chapter one
mum
I was 16, and the day that we had all been anticipating finally arrived. It was 6am in the morning when the phone rang. I knew straight away what the news would be.
“Hello”, I said.
”Miss Swain?”
”Yes.”
”It is St Vincense Hospital; we would like to inform you that your Mother passed on this morning.”
I paused. What was I supposed to say to this news? What was I supposed to feel?
”Thank you for letting me know,” I said, “what time did she go?”
”About twenty minutes ago.”
In truth she had left weeks before her body eventually gave out. For the last few weeks of her physical existence she had been in a comatose stupor, not recognising anyone who was in her hospital room. One of the last coherent times I had with her was a few weeks before.
I came to see her one afternoon after College, which fortunately was only across the road from the hospital. She was awake and talking to someone I couldn’t see. As I moved closer I could see she was not just talking she was ranting and raving to someone that wasn’t there.
“Mum, it’s me” I said, “Karen”. But she didn’t hear me, instead she continued to talk to the person she was emotionally involved with. I listened for a while, fascinated at what was happening and interested to hear her conversation. It erupted into an argument that seemed to become quite violent. Concerned for her welfare I leaned closer tying to console her and bring her back to the now. But as my face drew closer she reached out and slapped me across the cheek yelling something like, “I hate you”.
I was shocked at first wondering why she had hit me, did she hate me? What had I done wrong? Did she know it was me talking to her? What the hell was going on? I sat back into the hospital chair crying and holding my face. A nurse came into comfort me. “What is going on?” I asked.
”Your Mother is in a drug-induced state, we have had to up her dose of morphine to help her with the intense pain. Sometimes a high dose like this affects the mind. I am afraid she will not improve, with all the drugs we have to administer, her condition will only get worse” she said.
I sat in the hospital chair dazed and confused, wondering where my mother had gone. As I continued to listen to her ranting, I realised she was reliving a fight she had with my father years before. There were many of them over the years, but this one must have stayed with her and she was reliving the whole thing as if it was happening now. She didn’t slap me she slapped him! This thought gave me some relief, I realised she didn’t hate me in the last weeks of her life, but she was still hating him.
Is this what they mean when they say your life passes across your mind at the time of your death? I thought to myself. Is mum going through her life again in the days leading up to her finale departure? I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out. I wanted to understand this death experience more, why did she get sick in the first place? Why was she leaving this earth at such a young age, and where was she going? Why did she have to suffer so much pain and is there a way to overcome illness without all the suffering I saw my Mother go through?
Her struggle with the Chemotherapy treatment she received for the cancer horrified me. To think that the nausea and pain she went through was all a part of a treatment that was supposed to make her FEEL better. This never made sense to me, but these experiences were all part of initiating my inquiry into life, love and the universe which unraveled many of the mysteries of life. The journey took me on a spiritual quest and re-ignited questions that had been born in me lifetimes before. I had a lot of questions and I was now on a mission to find the answers.
When I put the phone back on the receiver that morning, I sat on the floor of the hall silent for a long time, not knowing how I was supposed to feel.
My mother had just died, was it a relief? I had watch her suffering so much. Even in the years before the doctors found the numerous tumours that riddled her body, she felt unwell and miserable. Living had no joy for her in the last few years of her life, and the hospital experience was definitely one of the lowest points. So much pain. I heard her say many times, “I wish the pain would go away, I just wish the pain would go”.
So now that it was over, what was I supposed to feel? Elation for the end of her suffering? Sadness at my loss? Fear that I was all alone in the world at such a young age? I didn’t know, but I knew that I did not feel the grief that we are supposed to feel when someone close to us dies. I did not feel sadness; I did not feel happy or relieved that her suffering was over.
I felt ready.
Ready to take on the world.
I was 16 and doing it all myself. The truth was I had been doing it all myself for some time now, as Mum had been in hospital most of the time over the past two years.
My desire for my independence had been granted. From a young age I wanted to grow up fast. I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do and how I should live my life. I wanted to discover it all for myself. I wanted to see the world, date desirable and undesirable men, drive my own car, have my own house, wear designer clothing and high heels, create my own stamp and rule my own paradise.
I wanted to discover what this world had to offer, I wanted it all and I wanted it now. Well I got what I asked for with an abrupt jolt. I didn’t have other family members willing to take me in and look after me, only my brothers who were 18 and 14 at the time. One would need looking after and the older one had to find out about the world himself, just as I did.
So there I was sitting alone on the floor in the middle of the hallway at four o’clock in the morning, and the only member of my family that knew she wasn’t with us any more. I had a lot to do…
My big brother and I lived alone in the house for a few months after mum’s passing, but the death duties caught up with us and we had to sell the house to pay the tax. This tax was abolished the year after mum died; I guess the government saw the lunacy in paying taxes to die as well as paying taxes to live.
After that I went to live with a friend and her mum for a few months and then moved into a shared flat I found in the paper. I was all grown up at seventeen living the life of a young adult, working and paying the bills. I had all the independence I could have ever dreamed of. It was a fascinating adventure.
Life without my mother was challenging but rewarding at the same time. I had no one telling me what to do, or who I could hang out with and how I was supposed to live my life. I was a teenager with no parental discipline impinging on my life experience. My friends were envious of my freedom and would hang out at my place to escape their parent’s control.
Most people would think that this kind of life would have seen me fall into the wrong environment. I was adventurous and wanted to explore all parts of life, but I was always guided. I had a great relationship with my inner knowing and it was communicating with me all the time, just like a loving caring parent that knew about everything life could throw at me and was never afraid for my safety.
I thought this communication was my common sense. I thought everyone had this type of thing going on in their mind. I thought everyone talked to themselves. Maybe they do, but maybe they do not listen to their common sense as it sounds too much like their parents and they are trying to resist this type of communication.
I know from my experiences growing up without my parents that we are all guided. Because they were not a part of my life I was not trying to prove anything to them. I wasn’t trying to rebel against their authority. I wasn’t trying to get their approval or their attention, so I was left to my own devices. I was left asking myself. “What do I want, and how am I going to get it without my parents providing it for me?” A question many of us do not ask ourselves till we are older.
This is the life I emulate with my teenage daughter. I want her to tune into her own guidance, her own common sense. I want her to make decisions based on what she wants and not on how she feels it would affect me. I want her to know she can create anything she wants because the source of her abundance and her well being is not just coming from me or her father. The source of her well being is inside her. So I have given her the freedom I had at her age to make her own mind up about how she will attract what she wants into her life.
I have said to her she can do, be and have anything she wants. She is her own best authority on this subject. I will always be here to look after her; she can always rely on that, but decisions about who she wants to be with, what she wants to do or not do and what kind of life she wants to live is all in her hands.
This has proven to be the best parenting tool I could ever have, as she tends to be the most cautious of all her friends. She doesn’t drink to get drunk like many of her age group or take drugs and have sex to upset her parents. Many of her friends do, as their parents have told them specifically they are not allowed to do things they want to try, so they go right ahead do it behind their backs.
She tells me she is like the mother hen always doling out the advice to her confused friends. She has a communication going on with her inner being or common sense that she can hear as she is not too busy listening to the rebellion going on in her head. Thoughts like “I’ll show them, they can’t tell me what to do.”
We are all guided, we all have access to this common sense or inner knowing, but it really helps to quiet the mind of all the worrying chatter to hear it, and sometimes the best place to do this is in our dreams.
Mum’s message
It has been about thirty years since mum left the planet, and over the years I have dreamt about her many times. In every dream she had the same thing to say to me, she told me in many different ways and in many different circumstances, but no matter where we were or who we were with she told me the same thing every time; she said she wasn’t dead.
The dreams would start with me discovering her in a strange place, like working in a shop in Queensland, or in a different country or at a stranger’s house. It was always a place where I did not expect her to be.
”O MY GOD you are here!” I would say to her when I saw her. “You are here. YOU ARE HERE!”
”Yes I am here”, she would answer.
”I can’t believe you are HERE! I can’t believe YOU RE REALLY HERE!” I remember thinking over and over again. “I thought you were dead.”
”NO Karen, I am not dead”, she always said.
”If you are not dead, then where have you been all this time?” I would ask her, shocked and confused?
The initial shock, that she was actually with me after not seeing her for so long, would go on for a while. Then, when I calmed down, I would ask her more questions like, What have you been doing all this time? Who have you been with? Where have you been living? I still can’t believe you are here!
The dreams were always confusing and disjointed as I tried to remember them in the morning. I was interpreting them through my own personal belief system, with my fears and misunderstanding of the eternal life experience.
As I awoke into the daylight hours and tried to relive the night’s adventures, the overwhelming feeling was one of confusion. I did not have an understanding of life and death as I do now. All I knew was I was with my Mother and It was real. As real as any physical experience, and I didn’t understand how I could be with her if she was dead. So my stories of far away places, and seeing her working in strange circumstances was my mind trying to make sense of an experience that didn’t make sense in my waking life. I was trying to put a non-physical experience into a physical content.
Anger was the dominant feeling I would remember as I awoke in the morning. If she didn’t die and she has been alive ALL this time, why the hell didn’t she want to be with my brothers and me? I would think while I was having the dream.
Why didn’t she want to be with us? Didn’t she like us anymore? You’ve abandoned me, was what I felt when she informed me she didn’t die. But as the daylight hours hit my waking mind I realised it was all just a dream and she was still dead. Phew! She didn’t really abandon me. It was all just a dream. As real as it seemed, she was still not here in this physical life.
Dreams are strange and enlightening playgrounds. Our dreams are always giving us messages about what we are doing with our waking life. In our dreams we live out the dominant thoughts that run our waking existence.
The feelings that dominate a dream are showing us the type of thoughts we are living with that are attracting the circumstances of our waking lives. If you can remember the dominant feeling you had in a dream, it will surely show you the dominant feeling you have in life. These DOMINANT feelings or emotions are the ones that are getting the most attention from the universe. Because of what you indulge in the most, the balance of the experiences you are attracting will reflect this feeling. So even when we are not open or willing to look at our emotional set point, our dreams will clearly show them to us.
If we have scary dreams, this is an indication that there is an aspect of our life that we are scared of. Happy or sad dreams show us the mind set we are living with.
Our dreams are communicating to us about what is inside our minds. One could say it is our inner voice talking to us, or our inner-being guiding us. This is happening all the time, but sometime our inner voice wants our full attention and this will happen at night while we rest.
We are being helped while we sleep. Our inner being is communicating to us on every level of our consciousness. The question is, which level will get our attention? This dream platform is a wonderful place to find answers that may not be available to us in our waking existence.
The physical world around us has mesmerised us so much, it has most, if not all, of our attention. Most of us are so busy trying to control and perfect the circumstances of our lives we seldom stop to think about the circumstances of our mind.
A death experience will remind us that we cannot control or perfect every circumstance of our life. Usually it renders us helpless in the face of a circumstance that has been out of our control, and this is the feeling so many of us try to avoid. We all want to feel like we have everything under control, that our destiny is in our hands and happiness is ours to live.
But when someone does something like dies, it can feed our insecurity that we are completely out of control. Here we all are trying to have a great life by avoiding horrible things, and yet horrible things seem to be unavoidable.
What if we were to view these horrible things in a way that felt better, instead of trying to avoid them? What if none of them were horrible at all? What if we looked straight at them with a renewed perspective and saw them as gift instead of a horrible drama, because the only way to avoid them, is to leave the planet and transition back into the pure positive energy that made us, and this may not be the plan at the moment.
What were my dreams telling me? Was mum showing me I had a belief that was not serving me? Was she showing me the source that was causing of much of the unhappiness I felt in my life? I had felt abandoned by the one person who was supposed to love me the most. My Mother.
This belief played out in a variety of disturbing ways in my young life. My unconscious thought was; if mum didn’t stick around to love me, who else would love me? Not the truth of course, just one of the many lies I would tell myself to justify why I would push the people who wanted to love me away. The truth was, my Mother came to tell me she did not abandon me, that she did not die. She wanted me to know she was always with me and I could be with her anytime I wanted to. She was trying to communicate to me that I was loved and that I can never be abandoned, had I understood the dreams better at the time.
These types of dreams stopped when I was in my thirties. I was coming to a better understanding of how all this living and dying thing works. My thirst for answers was being quenched; I was listening to my guidance more and gaining a trust in my inner voice and myself. I’ve had waking visits from Mum a few times since the dreams stopped; usually she came to give me a message. Sometimes I would listen and sometimes, when I was so busy with the goings on of my life, I told her I would call her back. This day was one of these…
A very real encounter
It happened when I was in my thirties, a single mother with an eight year old daughter. Christmas was drawing close and my young daughter was in the school’s Christmas play. We had a beautiful Japanese student staying with us. I was still searching for answers to the big life question.
I had finished my Naturopathic studies and had done all manner of self-help, psychic awareness and spiritual healing courses and was coming to an understanding that I had always had the ability to tap in, turn on, be with by inner being.
I could talk to my source energy or my greater self and find answers to my questions. I was coming to the understanding that I did not need all the courses and teachers to teach me what had always been within me. But they were all apart of my awakening process, showing me what was always there and I am grateful to them for that.
This was a fascinating time for me, and our beautiful Japanese student, Yamiko, was a very special part of this time in my life.
Yamiko was in her fifties then, maybe even older. She was not your average kid living in Australia to learn English. Yamiko had a strong desire to come and live in Australia one day. She had worked in the same factory all her life, lived in the same house, raised two children, and outlived her husband.
Now, late in the game she was looking for a new adventure. We fell in love with her. She was a single mother’s Angel. It was like the universe sent me an angel to look after us at a time when we would really need it.
Around five o’clock I took five minutes to have a shower. I had soooooooooo much to do. I had to cook dinner for Yamiko and my daughter Anika. I had to get her ready for the school play, make sure her costume was all ready and in one piece and get to school by 5.45. I will just take five minutes to relax and rest, I thought to myself as I got into the shower. Just five minutes, then I will rush around like a mad thing and make sure everyone is ready.
I sat on the floor of the shower and let the hot water cascade over my head and body, the heat felt so calming and nurturing. I love the feeling of hot water running over me, I was in bliss. I closed my eyes to enjoy the sensation more and then…………… BANG!
There she was in all her glory. My mother’s face in profile, as clear as day. Just her face. It was one of the clearest visions I had ever seen in my mind’s eye. As I stared at her she turned to look straight at me.
”OOOOOOOH NO Mum! I don’t have time for this right NOW!” I said to her. I have a million things to do, I told her, “I’m just stealing five to relax before the rush”.
So I opened my eyes as quickly as I could, trying to rid myself of this psychic experience, but Mum was having none of this. The moment I opened my eyes, many of my other physical senses were engaged giving me the experience of her presence.
I could smell her, I could hear her voice, I could FEEL her presence and memories of her came flooding back like an onslaught.
”OH MY GOD,” I said to myself. “I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER YOU.”
I could smell her, it was such a familiar smell, I could feel her, I could almost taste her. I looked around me, she was everywhere, I could feel her everywhere. I could feel her and yet I couldn’t see her. It was an amazing experience, one I will never forget, and one that has never been replicated to this day with such clarity.
It had been about twenty-three years since she had left the planet, but this experience put her right in the room with me, just as she was when she was alive and being mum.
“Listen Mum, I know you have come to tell me something”, I said to her; “but listen I don’t have time for this right now. I have so many things to do and I have to get Anika to school before the play so she can get ready for her big part. I will call you back, OK.”
As quickly as I could I leaped out of the shower and raced to get dressed, hoping that my busyness would stop her essence. It did, and we made it in time for the start of the Christmas show. It was wonderful, Anika’s dad was there with his new partner and we all enjoyed a festive Christmas night at the school play. Especially Yamiko, it was her first Australian Christmas Play and she just loved it! It was a happy night filled with appreciation, laughter and adoration for my funny, beautiful little daughter and her school friends all dressed up on stage and loving it!
What was it that mum had come to tell me?
Did I call her back?
The next morning would reveal everything…
