Healing the Grieving
A FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MAN WAS DYING OF METASTATIC lung cancer in a major university hospital. For a while chemotherapy had stopped the progress of his disease, but finally the lethal cancer had gained the upper hand. Leonard was waiting to die. When he could, he passed the time talking to his wife, Evelyn, or to his physicians. Fortunately, these were physicians who took the time to listen to him.
“How long will it take to die?” Leonard asked his doctor one day.
“I don’t know. It could happen anytime, or it could take quite a while,” the doctor answered. Then Leonard and his doctor talked about letting go and being able to die. Leonard’s wife was included in this conversation, and she felt both comforted and comfortable with the words and thoughts.
The couple talked even more after this meeting. It was as though something had been unlocked and released in them. Leonard and Evelyn began to spend even more time together.
Leonard’s level of alertness began to fluctuate as his terminal condition deteriorated. At times, he was semicomatose. At other moments, he was fairly alert. Evelyn thought he was having hallucinations.
“Leonard feels like he’s floating,” Evelyn told Leonard’s doctor.
“Perhaps it’s not an hallucination,” the doctor replied. “Many patients tell me that. Is there more? I’m interested in hearing about these things.”
With that, the oncologist had left the symbolic door open. He had let Evelyn know it was safe to tell him things like this, no matter how strange or unusual they might seem.
The next day when the doctor made his hospital rounds, Evelyn had something new to report.
“He said he was floating again, and he felt good about it. He heard people talking by the door, and he floated to them.” The doctor assumed that Leonard had heard a conversation among nurses outside his room.
“No,” Evelyn corrected. “They were people waiting to welcome him.”
By the following day, Leonard was barely clinging to life.
“He said he was floating again,” Evelyn told the doctor. “He went to the people outside the door.”
Leonard nodded his agreement from the bed as Evelyn repeated the story.
“The people showed him a large book, and in it was the name he would have during his next life. It sounded like a Pakistani or Indian name. He told me his first name, but he couldn’t see his last name.”
Leonard roused himself. “They covered up the last name,” he whispered hoarsely. “They said, ‘No, you’re not supposed to see this yet.’”
Later the same day, Leonard told Evelyn he saw a bus coming to take him somewhere. Then he spoke a few more words, which were barely audible.
“Dying is not a loss,” Leonard whispered to his wife. “It is a part of living.”
Those words proved to be this man’s last. He died that afternoon.
Evelyn grieved his death, but she also felt comforted. She was certain now that Leonard’s soul would continue to live after his death. And Leonard’s final words had changed her own perceptions of death and dying. She felt much more peaceful about death’s inevitability in her life.
She would never be as fearful of death again.
As it happens, Leonard’s doctor was my youngest brother, Dr. Peter Weiss. He and his wife, Dr. Barbra Horn, are both specialists in hematology and oncology in St. Louis, Missouri. In private practice, they specialize in treating cancer. They are also both members of the clinical faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine.
Both Peter’s and Barbra’s lives have been altered personally and professionally by their relationships with their patients and also by the discussions they and I have had together about our own and our colleagues’ experiences with life and death, experiences that have taught us more about what it truly means to die.
We are grateful to patients like Leonard and many others because their experiences give us more information and new perspectives concerning the dying process that, hopefully, we can share with other dying patients and with those who grieve for them, both to teach them and to heal them. From these patients we have learned that death does not have to be primarily an experience of fear, loss, and separation. This most challenging of life passages can also be a time of healing, expansion, and new beginnings.
Peter was treating a patient named Matthew. Matthew was a stoic, sixty-five-year-old professor who was reluctant to talk about his feelings as he was dying from a painful and rapidly advancing cancer of the pancreas. Peter and he finally began to communicate on a more personal level. Once again, Peter gave his patient a subtle indication that it would be all right to talk about anything, no matter how unusual the topic might seem.
“A strange thing did happen now that you mention it,” the professor admitted. “An angel came by and asked if I were ready to go. I asked if I had to. The angel said no and then left.”
Peter asked the professor how he knew his visitor had been an angel.
“By the bright light within and around, and by being so high up in the religious hierarchy,” came the enigmatic reply.
A few days later, the angel reappeared.
“Are you ready yet?” the angel gently asked.
“Not yet,” the professor replied.
The angel lingered. By this time, Matthew’s cancer was advancing rapidly and he was in considerable discomfort, requiring potent analgesic medicine just to blunt the sharp edge of his pain. Yet this man still retained his mental acuity and alertness.
Matthew watched as the angel reached into his abdomen and removed what looked like a brown brick.
The pain immediately disappeared and the patient felt much better.
Then the angel left once again.
Gradually Matthew’s pain returned, but so did the angel. Another brick was removed. There was now no pain at all, and all of the pain medicines were stopped. The visits from this healing angel provided this very logical, stoic man with great comfort and hope.
His clinical condition deteriorated further, and this man who had formerly been in excruciating pain died peacefully and quietly. Finally, Matthew must have answered “Yes” to the angel’s question.
Most physicians and therapists know very little about death, dying, and grief. Those who have a personal experience of their own with grief understand it a bit more, but, in essence, most members of the healing professions do little more than describe the stages of death and dying and the symptoms of grief.
They do not explain what happens to those who are progressing from dying to death and beyond. They do not provide all of the tools to assuage grief. Clearly, we do not pretend to know everything about the spiritual process of dying, but experiences like Leonard’s and Matthew’s begin to provide such tools.
Grief therapy has to incorporate psychic events as well as spiritual thoughts. People who have had near death experiences, regressions to past lives and the in-between-lives state, out-of-body experiences and certain psychic phenomena dealing with life or consciousness outside of the body, usually do not grieve as deeply or as profoundly. They know something more than the rest. They know that consciousness never dies.
People who know that they are going to die often go through the process of mourning their own death. This process can begin as soon as the diagnosis of a terminal illness, such as metastatic cancer, is made. The dying person may experience feelings of denial, anger, and despair. Family and friends may also begin to grieve well before death occurs.
Grief can easily become clinical depression. The dying or grieving person feels despondent, hopeless, and beyond help. Psychological pain becomes acute and omnipresent. Sleep patterns, the ability to concentrate, appetite, and energy levels are all disrupted. Friends try to cheer the grief-stricken, to distract them from their despair, but to no avail.
Yet the grief of both patients and their families can be healed before death. As they learn about the wonderful experiences of others, such as those told in this book and elsewhere, they can begin to feel more hope. The dying and the grieving can be encouraged to communicate their experiences and insights to each other. They can talk about the possibility of being together again. They can express their love. They can more easily and more calmly accept death. A dreaded experience can be transformed into a time of honesty, sharing, love, and sometimes even humor.
Another patient of Peter’s, the matriarch of a large Italian family, was dying as a result of an acute flare-up of her leukemia. Silvia was comfortable with her approaching death, which she believed was much more imminent than Peter did.
“I’m going to die on Saturday,” Silvia announced one day.
“How do you know?” Peter asked.
“I just know,” she answered.
When Peter entered Silvia’s hospital room that Saturday morning, the whole family was crowded within. It seemed to Peter as though a scene from a play was being reenacted. A priest was present, and last rites were being administered.
At some point in the drama, the priest said, “And now there will be a message from God.”
Just then, the telephone rang.
It wasn’t God.
Everybody laughed, and the tension was broken.
Later that day, Silvia had a vivid out-of-body experience, being drawn to a beautiful, warm, and comforting light. She further described the light to Peter as three-dimensional and inviting. Perhaps there was a message from God after all.
Silvia died one week later.
Peter described another of his more memorable experiences with a dying patient and the patient’s family. “There were seventeen members of a large and very close Irish family. But all of them were consumed with fear and anger as their relative’s death approached. I got involved with all seventeen, teaching them about death, how to let go with love, how to say good-bye, how to accept what was happening. The transformation and healing that went on in that family were amazing. They began to talk, to hug, and to love. It touched me deeply.”
Occurrences like these are often so compelling and extraordinary that frequently the patient is afraid that a counselor or physician who hears about the event will trivialize or dismiss this precious experience and consider the patient odd or strange. When the patient is reassured that it is safe to discuss these experiences, doctor-patient communication reaches a new level. The healing bond is strengthened. Both Peter and Barbra take the time to talk with and listen to their patients and their patients’ families. They feel a responsibility to be with their dying patients, not only to provide excellent technical medical care, but also to offer psychological support. This provides immense satisfaction to them, gives comfort to the others, and has taught them a great deal.
“I no longer get so burned out,” Peter says, “because I now know that death is a natural part of life. I still try my hardest to cure patients, but I no longer take their deaths, when inevitable, so personally or as failures.”
We are on the frontiers of a new form of helping, one in which those in the helping professions are not merely able to identify the stages of grief but are also able to communicate a more spiritual, open, and enlightened understanding of the actual death experience. Hopefully, this frontier is one in which the dying, the grieving, and the caretakers will all be able to learn and grow together.
According to a 1990 poll by the Gallup Organization affiliate, The Princeton Religious Research Center, roughly half of all Americans believe in extrasensory perception. Like the extraordinary experiences that can occur during the dying process, psychic experiences concerning a departed loved one can also induce profound changes in a person’s life and his or her attitude toward death and dying. Healing and growth can occur as these life-altering events are integrated. Profound grief and fear of death diminish, especially when the psychic experiences seem to be connected to “the other side.”
A husband and wife, both respected physicians in Miami, came to see me in order to describe an unusual phenomenon they had both witnessed. The wife’s father had recently died. About a week after his death, which had occurred in Colombia, both she and her husband saw her father’s body, glowing brightly and somewhat translucent, waving to them from their bedroom door.
Both were wide awake at this time. They walked over to touch him, but when they did, their hands went right through his body.
The father waved good-bye and suddenly vanished. There were no words.
When they later compared notes, both physicians discovered that they had seen the same physical form, the same radiant body, and the same wave good-bye.
In another incident, a highly respected professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami came to talk with me after reading Many Lives, Many Masters.
I expected this man to be polite but skeptical, but I was surprised.
“You know,” he began, “for many years I’ve secretly believed these parapsychological phenomena are real. Years ago my father had a vivid dream about his brother. His brother had been in apparent good health, yet he came to my father in a dream to say good-bye. ‘I have to leave you now,’ his brother said, ‘but I’m fine. Take care of yourself.’ When my father awakened in the morning, he knew that his brother had died.”
A phone call had soon confirmed this intuitive feeling. During the night, the brother, who had no previous history of heart disease, had died of a massive heart attack in a city five hundred miles away.
Another interesting case came to me in a letter from a Miami businesswoman:
Though it was very difficult for me to discuss this for many years, I would like to share with you my experience with the death of a loved one. During my years in graduate school I was engaged to another graduate student for two years. We broke up and two years later I was married. During this time I was working in New York City, and I learned that he had taken a job in Los Angeles. It would be several months before I would learn that he bad been killed in an automobile accident. Before I was informed through mutual friends of his untimely death, he visited me in my sleep for many weeks in a row.
Each time he would appear he was distraught, crying and confused as to where he was. He would ask me to help him; he didn’t understand this limbo he found himself in and was not sure that he was dead. I was not frightened, but I was concerned about his well-being. At this time, I was still not aware that he had been killed. After several visits to a medium/spiritual counselor, I was told that the young man in question had indeed died and remained very close to me and because of this confusion, he naturally felt safe in searching me out.
I have learned in interviewing patients and conducting past life regressions that it is not rare for those suffering a sudden and violent death to cling to the earth plane and to be confused and in a state of limbo for a while. Eventually, though, they do find their way to the wonderful light and the spiritual presence of a guide or universal love and move onward.
Several other people who have come to my office have described similar visits shortly after the physical death of a loved one. Some have even described receiving phone calls from the recently deceased, calls that have sent shivers down their spines. In my professional opinion, the descriptions above and many others that I have heard come from normal, nonhallucinating people.
It seems that a primary purpose of experiences like these is to encourage the living to heal their grief through understanding. Like my brother Peter’s patients, those who have these experiences come to understand that they will never die, that only their bodies will die. For death is inevitable. Death is how we grow, how we move from lesson to lesson, from lifetime to lifetime. We will all die, and based on what I have learned from past life regression therapy, most of us have already died many times before this lifetime.
This is good news. This means that most of us have grown significantly, have been allowed to savor new life experiences while retaining former strengths, talents, and even loves. It also means that we will continue to grow even after our deaths.
Martha was another patient who resolved her grief almost as a bonus of her past life therapy experience. Martha was a twenty-six-year-old film editor who said that she had no symptoms when she came to see me. She simply told me that she wanted to have a regression experience out of curiosity, to see “what came up.”
The simple desire to explore and to know more is a wonderful reason to try past life therapy. Those who are suffering from symptoms are not the only ones who can benefit, grow, and become more joyful through this particular method of spiritual growth.
Martha quickly slipped into the key moment flow regression pattern. First, she saw herself as a young boy watching a hanging taking place on a platform. In this key moment Martha was being teased by her older brothers, who were making her feel quite uncomfortable. Then Martha saw her home in that lifetime, and she realized that her father in that lifetime is her deceased father in the present lifetime. Later in this past life, Martha was conscripted into the military, where she remained. She married, had an uneventful life, and finally died of old age on a stone bed. During the death experience, Martha found the light above her and flew to it, speeding through space and time with other spirits, finally merging with a golden light for her life review. During the life review, Martha commented that the day on which she had seen the hanging had been a very important one for her, for on that day she had learned about the difference between good and evil and about the futility of violence, despite the fact that at the time her primary concern had been that of being teased by her brothers.
As Martha moved on to another lifetime, she saw herself as an old man dressed in what seemed to be a toga. She had a white beard and was playing music on a lyre. This was her only memory of that lifetime although she had a very clear impression that the entire lifetime had been a very happy one. In the third lifetime that Martha recalled, she was a woman with dark hair and green eyes. In this lifetime Martha had been the mother of two babies who gave her a great deal of joy.
After the session was over, we spent time integrating Martha’s experience. Martha told me how great she felt to have remembered having lived three lifetimes filled with joy and happiness. She said that the regression helped her quite a bit. As a young person still at the beginning of adult life, Martha was also relieved that she could call on her happy past lifetimes to create lasting happiness in this lifetime. This seemed more real and tangible to her, less abstract.
But Martha also told me that, to her surprise, the experience had helped her heal a longstanding, lingering feeling of grief and mourning over the death of her father four years previously. It had also helped her clarify her own understanding of death. She now knew that she had known him before, and, of course, that she herself had lived before. The possibility existed that they could meet again. Her experience had proved to her that death as a final ending does not exist. Her father might no longer be with her physically, but she felt uplifted to know that his consciousness lived on.
For Martha, resolving her grief was an unexpected bonus of this process. However, other patients specifically seek past life regression for this purpose.
Rena is a twenty-eight-year-old social policy lawyer. She was married to a prominent newspaper columnist in his thirties. Only several years after their marriage, Rena’s husband tragically discovered that he was suffering from terminal cancer. During Jim’s illness, he and Rena had many arguments about life after death and the existence of other realities. Rena had a strong belief in both, but Jim was extremely skeptical.
Trained as a journalist with superior reasoning skills, he had a professional bias for not accepting the existence of anything that he could not verify factually. Jim not only refused to consider these possibilities for himself, but he had also tried to wear down Rena’s personal faith in life after death and the immortality of the soul, which was one of her greatest comforts and supports as she began to grieve her husband’s imminent loss. As Jim’s condition deteriorated, their arguments continued. Jim appeared to become angrier and angrier, both about his condition and about Rena’s beliefs. He also seemed to become more and more fearful.
Finally, Jim was hospitalized. Both he and Rena knew his death was imminent. Right before Jim’s death, though, something astonishing happened. He calmly told Rena that he had seen an old man sitting in a chair in his room, and that the old man had told him he was there waiting to take him on his journey. He added that she had been right about this subject all along, that he had been wrong. He apologized for being so recalcitrant and hoped she would continue to explore and learn more after his death.
After he reported this news to the astonished Rena, this formerly angry, agitated, and fearful man became peaceful about his impending death.
Jim died the next day.
When Rena came to see me, she told me that she herself was very grateful to have reconciled with Jim on this important and formerly divisive matter before his death. The wonderful change that the appearance of the old man had wrought in Jim had also been healing for Rena. It had brought her confirmation of her own beliefs, and to receive confirmation in such difficult and important circumstances had been a very precious gift.
Rena’s visit to me had many reasons. She was still suffering from some grief and anxiety at her unexpected and recent loss. She needed to integrate this important death experience further, not only the grieving but also the profound growth and healing that had begun to blossom in her at the same time. And Rena’s visit to my office was also part of her fulfillment of the promise she had made to Jim that she would continue to study and explore life after death, spirituality, and the immortality of the soul.
Interestingly, Rena’s regression experience did not directly address her relationship to Jim. Instead, Rena’s past life memories seemed to give her a message about another fresh and ripe new field of learning and growth.
Rena regressed to a lifetime in which she had been a male Native American who had helped nurse and cure sick Pilgrim children in the seventeenth century. After the session, Rena recalled that as a child she had always picked school projects that had to do with the Pilgrims and she had always seemed to know a lot about them.
With the regression session completed, Rena felt that she had now experienced her own immortality firsthand. More significantly, the regression seemed to unveil heretofore unknown talents in Rena’s own past, talents that she might be able to develop once again in this lifetime.
Whether this includes health care, work with children, or a sensitivity to certain aspects of early American history remains to be seen. The subconscious, inner wisdom that led Rena to access that particular lifetime might also be giving her conscious self a message that Rena herself had helped Jim face his dying and his death.
What is certain is that this session, intended to help her resolve her grief, had, like Jim’s death itself, furthered Rena’s growth and surprised her with yet another clue to her evolving understanding of herself. It had pointed to the many new directions and experiences that might still lie ahead of her.
Jim’s and Rena’s experience is a very profound example of the potential for growth and healing that the death experience contains. Many of the dying report being visited by a guide or a wise person who is waiting for them. The alertness of the patient does not seem to be a factor. Whether the patient is alert or not, in a chemically medicated state or not, these experiences must not be dismissed as mere hallucination. If a loved one tells you of such an experience right before death, you can let go of your doubt and feel fairly confident that the experience is real.
Philip was a computer software designer who also sought the past life regression process in order to heal his grief. Philip and his wife, Eva, had lost two very young children, a girl and a boy, to a rare congenital birth defect at the ages of three and four. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Philip’s children’s story was the fact that the loss of a second child might have been prevented. After their first child, their daughter, was diagnosed, Philip and Eva had been told that the defect was not hereditary and therefore there was no reason they should not have a second, healthy child. However, this advice was inaccurate, and Philip and Eva had to suffer again the loss of a child, this time with the knowledge that the tragedy and their son’s suffering could have been avoided. Feelings of responsibility, loss, and grief were inextricably and devastatingly intertwined.
The tragedy was several years behind Philip when he came for therapy, but he was still mourning. As a computer scientist with advanced graduate degrees, Philip was highly trained to use logical, analytic reasoning, but he also had a strong Catholic background, and this orientation had made him quite comfortable with a full range of spiritual phenomena and experiences as well. Several times since the children’s deaths, Philip had visited a famous psychic who seemed to be able to communicate with his little boy and his little girl. He had grasped at this opportunity to resolve his grief, and he felt that his sessions with this medium had been helpful. But the psychic had recently died. Philip felt that now he had no chance of contact with his children, and this lack of contact had deepened his grief.
Based on the results I have observed with other patients, it seemed that a regression experience might give him a new perspective to deal with his losses.
Philip proved to be a good subject for hypnosis. He was soon in a deep and relaxed trance state, and he appeared to be having a vivid past life experience. He described being in a beautiful alpine meadow high in the mountains, surrounded by a profusion of wildflowers in full bloom. Suddenly, he saw his children, now older, approaching him. They ran to him and danced around him, laughing and singing. Then Philip’s deceased father and mother joined them, along with his maternal grandfather, to whom Philip had been especially close.
First Philip’s children, and then his parents and grandfather, came and held his hands. Philip could describe the touch of his children’s hands in his, how real the feeling was, how strong their grip, how much stronger they now were, and how much they had grown. Looking into his eyes, all of them communicated with him deeply. They told him that they loved him. They told him not to worry, that everything was fine, and that they were fine. They were very happy in this meadow and in this dimension. Joy literally sparkled from their eyes and their smiles.
Clearly, despite the vividness of the surroundings, this was not a past life experience at all. In trance, Philip seemed to have entered another dimension.
Even before we began the integration process for the session, it was obvious that Philip’s experience had been emotionally cathartic. He told me how happy he was to have had this direct experience of contact with his children. As he described the sensation of their hands holding his, he literally began to cry with joy. Philip’s experience in the meadow finally allowed him to release the guilt, grief, and helplessness that had burdened him for so many years. He gained an understanding of the immortality of the soul, and he began to anticipate a life of renewed purpose and optimism.
Since this regression session, Philip continues to feel joyful. The burden that he carried for so many years has not reappeared.
Critics may comment that reunions such as these consist of nothing more than fantasy or wish fulfillment. But fantasy and wish fulfillment do not produce the powerful healing forces that can take place as a patient reconnects with the eternal nature of the soul and experiences bonds with departed loved ones. Martha, Rena, and Philip all felt dramatically better after their trance experiences and all reported that ongoing symptoms of grief and anxiety lifted as a result.
Everyone whose story has been told in this chapter has learned that death is not absolute. Ultimately, it is this knowledge that is the great healer. The loved one is not lost. After death, a connection to that person remains.
People who have this experience or knowledge learn that death is less of an ending than a transition. It is like walking through a door into another room. Depending on the level of spiritual or psychic development or interest, communication with someone in that next room may be very clear, or intermittent, or there may be no communication at all. Nonetheless, whatever the nature of the basic connection, it can be improved as long as the grieving understand that the separation is not permanent or absolute. Like Martha and her father, they and their loved ones have probably been together before, and separated before. Yet, they were allowed to come together again. Like Philip, they learn that the consciousness of the loved one has only died in physical form.
This gives the grieving great hope for the future, hope that they will meet again. Of course, they may not meet within the same relationships or circumstances that prevailed in the current lifetime. For example, a father and daughter might meet again as friends or siblings or grandfather and grandchild. Nevertheless, souls do continue to meet again and again.
In a way, the grief of the dying is a grief over loss of self, and in that sense, the past life regression experience can also be very helpful. Those who experience it or learn of it understand that death doesn’t mean a disappearance of the self into oblivion or blackness. Patients have shown me that it simply means that, in the wisdom of the soul, the body is no longer needed. The time has come for the soul to pass out of the body and to exist in a nonphysical, spiritual state. Awareness is immortal, and so are aspects of the personality.
Often the soul returns to a new lifetime with the same talents and abilities a person exhibited in a previous lifetime. Sometimes, people even access unknown talents in the current lifetime after recalling the existence of these talents in previous lives.
There are so many different levels of the self. We are wonderful, multidimensional beings. Why must we limit ourselves mentally by restricting our definition of ourselves to the personality and body that exists in the here and now? The entire spirit is not encapsulated in the body and the conscious mind. The part of the self that exists here is, in all probability, just a fragment of the entire spirit.
No doubt the potential exists that even as Philip met his children in the meadow, another aspect of his son’s and daughter’s souls could be growing and expanding further in a new incarnation. The versatility and potential of the soul are limitless, infinite. The ideas and experiences outlined in this chapter are probably just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ability to account for the full dimensions of the soul.
The mystic Yogananda has said that life is like a long golden chain floating deep within an ocean. It can only be pulled out and examined one link at a time while the rest glistens beneath the surface, alluring and unobtainable. What we now know of death, indeed of life and the soul, is probably just one link in this golden chain. As we integrate our grief into growth, we will be able to raise more and more of this golden chain of joy and wisdom from the ocean of being and into the light.