanigans which we loved to engage in so much.
But he wasn’t in my life on a day-to-day basis so the loss of his presence wasn’t as palpable as someone I’d see every day like my dad. My brother-in-law’s name still frequently passes my lips as I keep the spirit of who he was alive in our hearts.
Piercing the protective bubble
I’m hesitant to pierce this bubble of gratitude and peace I have been in by openly sharing my journey because at that point, all manner of energy comes rushing my way by kind people who care and want to share their own grief stories.
I wish to keep what I’ve got in my heart right now without gripping and grasping trying to force it to stay…
…because that would be a mistake.
I want it to be here with me as long as it wishes to be my companion in gratitude of what is without expecting it to be anything else…
…especially by those around me who mean so well.
I wish to continue to simmer in my self-reflection and wonderment of this sacred process of unwinding someone’s life while facing my own feelings around what it is — and what it isn’t — without “shoulding” on myself.
But this is my first time and I’m so naive.
If this is what naive is, then I like it because it’s as s m o o t h as Dove chocolate in my heart…at least for this moment in time.
There’s plenty of time to ride the waves of grief when if they arrive. Why in the world would I want to be there before it’s time?
I check myself daily for signs that I’m compartmentalizing or stuffing my feelings. I haven’t yet found that I am, but I know sometimes we can hide really well from ourselves…so I keep looking.
The tears come…
I cry when I need to and sometimes when it sneaks up on me.
His overshirts that looked so good on him as they caught up the strawberry blonde of his beard and picked up his crinkled sparkling green eyes as he smiled in my direction.
I will never see him at my dinner table in those shirts again.
The straw cowboy hat that gave him such personality as the color and turn of the hat beautifully complimented his coloring and personal radiance.
I cried as I journaled those days in the hospital revisiting all of the small details for the future, as I tend to forget so many things without triggers to pull them out of me.
Going through that night in hindsight allowed me to let the energy flow through my body once again while watching for energetic snags and hooks that potentially create internal catches in my energy.
What needs to be more closely looked at as something rubs up against inner resistance and snags in a rough way?
Where am I ok and where do I feel tender?
Just notice that.
My father’s spirit animal was a wolf cub. He had a brilliant mind and was so very curious. He passed that curiosity onto me, his cub. He was always wondering about things, thinking outside the box, even inventing things.
He swam in the depth of the oceans as a scuba diver playing in the bioluminescent waters of France, as well as just outside the kelp beds in northern California with a wild seal. He felt the sky against his skin when he parachuted over 100 times, once off the wing of a bi-plane.
His eyes were always pointed towards the heavens in wonder. The hubble telescope was one of his favorite things to check on each day. Long before Elon Musk became politicized, he marveled at the ability to send a rocket to space to have it return to earth just to relaunch it over and over again.
He marveled at the rapid change in technology as one of the engineering minds working towards winning the space race in the 1960’s.
There is a NASA website where you can plug in your birthday to catch an image that the Hubble telescope shot on that day, but it won’t necessarily be the same year.
You can find your birthday image here. If you capture yours, please share it with me in the comments below. I find them fascinating!
There were 5 days between his birthday and mine so we always celebrated them together. In 2022, I wanted to get my nose pierced for my birthday. He decided to join me to get his ear pierced at 82 years old. He never took that earring out and I now wear it to keep him close.
For 60+ years, some sort of camera resided in his hand recording videos and still pictures. This has left me with dozens of boxes of slides, hard copy pictures, VHS videos, and every other form of camera media that we’ve evolved through in his lifetime.
He would run across a snake or a beautiful Chinese iris on the property and take 10 pictures of it from different angles. When you have a habit of doing that, the pictures pile up…BIG time.
What’s the right way to honor someone’s visual capturing of their life experiences when you can’t keep them all?
A tip shifts perspective
This brings to mind a little secret my daughter told me about while going through thousands and thousands of images, especially digital, that might be helpful to you.
As my daughter and I started through our picture sorting process, she told me that we needed to shift our focus from figuring out what we wanted to get rid of to what we wanted to keep. That was just one degree of a shift in perspective that freed me up. Now I have much better direction to ease the process of sorting through the visuals of my father’s life experiences.
Perspective is like that. It’s a magic key that can unlock the doors and concepts that we’re sometimes imprisoned by merely by shifting our perception ever so slightly enabling us to see things with more clarity from a different vantage point.
I use shifts in perspective all of the time to release the ties that bind me. That’s why I named this publication ✨MindShift Musings✨ because I’m constantly shifting my perspective for ease, inner peace, and understanding.
The unpacking of it all
There’s still so much to unpack—not just the tangible things like photos and belongings— but the energetic imprints, the quiet moments, the inner whispers that keep surfacing.
I'm beginning to see that grief isn't a fixed point or a straight line. It’s more like a spiral, circling back with new insight.
As I continue this journey in writing, I invite you to walk with me a little further into this unfolding... there’s more to explore, and I’d love to share that with you in Part 2.
Meanwhile, today is also a poignant day for me in a few ways.
First, I find myself in the never-before experienced situation of having two different life transition ceremonies to attend on the same day. One is for a dear friend who has lost her mother in a somewhat similar way to my dad. Today is her funeral.
The other is a Celebration of Life ceremony for a friend’s mother that I’ve known for decades.
And lastly, this day brings up a special memory for my father and I as he took me to see the first Star Wars movie in San Francisco when I was 15. What a mind-blowing experience that was for all of us back then!
So, in the spirit of that memory…
If this initial sharing resonated with you in some way or stirred something up in you, I’d love to hear about it. Also, if you found your Hubble image from your birthday, please share it with us in the comments. They are so beautiful!
This is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing your wisdom of shifting perspectives even in grief. Sending love and light to you. ❤️
Thank you Alecia. You have been my trigger for memories long buried. 🌼
~
What did Hubble see?
On February 3 in 1995
Bow Shock Around LL Orionis
Named for the crescent-shaped wave made by a ship as it moves through water, a bow shock can be created in space when streams of gas collide. This image captures the bow shock around the star LL Orionis.