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I Will See You Again

A Mother's Story and Sacred Journey After Finding Her Son's Lifeless Body

Balboa Press

CHAPTER 1

Transformation

I refer to the internal change that I underwent over the past four years as a transformation. We all have an idea of what transformation means; a change or process of changing from one way of being into another. Transformation implies that the end result will be a positive one. Just as the butterfly begins life as an egg, then a chrysalis and emerges into this breathtakingly beautiful creature, its' final stage having no resemblance with the creature it began life as.

During the time that the butterfly is a chrysalis it appears from the outside that nothing is going on, but there is great change taking place from within. It took me a while to realize that I too, had great changes that were taking place within. It was only when I could look back and see old beliefs and patterns that were no longer a part of my world that I realized my change from within. As it was happening I was completely unaware that my transformation was under way.

I was well into learning about spirit, about myself before I would even know that I had changed from one way of being into another. At no time was I afraid or overwhelmed in any kind of way while going deeper and deeper into my understanding of spirit, of myself. When I speak of Spirit, the Universe or the unseen world, I am referring to our creator, Mother/Father God, The All That Is, the Divine or those on the other side. There are many names which refer to the same thing and I do not think that it matters the name that we choose to call our Beloved. I believe that our creator has many helpers in the unseen world who are given the task of assisting those who may have asked, those that are ready to awaken as part of their journey in this life. My journey and any journey of awakening to spirit is always filled with love and respect; love of the being that we are at the present moment and for the being we are becoming.

Spirit is truth to me, in the deepest sense of the word. When discovering one's truth and working with spirit; there is never any judgment, condemnation, shame, or guilt that is used to manipulate one in any way whatsoever. Spirit is our creator's way of taking us by the hand and leading us gently and lovingly. Our divine awareness is always of the heart. When I work with spirit, I am working with God, the Divine white light from which we came.

I am writing to you about what was a very difficult time in my life and the events that changed my views of self, of life as I knew it and death as I perceived it. I am writing about experiences that are very personal and dear to my heart, the death of my youngest child, the events leading up to his death and the events that happened after his death. I am describing my feelings with you as I remember them at the time of his passing. I am sharing with you, my feelings of deep hurt and profound loss that I felt when I found my son's body. Not only was I having all of these feelings over perceiving his death as a tragic loss, I was also experiencing the shock of finding my son's dead body. You will read about the chain of events that changed my life and the life of my family forever. This was the most difficult period in my life, but as I would learn, it also turned into one of the most wonderful and life altering experiences of my life as I allowed Spirit to lead me onto my sacred journey. Many of us will find ourselves in these very circumstances, with the worst of times and the best of times both happening congruently. It is up to us how we are going to juggle the two extremes and find balance in our life. What may seem like one of the darkest of times may lead you into one of the brightest times of your life.

I could never have imagined the depth of feelings and emotions I experienced, having one of my children to pass from this earth before me. I just knew how much I loved my two sons and wanted to protect them from any perceived danger. It was scary for me just to think that something could happen to hurt them, to take them from me, their death was not anything that I ever allowed myself to imagine. For parents and grandparents, any of us who have children in our lives, they feel like they are our world. We love, hold, and cling to them for fear of losing them; for seemingly they are the most precious beings that we have. I call them our most precious commodity on earth, our shining jewels, but what we forget is that, we adults, were and are those same precious jewels in a grown up body. We forget our own inner beauty and worth. We forget that inner child still lives within our body waiting to be recognized.

To imagine losing one of my sons, was just something so horrific, that I could not even phantom such a loss. To lose a child can be one of life's most difficult challenges to recover from. To lose any of our loved ones can be very traumatic for us. We have been brought up to see death as the end of a life, something awful and sad. I want you to know that it does not have to feel this way. We are all going to have death to be a part of our lives. There is no need to fear death, for now, it is how we take our exit from this earth, we return from where we came.

As parents, most of us have expectations of seeing our children grown, becoming adults, settling down, getting married and maybe having children of their own. As parents, we may often expect to pass from this earth before our children. All of these hopes and dreams seem to make the loss of a child even more difficult, as the pain can be indescribable, and at times unbearable. I am writing about the events that took place in my life and the perspective I had at the time of my son's passing, how these perspectives have changed and how I have changed.

I am forever grateful for the Divine Intervention of Spirit and the unseen world. I am also grateful for all of the loving family and friends that were put onto my path in perfect timing, bringing messages from beyond, messages I would learn to allow, interpret and appreciate. I have learned to incorporate these beautiful gifts of the universe into my life, allowing them to prepare, guide and assist me along my path.

I hope that in writing to you about losing my child that I will be able to assist those of you who have lost someone to death move through your grief. I wish to help you find ways to express your grief in your own personal way and to assure you that we all grieve in our own way, in our own time. Even more than moving beyond the grief of death I want to assist you in seeing death from a different and broader perspective.

Although the death of my youngest son was the situation I found myself drowning in, there are many life situations that can happen that may leave us feeling injured, hurt, victimized, overwhelmed, guilty, depressed or angry. This is just a few of the negative emotions that we may have that can send us into a downward spiral from which it may seem or feel impossible to return from.

I will be presenting you with some of the tools and habits that will allow you to move past all of the negative events, memories and emotions that you think may have you trapped. If you are ready, we will be working with some exercises later on that will assist you to move on with your life in a positive way. Please know that we are all capable of finding peace, happiness and joy in our lives, although it may feel like an elusive desire for some of you at this time in your life. I will ask you to keep an open mind and read the book through to the end and be prepared to do a little work on yourself. You are so worth it. You can do it. I am here for you. I understand and feel your pain.

We are going to learn how to work through, allow, and let go of the thoughts, feelings and emotions that bring us down. When we deny the emotions that we feel, we are in effect denying a part of ourselves to be expressed, this is what sets us up for illness and eventually, disease. It is in experiencing our emotions as they occur, even as painful as they may feel at the time, that we are allowing ourselves to be who we are, to experience and feel, thus allowing ourselves to heal. Feel the emotions and let them go. Let them go! They will be replaced by other emotions.

As I share my journey of spirit with you throughout the many stages of my life, I hope you will see how spirit ever gently plays in and out of our lives. I am also going to introduce you to a most beautiful and wonderful place, I call Serenity Farm Retreat, my childhood home. I am going to present you with the passing of my mother, my youngest son and while I was sharing my journey with you, most recently, the passing of my father. I was at very different places about my perspectives of life, death and dying when each of my loved ones passed. It was my thoughts and how I perceived death with each passing that played such a huge role in my understanding and allowance of their death and the perception of grief I experienced.

At the time of Casey's passing I had just begun going deeper into my spiritual journey, into deeper knowing and understanding of the unseen world. Again, I am forever grateful for the divine intervention that assisted me to eventually see, allow and accept my son's passing with an understanding that is eternal. I feel that if I had not been at such a place in my enfoldment that I would have slit my wrists from the grief and agony that I would have felt and clung to, without the intervention of higher guidance.

After Casey's death, I was aware that I was never alone; the unseen world of spirit was always with me when I needed them. Almost every time I shut my eyes I saw a beautiful magenta color and was aware that I was being held in love. I was not alone. Although I did not understand all that was happening with me at the time, I knew that it was something most wonderful. I am sharing my story in hopes that it may inspire, heal and motivate those that it touches. Loving assistance is always present from the other side, in the unseen world of spirit. I like to call them God's assistants.

I am telling you my personal story and presenting you with some of the tools that will assist you in gaining control of your life through being empowered. Sit back, relax, and get ready to peel back the layers of entrapment. We are much like the onion which has many layers, each one revealing another part of its self. We are going to go deeper and deeper into our center, the spiritual heart where we will find our truest self. When we allow ourselves to just be and stop the judgment, the expectations of the people in our lives, of life, we are free to just be and experience life as it comes. We can use our "paddles", our knowing, to navigate our life, instead of being adrift in the sea of life. We can begin to appreciate all the small and beautiful moments life offers us.

It is important that you know within your whole being that you can be happy, and that YOU deserve peace, happiness and joy in your life. Joy is our natural state as beings of light. I want you to know that you are so much more than you think you are. You are capable, loveable and powerful, yes powerful! The ball will be in your court, it is your life and your decision on how you choose to use these tools. Life goes on. Our choices in life always effect our lives and also have a ripple effect to all of those around us and to the vibration of the whole universe. Everything is alive and part of the ALL THAT IS.

I am a counselor by choice, but I cannot help someone who does not want to help themselves, nor can you. We can only extend our hand, while offering our compassion and understanding. We can only listen with an open heart and forego our judgment. We can recognize that all of us are on a chosen path and honor that path while trying to see the big picture, not the finite picture our personality self may want us to see. Acceptance of one another is something we all want. Come take my hand and let us walk together.

CHAPTER 2

My Mother, Anne

I, just as you, carry the memories of my mother in my heart and my mind, but I just as you, also carry her memories in my blood, my very cells, my DNA, not only do I carry my mother's memories, but I also carry the memories of my families heritage. We all carry our heritage within our bodily vessel. It is not just our physical family heritage we carry, but also our soul's other aspects from the many, many sojourns in and out of life. We have been going in and out of life from our very existence. The soul is eternal. We see ourselves as only this personality, as separate, but there is so much more to each and every one of us. There are many ways of living, of being.

I wish to tell you the story of my mother, her passing and how I perceived her death. I had not yet gone into the depth of my journey of spirit on which I found myself with the passing of my youngest son. I perceived her death quite differently. I want to share with you how my thoughts, our thoughts, create our reactions in life.

A little over thirteen years ago, in January of 2000, I lost my mother to Alzheimer's disease. She had been a victim to this disease for several years. She passed at the age of eighty five and up until a few years before Alzheimer's and dementia came on, she lived a very active life.

When my mother was seven years old her father was in a serious accident at the tanning factory where he worked. He was brought home to die. A doctor was summoned and he came to the house. Her father passed within three days, leaving her mother and the other seven children in extreme poverty. Life was already a difficult existence, with the father working. Food was scarce and the quality of life was difficult, at best. His death was a hard financial blow for the entire family. It was 1922, the whole country was in a state of rapid decline and poverty was a way of life for many. To help ease the hardship and financial burden on my grandmother, my mother was sent to live with her older sister Clementine, nine years her senior. Clementine was already out of the house and married. Whatever her sister, Clemmy told her to do, she did; clean, cook, milk the cow, rake the yard, wash clothes. All of the younger kids were afraid of Clementine. She inflicted fear into their minds; therefore this fear was also a part of their lives. She was like a mean, arrogant dictator to the kids. Clementine always told my mother how ugly she was, that her hair was piss burnt brown. She was always belittling her in any way that she could while bossing her around. It wasn't just my mother she teased and tormented, she belittled all of her younger siblings. She was obviously a very angry person and took it out on her brothers and sisters. She had no children of her own.

We went to visit my Aunt Clemmy on many occasions when I was a child. She happened to live beside my grandmother. She was a force to be reckoned with. I found myself being very afraid of her. My most embedded memory of her was when I was around seven years old. We had gone to her house for a family gathering. That day she took me with her to the rabbit hutches. I was excited to see all of her rabbits. There was cage after cage. She told me how to tell the difference between a boy rabbit and a girl rabbit. She explained that the boys have what looks like the end of a sharp pencil between their legs. She picked up one of the younger rabbits, as she held the small little furry creature in her arms she showed me he was a male. Before I knew it, she had twisted his little neck, ending his life before my eyes. She said he was our main course for dinner that day. I had a lump in my throat that kept me from swallowing right after that. I thought she loved the little critters like I did. It turned out that she and I had different concepts about the rabbits.

Just like her older sister, at the age of fourteen my mother became a married woman. She delivered her first child by the age of fifteen. Mama told me this baby had brought her so much joy, a joy I sensed she needed in her life. She said he was a happy baby and was always smiling. I would not know the whole story of her marriage until I was grown. Mother told me on her wedding day, very much to her surprise, her new mother-in-law said she was glad that her son was getting married and would be hitting someone else. Mama said soon after they were married he started hitting her! She said he would get very angry and just blow up, and take it out on her. She began working in a factory soon after she was married. As I grew up and put the pieces together I knew that he was an alcoholic and that he had beaten her and had run around on her with other women. She was pregnant with the fourth baby when he had beaten her so badly that she lost this baby. He was a boy. It was ten years later that my brother Jerry was born.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from I Will See You Again by Sherri Bridges Fox. Copyright © 2013 Sherri Bridges Fox. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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