Very gradually, my father got better. He spent three weeks in the ICU and one week more in a hospital room. We were advised that one of us should always be present, but this piece of advice didn’t seem to be equally relevant for all the members of the family, so at the end only a few of us stayed there by night. The longest period of time I was there was from one Monday at 11 a.m. to Tuesday at 6 p.m. I slept around four hours and helped my father in everything he needed. Four days later he was dismissed and could go back home, where to this day he is still slowly recovering.
Death doesn’t exist. I always say that is the greatest certainty that remembering past lives has given me, and that is one of the reasons I am infinitely grateful. Besides, I was feeling grateful for having the chance of living this experience. I have always liked to live with intensity. My present life is rather boring, so it did good to me changing the routine for some time, “working” even though I was not really working and, above all, observing with the distance and calm yoga has given me. Observing myself, my emotions, and also observing the others, as it is in these moments of crisis when we know the stuff of which each of us is made. Personally, I am very glad of my way of reacting. I only would have liked to be able to control the inner rage that contemplating the actions (or lack of them) of a family member caused in me. In that moment I forgot about compassion and forgot we must avoid judging others. In my favor, I can say I didn’t argue with any of my brothers, as I actually did at least in one occasion in one of my past lives, for similar reasons.
I have to say the hardest part has been facing my own fears, my own emotions. I know how hard it was for me to get over the loss of loved ones in other lives. In WWII that led me to suicide. Circumstances are always different, and neither the type nor the degree of grief is comparable in each situation: losing a daughter or a son is not the same as losing a father, or losing a partner… it is also different if you are the one who has to part. It also depends on the nature of the relationship with that person: if it was good or bad, if there were things left to say, unresolved issues… With my father there were none of those, so I had no worries on that side. What hurt me the most was seeing him suffering, when he was half-unconscious in the ICU and he could barely breathe after the first attempt of extubation. Half-sedated, he repeated he couldn’t stand it any longer. At that point I did think about certain things, for instance that it is better to be dead rather than to be suffering that way. Something that upsets me a lot in modern medicine is that patients, regardless their age, are treated like a child from the moment they are admitted. They put them a bracelet with a code like they do with the newly-born. They lose their intimacy. They put catheters into all the possible body orifices. And if they should relieve themselves in the spot, they just have to. I can’t understand how in the middle of the most sophisticated technology, something as simple as that hasn’t been resolved yet (maybe it is not that simple). But the worst of it all is they can’t make decisions. They are not told the whole truth. They are not asked if they want to live or die. It is taken for granted everybody wants to live, and maybe there is someone who doesn’t want to go through all of that to just prolong life a few months or a couple of years more. But doctors don’t care about that. They live with death all the time, but death is completely ignored.
My eyes would fill with tears thinking about the anguish my father must have felt, ignoring what had happened to him, or why he had to be immobilized on an ICU’s bed, why he couldn’t breathe properly… Though, if truth be told, I don’t know how much he could become aware of, as he was kept under sedation, even after the drug-induced coma (another practice that is hard for me to understand). That day I even needed support from a friend with whom I talked in the phone for an hour. She and other friends sent reiki to my father, which perhaps would explain the vision he had, as he told me several days later. He told me that while he was in the ICU, he used to close his eyes to isolate himself from the environment and try to sleep, a nearly impossible task, no matter if it was day or night. But when he opened his eyes, he would see, above and in front of him, in the room’s ceiling, a band of a sky blue color with a pair of blue eyes looking down on him, watching. When he saw them he would immediately feel comforted, thinking “If I see them, I am still alive”. When he went out of the ICU, he didn’t see them anymore.
I have commented this incident with other people and I have received various interpretations. One of them was it could have been a signal for me, to know reiki had had its effect. I don’t discard this explanation, but even if it were true, I think it is more important the effect it had in my father, who is someone, I am not going to say skeptical, but rather a believer that there is nothing after death. While he was telling me, he visibly got emotional, and I think that is because it meant a lot to him: somehow he knew he was not alone, he knew he had nothing to fear, and whatever the outcome, someone was watching him in case he needed some help.
Now my father has many questions. When you have seen death so closely, transcendental matters arise. And I am thankful I can answer a great part of them, from my personal experience and conviction, without the need to resort to false religious beliefs that only muddy human beings’ mind.