Crossing the Threshold

I thought I would try writing a Coming Home newsletter that’s a little more personal.

It was engaging to write from my own personal experience for this one, as opposed to the more analytical and theoretical perspective. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it too. Let me know if you do, and I can start doing more of it for these Coming Home newsletters.

To keep it related to near-death experiences, I thought I’d write about our mother’s death. Her death was a big part of why both Eliot and I decided to start the Coming Home channel, and in many ways, witnessing her journey over the threshold of death was a profound spiritual experience.

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Our mother died from cancer in April 2020. She had battled it on and off for nine years, but the final three years were hard. There were endless treatments and continuous hospitalizations. Towards the end, it became hard to live any kind of normal life.

She finally entered hospice in December 2019. She stopped all treatments and just enjoyed her life with friends and family. Spending time with her during this period was hard but also profound. She was living between worlds by the end, as her mind had begun to deteriorate. (On one walk through the garden, she turned to my dad and casually said, “What’s with all the fairy godmothers running around?”).

I remember how three days before she passed, I came over to visit. She was napping and woke up with a simple request: “Bring me my suitcase.” When we asked why, she said slowly, “Because I’m leaving.”

I knew then and there that her time had come.

She stepped outside for our usual afternoon walk around the house. Putting her arm in mine, she asked me, “So where do we go from here? What happens next?” There was an urgency in her words.

“Oh,” I responded, trying to keep her calm. “Well, we’re just going for a walk, Mom, and then we can sit outside and have something to drink.” She stopped walking, and I turned to face her. “No,” she said emphatically, with irritation even, “I mean in the bigger picture—what’s next, where do we go from here? Are we leaving, is Dad leaving?”

Then I knew she was asking about the deeper journey. She wanted to know. She needed to know.

I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Yes Mom, you are leaving,” I said, looking into her eyes. “You are going to die soon, when your body is ready. You will leave your body and take flight somewhere beautiful. But Mom, we are all here around you. Dad is here, Ana is here, and me, Eliot, and Zoe are here too. You are safe and surrounded by those you love. You can leave anytime.”

She was gazing at me, then gazing off into the distance. I repeated, “You are safe, Ma, you are loved. You can leave anytime.”

She took it in, gazing back at me, and nodded quietly.

We kept walking and talking. She had so much energy, so much to say. Her questions were direct, but they were coded in symbolic language. The language of dreams, of children, of the dying.

After two hours, when I left her sitting on the patio with Dad having a drink, as the warm spring sun slanted its rays into the early dusk across the backyard, I waved, blew her a kiss, and said I would see her soon.

Twenty minutes after I left, she tripped and took a bad fall on the patio steps. Within twenty-four hours, she had stopped talking, and soon after lost the ability to move. She rapidly transitioned into a cocoon of withdrawn silence, her soul beginning its sacred work of unwinding from the body. It took seventy-two hours, but then her soul was ready to fly.

I remember sitting with her for hours, along with my dad, my sister, and my brother. Holding her hands and whispering to her as her breathing became harder, more labored, and slower. She closed her eyes and slipped into unconsciousness. When her breathing became so labored that we began waiting for her final breath, my brother, sister, and I were holding her hands and her feet.

As her body fought to keep breathing, we knew the end was near.

Suddenly, after over twenty-four hours of unconsciousness, she opened her eyes wide and began to sit up. This startled me so badly that I jumped up and took a few steps toward the door, my heart racing. Her eyes were not just wide open but incredibly clear. We tried talking to her, but her eyes were gazing out at something beyond us—she wasn’t even seeing us. She was connecting with something that none of us could see and seemed to be reaching for it.

She squeezed our hands and took her final breath. She made the Leap, and her body fell back into the chair with one last slow exhale. Amidst the tears, we held onto her hands, stroking her arms and saying goodbye.

My sister ran outside to get our dad, who was out in his office. When she stepped back in, she asked my brother and me, “What’s with all the bells?”

We were confused. Bells? Yeah, she told us, bells and chimes. She told us to go outside.

We stepped outside, and indeed there was a chorus of bells and chimes ringing out across the backyard. It was what I can only describe as similar to loud xylophones or chimes being rung loudly, melodic and harmonious. But the sounds were coming from all over the backyard. My brother told me later he felt as if they were coming from out of the trees and plants in the garden. We had never before and never afterwards heard these kinds of sounds from the backyard, and we had spent many months there with our mother in the months before she died, as well as for weeks afterward. We had grown up in that house and had never heard anything like it before, and never did again.

I still think about that strange moment, a moment filled with anguish and loss, with grief and goodbyes but also with a radiant mystery and grace. It was as if she was parting the veil and giving us a glimpse of her welcome to the Other Side, filling our home with the bells of celebration.

In many ways, walking our mother Home was one of the greatest gifts and opportunities of our lives. I can say it was for me. It was the most extraordinary spiritual experience to witness her crossing the sacred threshold of death, for it taught me that death was no longer something to fear. It was a holy initiation into seeing death as a threshold and not an ending. And what a relief that was.

Eliot and I read many near-death experiences throughout this chapter in our lives, and it became an emergent idea to start a YouTube channel in 2022. We are so pleased that in our first year Coming Home—our channel dedicated to sharing NDE stories—has been embraced by such a wonderful community.

Thank you for joining us on the journey—to explore death and the Life that exists beyond. You all are the ones who make this journey so meaningful.

And Mom—wherever you are, I hope you’re smiling and making everyone laugh, just as you did down here. I miss you, and I love you.

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