Celebration of Life: Ascend and Include (Part 4)

This is the fourth in a series of four posts by our amazingly awesome contributing blogger Dr. Penny Lloyd!

Dr. Penny recently lost her lifelong companion mare “Bangwyn”. By sharing experience and insight around life and death of loved ones, it is her intent to help all of us open to the unfathomable beauty and ultimate connection that is healing.

Celebration of Life – Ascend & Include

I am not here to tell anyone what to believe around death. I am simply sharing my experience. That is what I trust most nowadays. This seems to be the general trend for humanity at this stage in our evolution. It used to be that we would accept without question, information handed from authority figures (parents, doctors, government, police, boss, experts in any field). Now it is rare to take someone else’s advice, or even research, as absolute. When we question for ourselves, we discover there are many layers to everything. That makes life fascinating. It is all about finding our own way to truths and what is real – by sifting life through our own filter. That comes through being present to our own experience. That opening is what I wish to share.

Life is different for everyone because everyone’s perspective is different – built by our unique biological makeup and life experience. Each point of creation is unique. So my way is not the one way, the right way, the only way, the highway…it is just my experience at one point in my own evolution … guaranteed to change. So will yours.

Close to a decade ago, when my 21 year old cat best “Buddy” died in my arms, it was the most pain I had ever felt. The only thing that helped was going outside. When the pain was at its worst, I remember hearing a whispered “promise of connection”. It came while I was in the pasture, and was surprised to see a cat. The cat turned and looked at me – giving pause to my raging internal blizzard for a millisecond – long enough for the message to land. At that time, the word “connection” didn’t mean a thing. I quickly dismissed and forgot it. But it has resurfaced, becoming a focal word in my reality.

One of the things “Buddy” was just starting to do before he passed on was curl up at night in the crook of my arm, right next to my heart. I just loved it, couldn’t get enough of it, and wished he would sleep there always. A couple years after his passing, a little black fuzz ball kitten climbed up my leg one day and adopted me. He sleeps there regularly. And I love it more than ever.

Ten months ago, my sister’s dog “Sharky” passed on. Some time later, she adopted a full grown dog “Mystic” from the humane society. Everyone was shocked at how similar they looked. We have all made an effort to call the new dog “Mystic”, but regularly make the mistake of calling him Sharky. Even though they look the same, there are differences in character. Mystic definitely has traits Sharky never had. But in a surreal yet deeply comforting way, somehow all of Sharky surfaces within Mystic. He no longer seems gone. Somehow he is not all of Mystic, but part of him.

With the connection Bangwyn and I shared while she was in physical form, I could feel her presence with me whenever I thought of her. (This is something she helped teach me, which is another story.) We were never really apart. Even when we were a thousand miles away from each other, I could feel her energy right with me. All I had to do was focus and instantly there she was. It was a particular sensation that I knew to be her.

I assumed it would be the same when she passed over. The first time I checked in after her death, I fully expected her to be there as she had always been. Then I had a brief surge of panic that she had disappeared. But her presence was there. It had changed and felt different. The quality of it was lighter and freer – more wispy, less solid. And it was found in a slightly different place. It was no longer a next to me, side by side, walk together, merging sensation. When I scanned for her presence the way I had always done, I found it deeper and more central, integrated – it had become part of my heart space – at the very core of it. That’s where I found her after she passed on.