This week thirteen years ago my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. 25 years before that, I watched him develop diabetes as he lost his business, his dream. I’ve read that more heart attacks occur on Monday mornings. The connection between being useful to others (often through work) cannot be understated. We work hard in this country for less. The past 40 years many have had to develop second and sometimes even third jobs to make those proverbial ends meet. We are working ourselves to death. To see a loved one lose or have an unfulfilled dream is painful beyond belief.
Fortunately, the last conscious in person conversation that my father and I had we talked about the difference between having a dream or a visitation. He told me that his grandparents (who reared him) had been coming to him in dreams. The spiritualist in me asked if he was waking up ready to move or was there a lingering feeling, as if their spirits were still there.
He interrupted my investigation (or cross examination) and exclaimed
“Boy, how do you know this stuff”?
“Dad, I have to ready to talk about whatever my clients ask, any so-called allegedly ‘weird’ events. Astrology just gets them in the door.”
I still remember his smile. I was grinning too because I felt like he not only heard me, he understood me, got my work/calling for the very first time.
I had been talking about the mystical way my great grandparents died on Easter nine years apart. How my great grandmother didn’t listen to me or anyone when she took down the smoke alarms. My great grandfather died in a house fire three months later. We a stubborn lot, us Cherry’s & proud of it—even in the afterlife.
Three weeks after my father’s transition, he came to me in a dream. I said ‘too soon’ and shot up in my bed. He returned seven weeks later near his birthday! For about nine months after his visit, whenever I was in a session and he would come to mind, I’d ask the client did they suffer a loss. At least 80% of the time (or lawyer speak ‘clear and convincing’ evidence) they had. I felt it was my father’s interest in my work showing up from the ancestral realm!
Presently, I feel he reminds my baby sister to reach out every time the Moon is his Sun sign of Taurus! If I could grant him one wish it would be that he lived eight months longer to see Senator Obama become President Obama. And that he had won his own campaign for Wayne County Commissioner.
On that late January day, my sister Tracy called me to tell me the sad news. I called him immediately. She and I would laugh about his two major phone habits (we were his only children who lived out of state). You had say ‘I love you’ before hanging up and ‘When are you coming home?
When he asked me his standard question (I had left Detroit 20 years earlier), I said “six weeks”. He died six weeks and three days later. When I arrived in Detroit he had already been admitted into hospice. I’d like to feel he heard me and waited for his ‘alter ego’ (one nickname from him) to see him one last time.
I hear ya, Dad! I love you