I awakened from deep sleep feeling as if I’d been propelled from some vast, wide bore cannon. Released so suddenly I sat bolt upright, stunned by an understanding, yet there was absolutely no dream trailing behind the insight, no accompanying imagery or words. I was deep asleep and then I was vast awake with no transition.

My body was buzzing like a thousand bees careening through my physical passageways. The sound of the high voltage experience was crackling in my ears as if I was standing at the center of midnight’s power plant.

When a person experiences love, deep connected love, love like a bond or cord or bridge between two continents, there is no thing that can break that bond, unless we choose that it be broken, particularly death. Love, of course, can wax and wane with time and circumstance. It can fade if not nurtured. Without attention or awareness the bonds can fray.

Yet when I awoke that night I experienced an understanding that was extraordinarily specific, one that I had never heard or had not been listening to when introduced. It was very simple. Death followed by grief ties us closer to our spiritual source. In fact, the death of someone we love deeply literally heaves a part of us to the side of death, ties us to death. The bond that connects us to the one we love is not broken when they go to the other side. Staying connected to that person we are now connected to the other side. Death becomes familiar, intimate. Death is where our love lives.

But the insight or understanding continued. It was still simple, but less easy to explain.

There is no death.

When a loved one passes, and we become bonded to death though the cord that connects us, we become attached to the infinite. This is the same infinite that is ever-present, the god that accompanies us right now. Becoming connected to death we are actually connected to life and the source of life. That is where our loved one has journeyed to. They have actually entered the unfiltered infinite, and that cable still attached to us carries back into our bodies and ours selves the infinite crackling energy of life and its always now beginning.

Death literally brings life. Grief cleans our mind and bodies of the distractions of the everyday. Grief allows us to let go of judgments and it’s accompanying emotions. Judgment frays the cord between ourselves and the ones we love skewing the flow of energies with thoughts of blame or responsibility.

As I sat there in bed, the sounds and feelings of death’s high voltage animating every muscle, every cell, I could feel my mother’s hidden grief. I could feel the grief she’d chosen in her life not to experience. My mother’s grief was a palpable living thing, a thing that at that moment was connecting me to the source. Somehow, in sleep, I’d picked up the buzzing cable abandoned by my Mom when her Dad killed himself not long before I was born. I’d picked up, in sleep, her opportunity to be whole. The wound, where she’d detached the cord over 40 years before, was how I’d always knew my mother. I knew her by the loss, by her flat affect, by her reflexive recoiling from intimacy. Instead of knowing her through the music, that deep throated bumble bee buzz of the gods, the melody that accompanies our connection to the other side, I knew my mother by the silence. And so my life was often characterized by fury and self loathing. I’d grown up feeling alone.

I’d awoke from dream after I’d picked up my mother’s abandoned opportunity to be tied to the source of all love, all life, all death. I don’t believe she realizes what’s occurred. But I’m aware that she’s now confused and delighted when we spend time together. In the past, it was never easy for us to be around each other. The difference is that now I’m aware that I love her, and I can express it. There seems few reasons to still cling to judgment. I’ve stopped trying to cut the bond that binds us.