What are you dying to know? (Loss of Parents)

On my parents' anniversary, I think of them.

My Dad passed from anti-coagulant treatment for a heart attack. My mom passed from cancer metastasis. She passed relatively quickly. She suffered consciously maybe a week? My dad’s decline over a period of a year until the final blow when he fell and hit his head and bled out into the brain. Losing our parents makes us think about our own mortality. How will we exit and move through the veil? What is the experience like and how do we prepare for this transition?

Many people don’t prepare. I remember when I worked hospice there was a kind sister that took her homeless brother into her apartment in Los Angeles to die. I was the day nurse who was there to support the family and make the brother comfortable. They came to say good-bye. He was conscious and aware of their presence and kind words. That was a relatively short time. I was told not to return the next morning as he had passed during the night. I am grateful that I was there for him and his family. My friend’s sister had a stroke. She was aware—conscious and was trapped in her non-operative body for two years. That would be horrible to be in a body that you had no control over, especially for an extended period of time. All we can really do to try to have the best optimal transition is to live as healthy as we possibly can, to try to minimize the decline and ensuring malfunction for as short a period of time as we can. Most of us are not aware, educated about or understand the process of death and dying. Kubler-Ross was one of the few that looked at the emotional process of grief. Grief of loss of healthy self and change in body image. The most common statement in the geriatric population is “I can’t do what I used to do.” Well, I have news for everyone—none of us gets out of this life experience alive! It is probably good to make plans; I have paid for cremation for both myself and my brother. He wants his ashes to be spread on his favorite hiking trail, “Happy Endings”.

But even so…we can’t predict anything. Suppose we get burned up in a fire? Do we get a refund from the cremation company?

Most people don’t deal with end of life planning. My mother refused to make plans stating, “I ain’t dead yet!” I made them for her. You don’t want to be making decisions in a state of grief directly after the loss. Yet, that is what most people do. I’m sure it is a lucrative business even though a morbid one. My mom had a sense of this when a week before her death, after a trip to Disneyland, neither of us knowing she was ill, took off her wedding band and gave it to me stating, “I don’t want just anyone taking this off of me.”

It being my parents' anniversary today, I wonder what will happen to me and my siblings during the “golden years”—yeah, right, “golden!”

How will we make this transition? Will Yeshua the messiah come and we will be healed and live forever? Will med beds be available to us so we can generate back, undoing the oxidative stress and damage and reach the healthy homeostatic balance originally intended before the trauma? Will the transition be long, short, painful and suffering, filled with people, or isolated? Shakespeare, in his Julius Caesar, wrote “Cowards die many times before their death. The valiant only taste of death but once. It seems strange to me, most strange, that men should fear death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” Soon after, Julius Caesar in the play walked into the senate and was stabbed to death. A quick but most likely painful way to go. What are you dying to know? Why do they take the bodies from the biding home out the back door? Are we all going to be dancing and singing in heaven with Yeshua? Are the people that I cared for who are on the other side…the Buddists, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Atheists locked out of paradise because of their beliefs in this world did not line up with the doctrine of a specific denomination? I don’t put limitations on God. He created each and every one of us. What is the yin without the yang? If we had no resistance or opposition what would we overcome? We are all one. We somehow got fragmented and separated and isolated. We are each a piece of the puzzle, and, with one missing, the puzzle is not complete. I do not know the mind of God. I know what it is to be human and care for others. I believe very strongly that I know one thing. That is that I don’t know. I can only validate my own experiences and clearly see we are all connected.

Whoever reads this, I give you the Cohanim Blessing:

May the LORD blesses you and keeps you; May the LORD shines his face upon you and is gracious to you; May the LORD lifts up his face upon you and gives you his peace.”

Heidi Lobstein MSN, RN 2026