Do You Still Laugh? Do You Still Sing? by Melinda Augustina (robert munsch read aloud .txt) 📖

DO YOU STILL LAUGH?

DO YOU STILL SING?

Words and ways to ease your heart
when a parent dies.

Author: Melinda Augustina
Copyright 1999, 2009
ISBN 1880567-01-6

Sound Communications
6230 Wilshire Blvd., #1791
Los Angeles, CA 90048
melindaaugustina@yahoo.com


This book is for pleasure and entertainment purposes only. The author does not claim to be a counselor or psychologist. The stories are simply an accounting of events, as they appeared to be happening to the author and are not scientifically based observations. Recommendations are made purely as a friend to a friend and are not to substitute for professional counseling and/or psychological assistance.





Dedication:
For my brothers and sisters and our extraordinary fortune-
being born into Gus and Jeanne’s story.



PRELUDE TO THE LETTERS:

“Isn’t she beautiful?” I would ask my friends when I brought them home to meet my mother. Always. Even after I grew up and she was much older. “Isn’t she beautiful?” I would ask them - right in front of her - and she would laugh and shrug it off, be a little embarrassed and love every minute of it.

And my friends would answer, “Yes. She’s beautiful.” That was the right answer.

It is 1999 and both of my parents have passed away and there is nothing special about this. But there is much I would share with you about my experience so you may be open, curious and have more ease when it is your parents’ time.


Maybe you have already been through this or perhaps only one of your parents has passed away or you have not yet faced their mortality. Whatever the case, come closer and I will tell you about what I noticed.

There are three things…

1. The grace and dignity with which they lived is the grace and dignity with which they died.

2. Their spirits moved into the world after they died.

3. Their spirits continue.

That is what I noticed.


Daddy was a big man, with a big voice, a loud, spontaneous laugh and splendid storytelling ways. He was a lot of fun. Quick, strong, bold, big, decisive movements were the patterns of his being. He walked with an east coast vigor and purpose as if he had the most important agenda in the world. His was not an energy of self-importance - but rather the crispness and clarity of a man of service and purpose. He was a man of business.

He could listen to a problem, sum up the situation in a few words, and spit back the best possible action to be taken. He wasted no time “dilly-dallying” as he would call it. Life was here, life was now, and you had best get on with it.

And so, for those of you following in similar footsteps what I’ll say is - at the end of his life he saw it a little differently.


I sat on his bed two weeks before his death, helping him sign Christmas cards and decorating them with red and green drawings of holly and evergreen boughs and he said, “This is fun. You know, we never had time for this when you kids were growing up.”

I felt his truth in that statement. To me it seemed inaccurate. He was an extraordinarily generous man, a devoted father, and had spent plenty of time with us as we were growing up - there were just so many of us (nine children) and only one of him. I imagine at that moment, no matter how much time it had been - it seemed like not enough to him.

We were not neglected in any way, shape or form (spoiled would be more accurate). My mother had created a very magical childhood for us. As our wild, busy household of eleven people grew even busier and the children grew into young adults things changed. I remember saying to myself, “But nobody sees! They all move so fast and nobody sees.”


After his death I would wonder how many millions of men there were in the world, of his generation, who had laid the tender corner of their heart on a sacrificial altar and had not been able to blend their drive for success and their desire for closeness with their families.

Two weeks later, maybe ten minutes before the actual moment of his death, the strongest man I had ever known, weighing maybe 95 pounds now, motioned me out of the room. He could not speak, but his hand motion was obvious.

A few minutes later I felt a pull to go back in his room and he was in the last moments of his struggle to stay. In the instant his spirit was freed from his body, the energy shot straight up on the air, flew to the foot of the bed where I stood and shot a bolt of power and strength through my body - from the top of my head, through my spine, my arms, my legs and all the way to the ends of my toes. It was an electrical shock. I felt the power and strength of his entire life inside my boney frame. It was one of the most awake moments of my life.


Daddy lived with the biggest bang he could create and died precisely the same way. It didn’t look like any death scene I’d ever seen in any movie or play and I became very interested in this energy. The sadness and sense of loss, the reality that he was actually gone would come later. At that moment I was given a surge of life force and a very different perspective of death.

I had studied theater at a college that was well known for their nursing graduates. I recall a moment when I was listening to two nursing students speak quietly about a dying man they both were tending to. As a ‘civilian’ listening in on the world of nursing, it all sounded pretty horrible to me. A few minutes later I was sitting alone with one of the nurses and I asked, “What do you do when someone is so close to death and you already know that nothing you do will help them live? What is the point?” Her answer was quite poignant, “You just try to make them as comfortable as possible and create a little pleasure for them.”


Years later it would occur to me that that would be a good thing to do all the time, instead of waiting until someone is dying.


“When a man is tired of pleasure, he is tired of life.” These words were written on a shaving mug that Daddy used for mixing the lather for his morning shaves. At the end of his life there was very little pleasure remaining and so, he was tired of life. How do you suppose our lives might be different if one day we all woke up and decided pleasure is the point?

Daddy had cancer for two and a half years. With Mother’s death we had almost no preparation time - two days. I say "almost" because although she appeared healthy, she had been dropping subtle hints for a while. My capacity for denial is larger than most people’s.

Growing up I always sensed my father would pass away before my mother. And my mother, well, I have to say it never occurred to me that she would die. Not really. Even with her subtle hints, even with the mothers of friends passing away - not my mother. She had always been here - always.


Surely she would always be here.

Always.

Surely.

Always.

Or at least for another ten years.

At least.


She was simply too beautiful to die - wasn’t she?

Well, little one of great delusion - no,

she was not too beautiful to die.


For us, Mother’s passing was very different than Daddy’s passing.


When Daddy died we were all so strong - just like him. As my mother quietly and seamlessly slipped from this life, we all softened. I don’t know how else to describe it. My eldest brother sobbed like a little baby. “My mommy’s gone!” he cried. It seemed to be harder on the boys than the girls.

In the room, as she lay dying, her energy was only love. She could not speak, yet I could feel her words on my heart. In the room there was only the largest, roundest, fullest sense of love.

I have loved and I have been in love, and I thought that I had loved at times and I have actually loved at times but in this experience I realized that none of that was it. This was the Big Love.

Like any human being, my mother had her opinions, prejudices and weaknesses. My mother was also full of love. With nine children, sixteen grandchildren and countless voice students - she had chosen the path with the biggest heart.


There was a certain quality in the room that night. My sense of it is that wherever the source of the river of love comes from - through her - in those moments it had found a pure channel of delivery.

“Life is completely connected. Only consciousness divides.” I read that once and have experienced it several times. In that room, on that night, was my most complete experience.

She had turned into pure love. Free of any earthly illusions her heart was truly free. Free to love larger than earthly cultures and consciousnesses will allow. I wonder what would happen if people loved that way all the time. It was so beautiful.

A sense of softness and magic filled every cell of me and expanded through every wave and current of my consciousness and then expanded even further. There was no “me” anymore. There was no anything.

There was really only... nothing.


And then after the nothing there was softness.


Then there was only softness and then the softness softened its way into everything.


And then she softened her way into everything.


Into me,

into the floor,


into the walls, everything -


into the family , into our hearts,

into our house,


into everything in the house.

Into everything.