Was the Soul Departing? Episode 2

(Second of a three Part Series written by my wife Kristine MacKain, Ph.D)

I had the mandolin that belonged to my mom’s well-dressed grandfather on a shelf in my bedroom. I had watched mediums use objects owned by the deceased to elicit their presence. So I thought, why not give it a try?

Each evening, when the yellow light of the summer’s late afternoon had turned to twilight, Cedric and I lit a candle on our screened porch in northern New Mexico.

I held the mandolin in my lap, sitting on our swing, while Cedric sat in the chair next to me. We meditated silently for about 15 minutes, then I spoke out loud:

“We know you are with my mother, Helen. Please help her transition so that she is received in love and so that she can know a love she never knew in this life. We hope she can pass without pain.” Then….

“Helen keeps saying that she wants to leave. She’s ready to go home.”

Several hundred miles north of our mother’s home, on the central California coast, my sister, Karen, sat on her porch as she watched the sun set over the Santa Ynez mountains. She made a similar appeal, asking her mother’s “visitors” to help her mother make a safe transition.

A week or so before our mother died, Sandy (the caretaker) was helping her into Karen’s childhood bedroom to lie in a hospital bed that was set up so that she could sit and gaze out the window into her garden.

By this time, our mother was struggling to walk. As she approached the bedroom, our mom stopped and looked up at Sandy.

“I am not my body. This is not me”, she said.

For three-to-four years prior to her passing, our mother no longer knew she had been married or had children. She remembered nothing past 1955, the year the family moved west to California. She also no longer recognized her home.

When Karen and I visited during her birthday week in January, she did not recognize us, though when I mentioned that I was born in Chicago, she said, laughing,

“Of course. I was there for that, you know!”

The first week in August, when Karen and I sat with our mom at the kitchen table, she showed no recognition, as expected.

When I began to sing our mom’s favorite song, Moon River, she joined in to sing with me. Her voice was clear and expressive, and as is typical of people with dementia, our mom knew all the lyrics.

The week that our mother died she had an experience called “terminal” or “paradoxical lucidity”. In these instances, normal cognition returns, albeit briefly, usually in the days before death.

Hospice workers are very familiar with this phenomenon and have documented it (along with the increase in visitations from the deceased during their patients’ final weeks).

Sitting on the bed in her own bedroom, our mother looked around the room and suddenly recognized she was in her bedroom, in her home.

For the first time in years, she recalled family members by name.

Dumbfounded, Sandy listened as our mom asked,

“Where is Mac?” (our dad) and

“Where do Kris and Karen live?”

When Sandy told her that Mac had passed and where her daughters lived, Helen, looking puzzled, asked,

“Why can’t I remember this?”

By the next day, our mother had returned to her state of severe dementia. She died a couple of days later.

Sandy was with our mom when she passed shortly after midnight in late August, in her bedroom, the room where she’d slept for 67 years.

Her last few minutes were on camera and recorded. Sandy kept a copy of the recording, which we all watched several times.

As our mother passed, an orb passed quickly across her left side. The orb rested briefly, hovering over her heart, then spun into a circle and shot straight up toward the ceiling.

Then, a grayish cloud-like blob appeared behind our mother’s right shoulder, levitated in the corner for a moment, and disappeared.

Sandy walked slowly around our mother, stopping to pray at her right side, then the foot of her bed, and finally, at her left side.

Sandy had cared for our mom for years and had grown to love her. In her demented state, our mother had also expressed love for Sandy, telling her that Sandy was her “angel” and that she was deeply grateful to her for her physical support.

Shortly after our mother died, Cedric and I went into our living room in New Mexico. We texted Karen who was at her home in central California. Then we texted our dear childhood friend, Janice, in Hawaii, who joined us.

We all sat together through the night.

Cedric created a shrine on our round corner table. He placed a photo of both of our parents and another, of Karen and me as young children, along with our mother’s grandfather’s mandolin.

Together, we lit a candle.

We all suggested music, which we played during this spontaneous memorial for our mother, as we all waited for the mortuary folks to arrive.

First, I played my mother’s favorite song, Moon River.

After her body was removed, Karen played Blackbird by the Beatles:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night

Take these broken wings and learn to fly All your life

You were only waiting for this moment to arise

…. You were only waiting for this moment to be free