Last year I met a beautiful woman who had just lost her 21 year old daughter. We became friends and over the year, we had many occasions to talk and to discuss spiritual issues around life, death, and the meaning of it all.

She recently asked another friend and me to help her family commemorate the passing of her daughter and together to plan a memorial service. I had never met the young lady, but I immediately knew that she was a very special person who had a deep and lasting impression on everyone who met her.

As we discussed the particulars of the service, I felt strongly that the service should include an aspect that celebrated not only the passing of a life, but also the continuity of that life. My feelings were based on how I view the meaning of life and death and how our grief is helped most not by simply commemorating the passing of the life, but also celebrating the continuity of life, the One Life in all. My friend agreed and wanted to have both celebrations: prayers for the departed at the grave site, and prayers of celebration in her home highlighted by the planting of a special garden by her family and friends.

I reflected, what would I read on this day? How would I articulate the passing and the continuity? I had chosen some passages from Other Worlds and they would be very appropriate and beautiful. I also wanted to have a deeper appreciation of what it means to be born with physical difficulties that seem insurmountable to others and how I would articulate this to friends and people whom I had never met and who also have differing religious beliefs and customs.

I thought of this lovely young lady: she suffered her entire life from a degenerating disease of the spine. She was in continuous pain and multiple surgeries. She was caught in this body prison, seemingly impenetrable and confining. She was loved and cared for. She was loving and kind. Everyone who met her said how much she taught them about love and about kindness. Her mother and family and friends see her as an angel who brought depth and love and understanding to their lives.

So, I wondered, how and why does this happen to incarnating souls?

I have no simple explanations nor do I believe in simple explanations. We simply do not know why, although we can speculate and even seem to make “educated” guesses. But we can never be sure; we do not have what is called “continuity of consciousness,” and, until we do so, we will only be guessing.

We are all confined and in a prison of sorts; this is what I began to realize. How ignorant we are about life and how confused we seem. Whether we are perfectly healthy physically or have challenges in our physical, emotional, or mental bodies, we are in some way imprisoned and limited. Form, material existence is in itself a prison. Our emotional and mental and spiritual limitations are also a sort of prison. How much there is to understand about life and how little we know! Unless we have direct experience, we must rely on logic, reasoning, religious and spiritual traditions and, if possible, our own inherent and remembered memories of various non-material experiences. Our religious and spiritual beliefs and practices are for the most part designed to help us understand, appreciate, or even fear the non-material aspects of life. Whatever we believe in, it is dismal when compared to the vastness of the non-material world.

Gita

Coming up: Part 2 of 3, “From Pain to Understanding”

- For more information about memorial services for the departed, see the book Other Worlds by Torkom Saraydarian.