Death, Dying, and What Remains

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“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”— Rumi

“There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.”— St. Teresa of Ávila

“What you seek is seeking you.”— Rumi

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”— Rabindranath Tagore

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I didn’t find out my mother died in a way that made any sense. There was no call, no warning, nothing that gave me even a moment to prepare. I was just scrolling when I saw a wedding photo on her husband’s Instagram, and underneath it, a note that she had been seriously ill for years and had passed on November 30, 2024. That was how I found out.

Everything in me reacted at once. It wasn’t like remembering. It was like being pulled back into a past I wasn’t thinking about. Moments from childhood came up without any order to them. Some were painful in a way that felt unbearable, and others were soft in a way that made them linger longer than I expected. There wasn’t any control over it. It just kept coming.

And through all of that, I kept saying the same thing, over and over, to different people throughout the day: “I’m an orphan now.” My father, my mother, my grandfather, and my brother. All gone. There is nothing left of that part of my life still here. And in truth, that part of my life has been over for a very long time. My mother and I were estranged. She had mental challenges that were impacting my children when they were very little, and when she refused to go to therapy with me, I couldn’t allow that to continue. I couldn’t let them be harmed the way my brother and I were.

I DM’d my best friend from childhood in Stockholm via WhatsApp. When she called back almost immediately, I couldn’t speak. I was crying so hard that there were no words. My dogs were barking in the background because the contractors had just arrived, and everything around me was continuing as if nothing had changed. She told me to go get Vince. I said he was meditating. She said, “I don’t care. He needs to do this.”

So I went downstairs and knocked on his door, interrupting his meditation, something I have never done before. He opened his eyes and said, “Your father was just in my meditation.”

There are moments that don’t ask to be understood. They just happen, and you recognize that something deeper is moving, whether you can explain it or not.

On the Path, we hear that we are not the body. Kathy said, “Birth is not fun and death is not fun… But we were not born when we were birthed.” I’ve heard that so many times. The Great Master, Maharaj Sawan Singh, taught that we must die while living. That is not something abstract. It is something that happens through meditation, through letting go of the identity we carry, the sense of self we hold onto. Kathy said, “It hurts when the body dies, but it hurts 100 times more when the ego dies.” There is nothing in that that softens the experience. If anything, it makes it clearer where the real work is.

She writes in The Living Master, “The Prelude is death, death of oneself, yet death unto new birth… only in death is there victory. Only in death is there life. And only through love can this death be won.” That kind of death is not something we usually think about when we talk about dying, but it is the one the mystics keep pointing to.

The day after I found out about my mother, I tried to work and move through the day in a normal way. And then, without me choosing it, “Stairway to Heaven” started playing on my YouTube, and everything changed. I felt them, my whole family, not as memories or something I was thinking about, but as something present. And with them, Kathy.

It wasn’t like they were around me. We were all in it. The love was everywhere. There was no separation. We were One. I was crying and dancing at the same time, completely overtaken by it. It was bliss. Not a small feeling, not something passing, but a few minutes of something so intense and joyful and real that I know will stay with me for the rest of my life.

The thought came, very clearly, “You all finally know. You know that I am good. You love me the way I always wanted to be loved.” And then I heard Kathy, just as clearly, from within, calm and certain, “You have always been this loved and more. It has always been true.” It didn’t feel like something new was happening. It felt like something that had always been there, and for those moments, I was fully inside it.

Maharaj Ji, Maharaj Charan Singh, said, “Die to live and live forever.” There is a simplicity to that, but it points to something that is not simple to go through. The letting go of what we think we are is not easy. It is, as Kathy said, more painful than the death of the body.

And yet, even with all of this, I know what I was in. The forms change. The people, as we knew them, are no longer here. And it can feel like everything is gone. But that bliss, that love, that Oneness was there, fully there, and it was not a feeling. It was Truth. That Oneness is always there.

I want to live in that. I long to live in that, in that knowing, in that love, in that complete absence of separation. Even a few minutes of it is enough to remember that it is real, and that it is everything. I will continue meditating to continue to live in it.

And I know in my soul, that is the Promise of the Masters, that is the Promise of the Path.