The Gift of Death
I've been wanting to archive on this blog space the following poem I channeled. I say channel instead of write because the process of writing these words down pen-to-paper was exactly like it.
I had just finished an illuminating session on grief and death with my previous energy healer whom I was working with (we started shortly after my parent's very sudden and unexpected passing). As I took the personal time to digest what we spoke about from that session, the opening line of this poem kept replaying in my mind. It was so insistent that I had to stop my post-session digital journalling halfway and switch to analog pen and my A4 writing notepad.
The moment I started writing by hand, the words simply flowed out on its own.
I initially published this online on February 12, 2025 via We Are Cosmic Collective, a trio partnership entity I/we tried to kickstart in 2024. It has since officially disbanded, and this piece is something I'd like to have on my personal blog (here!), without the ritual I had also written in accompaniment for that initial post. :)
The Gift of Death
The gift of death is in our remembering —
of a life once lived,
of a life to be lived,
of a life that had to be lived,
of a life that would have been lived.
The gift of death is in our remembering
of a life, or lives, that must end
for new ones to begin.
The gift of death is in our remembering —
that life is a gift,
a gift to be lived,
a gift for the living.
From our remembrance of life and death,
comes the gifts it brings:
the spectrum of our human experiences
as compost to be sorted,
as soil to be fertilised,
as seeds to be planted,
for the journey that calls us ahead
when the conditions are ripe and ready.
You can choose to answer this call,
to find your way back to your Being;
Home is where the Heart is,
the treasure you seek resides there,
waiting for you to come Home.
Ram Dass shared that
we're all walking each other back home.
Mary Oliver asked what do you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
If you, too, see the truth in that,
you'll understand that
the Gift of Death is in our living.
Memento Mori reminds us that we (will have) to die, someday.
Memento Vivere invites us to remember to live.
The Gift of Death is in our remembering —
to live a life —your life— worth dying for
because Death is just the beginning,
and the exhale into Rebirth.
I don't doodle often and the day I doodled this in less than a minute or two, was the final day I had spent together with my late parent and their human consciousness form. I had no idea what it meant that time, and only as I was preparing this post did I find this doodle again. I like to think that this is the liminal space of transition, be it metaphorically for us living humans or even for the newly departed in spirit realm. I actually noted down lots of omens throughout the year of my parent's death - they weren't 'ominous', just fairly unusual and just what it was - which on hindsight after the funeral duties were over, in private, the pieces of the puzzle came together.
I noticed this super teeny tiny green dragonfly at my parent's wake, after I had finished recounting to their newer friends who sounded like were nice people (when my parent spoke of them). This was the first time I was able to recount what transpired in the most calm and grounded energy. My parent's name in their mother tongue had the word "green". Before this, earlier in the day, I had also spotted two full sized red dragonflies around at separate locations during my walk over to the wake setup, which I immediately thought of two other family members who had already passed. Being around this area for decades, I don't recall seeing dragonflies near the buildings often, or not at all. In my culture, dragonflies in this context ties in strongly with death, transition, and the dearly departed. I truly believe that the specific details around this makes it not just mere 'coincidence', as with many things in this reality.✨