Goodbye

In an earlier diary, I wrote, “The goddaughter of our dying friend is kind of a stray cat.” That reminded me of how Coe (our Siamese cat) visited me in the hospital (despite the fact that he was dead at the time). Whitley recently found himself wondering about the afterlife and he had a dream about Coe, so that cat has become a sort of intermediary for us between the worlds. The Egyptians (who were obsessed with the afterlife) used to worship and mummify cats, so maybe they knew something we’ve forgotten.

Whitley often sees ghosts. A friend of ours was dying in a hospital in New York when Whitley visited the Monroe Institute in Virginia over 20 years ago, shortly after his Communion experience, and he saw him there. He thought it was odd, since he could only see this man from the waist up. He later learned that he was scooting back and forth across his hospital bed on his knees, during the time when Whitley saw him. Another time, Whitley saw a recently deceased friend at his daughter’s coronation.

We learned that we had been in a meeting when our friend died. I was sitting on a couch behind Whitley, and I was puzzled when I saw him raise his hand in a kind of wave. We found out that our friend had died at that moment, and Whitley told me he waved because he heard her call out, “Whitley, Whitley!” as she traveled to wherever she was going next. He said she sounded awed and excited.

Our friend Dora was a spiritual teacher in the very best way, and her impact on the lives of others was revealed by the extraordinary group of people who gathered around her during the last weeks of her life. Whitley first met her when she joined a Gurdjieff group he was teaching in New York City. He was feeling pretty self important, sitting in front of the group for a change, as a “leader,” when he heard this loud clicking and clacking noise, and a young woman entered the room on roller skates. The young woman on skates was Dora. It was a kind of “Zen shock” that brought him back down to reality immediately.

I talked to a friend of mine who has become another “surrogate Mom” to our goddaughter, since they were living in the same city. She had never met the mother (our friend) and didn?t know anything about her. When I spoke to her on the phone the day after our friend’s death, she said, “I have a headache?I need a massage.” I’ve never heard her mention getting a massage before, but this really amused me, because what she didn’t know was that our friend had been an EXCELLENT masseuse. It was an if our friend was saying to her, “Take care of yourself, so you’ll be able to take care of my daughter for me.”

Her daughter says that her last words were “Bonnie chased the horse, the horse chased Bonnie, poor Bonnie.” Bonnie was her dog. Maybe she had gone back to the freedom of her childhood days. Goodbye, Dora. We’ll be sure to take care of our newly- adopted “stray kitten” for you. Good luck on your next great adventure!

NOTE: This Diary entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.