What prompted me to embark on this deep dive into myself? On May 27, 2017 my father passed away. We were incredibly close and connected. I took care of him and managed his life in every conceivable way. I paid all of his bills, I knew all of his health caretakers and doctors, I managed his medications, and I made all of the medical and financial decisions for him. I was with him in person as often as possible, and when I couldn’t be with him in person (we lived in different states), I set up a webcam so that I could help him, especially during meal times. He suffered an unfortunate aftereffect of heart valve replacement surgery, requiring him to be on a feeding tube for the remainder of his life.

The feeding tube diminished both his quality of life as well as the duration of his life, a true tragedy. He could no longer enjoy regular food and his body would frequently fluctuate between dehydration and pneumonia brought on by ingested liquids as well as food (he still ate from time-to-time despite warnings not to) accumulating in his lungs. He never felt hungry or full, therefore he needed to be reminded to “eat” which consisted of a can of liquid nutrients mixed with various ground up prescription pills he was taking twice a day for a number of reasons.

When he passed away, I was completely devastated. He was such an important part of my daily life, now there was a huge void in my heart. Single handedly I took care of all the final arrangements, as well as cleaning out his apartment. When he passed away, I cried for three days straight, I didn’t sleep, eat, or shower. I cried until I had no tears left to cry. I was absolutely lost. I couldn’t reconcile that he was just gone. I still felt his presence and yet I could no longer touch him or see him. I felt myself slip deeper into depression, so I contacted my insurance company in an effort to get some grief counseling. Up until this moment, I hadn’t lost anyone so intimately close to me, and the waves of grief were not abating. Unfortunately, my insurance company informed me that there was a three month wait to see a therapist, and with other stressors going on in my life compounding the overwhelming grief I felt, I knew I couldn’t wait for professional help, I knew if I kept going like I was, I didn’t have three months.

CONNECTION

Dad and I always had a special connection, one I was covertly aware of, but not one that I could explain. For instance, I saved his life from thousands of miles away numerous times. For seemingly no reason, I would get a feeling that something was wrong with him, which fortunately I would act upon, resulting in saving his life. Whether it was my ability to detect pneumonia from talking to him over the phone, or discovering he had fallen out of bed and was unable to call for help, to instinctively knowing how to cure a chronic case of hiccups, to feeling something was wrong with him when he had to be hospitalized abroad during a cruise in the Mediterranean, I somehow always knew and was able to help him before it was too late. 

How could I reconcile this enormous void I felt left by his absence from my life? It made no sense to me that he was here, and now he wasn’t, he was just gone, and yet I still felt connected to him. In an effort to comfort myself, I started to think about it from a scientific perspective. I reasoned that since we are all made up of energy, and since energy could neither be created nor destroyed, then he wasn’t gone, he was still with me, we are still connected.

This realization brought me incredible comfort, and it also explained how I could still feel a connection to him, despite his cremains resting in a black case on my mantle. Pondering our connection led me to think about connection to the planet as well as to others, expanding my awareness to the thought that we are all connected. This sparked a quest for me to go deeper, to explore further which then for the first time in my life, led to my spiritual awakening.

I’m not sharing a novel concept here, but for me, this was new. I was not raised in a religious home, my upbringing observed both Christianity and Judaism in terms of observing the high holidays for both religions, but not in respect to formal observance. I was raised with both and neither, it was up to me to choose. Neither of my parents had a connection to religion, they both had a negative viewpoint on it, so there was no emphasis on it, in fact, it was the opposite. Personally, I am not a proponent of organized religion because of the hypocrisy that exists in the traditional ways that religions are followed. As a woman, I am also not keen on being treated as less than a man. Seeing the prevailing moods of both hypocrisy and sexism turned me off to all aspects of religion, so I never thought to explore any of its messages. Essentially, I threw out the baby with the bath water and never thought twice about it. I didn’t know that I was missing anything.

But approaching spirituality from a scientific point of view appealed to me, and from there I was open to learning more. Having lost my dad, my desire to not be alone was also influenced by other things going on in my life too. So I was trying to make sense of not only the enormous loss I felt missing my dad, but I was also facing losing myself and I desperately wanted to understand myself. I wanted to not only feel connected and that I wasn’t alone, but I also wanted insight as to who I was inside which got me to where I was, which then led me to the next step in my journey:  energy vibration,  astrology, and tarot.