Shared Crossing Stories

I get myself ready for bed and brush my teeth a whole bit and I'm just lying there in bed. It's like, I can't sleep. I can't believe what I've just seen and felt. And the room is so quiet, and I hear, I feel a presence, it's incredible, comes up inside of me and I am going through waves of vapors and clouds, and I just have no sense of time or my body or anything,

I just go. And this is the cloud's part and here is this enormous field and it has no parameters, there are no walls, I get no sense of ending, it's just infinite and they are beings of light and they're wearing, some are in red, some are in blue, some are in yellow, some are in green, some are in orange and they're tall and they're small and they're thin and they're wide and where their faces and heads would be, it's just this beautiful light. And I see a being in front of my eyes going from one side of my vision to the other, just gently pushing the clouds aside.

And every time they would move, this being would push them back again. And then there was Maurice and he was upright, his arms stretched out, he had a white pressed shirt and dark pants. I could see his beard, his hair, his face was not quite clear but I knew it was him. And this welcoming and loving and joy. Wherever I looked, there was just this, I was welcomed, I was so joyful for him.

And then the clouds collapsed and I felt myself going back. And I was there. And I sat up and I was shaking and I was laughing and I was crying. I knew I had seen something amazing. And it was a gift for me.

I just bolted upright, just had this urgent sense, I had to get back now. And so, I threw my clothes back on, raced back over to the hospital, came in, there was no change. She was still, there was a slight change. Her breathing was getting more shallow, more and more rapid short breaths and then pauses and the patterns that a lot of dying people go through when they get close. I said, “Well, I will sit with her if you guys, my sister and brother-in-law want to take a break, because they've been with her. They said, “Yes, we would. We would like to get a bite to eat or take a walk or something.” I said, “Okay, great. You guys take off and I will be here with her.”

And so, I sat in meditation quietly and reached out to her with my mind and my heart, and we connected. I could feel her presence. I knew that she could feel mine, and I just had an outpouring of love, of gratitude for all she had done for me, for the love that she had given me throughout her life, and all that she had done to support me and be there for me. After a few minutes of just kind of being in that state of gratitude. And this sounds corny, but her life flashed before my eyes.

And the way I describe it, it was like watching a movie where you could see the entirety of her life from beginning to end, but it was watching every frame of the movie at the same moment in time. It was not continuous. It was just a vision of her life all the way through childhood, all the way through all the things she went through, coming to Arizona, her family, all that, my father, all that, in the space of an instant, a timeless moment, when I just had this flash of her entire life as if it was watching all the frames of the movie at once. And I was just in awe of that and sitting there with that, just being with her.

And when we were in that space, again, I don't know if time kind of became irrelevant, I don't know how long we were in that moment of being together and me just appreciating her and all she had done in her life. a presence, a very distinct presence of four spirit guides, four individual spirits that came to be with the two of us there. I knew they were benevolent. I had this strong feeling that they were her guides, that they were there to help her cross over and that there was some some relationship between them and her. I did not know what. I did not have any feeling about whether they were her parents or anything. I just had the feeling that they were benevolent. There were four of them, and that they had come. And what I felt from her was trepidation, a feeling of, I do not know what to do. And I said to her, psychically, "these are your guides. It is safe. I am going to be fine. Our family is going to be fine. These are your guides." And it was still for a moment.

She took one deep breath, which she had not taken in an hour or two. When she exhaled, I could just feel her spirit lift off. She exhaled and relaxed and I knew she was gone. The spirits also went with her and so I was there in the room alone. I sat with her for a few minutes just in reverence and gratitude for how easy it had been for her to let go and then called the nurse.

I crawl up on the bed next to her, my sister Ruthie is next to me, my other sisters are kneeling by the bed with my dad, and I'm feeling, I'm up on the bed and I'm feeling her pulse, and I said, no she's, she's still, her heart's still beating, she's still with us. But as I said that, I began to experience it as if, it's really hard to explain, as if I was watching it, but I was also feeling it.

I began to experience her life force, her intelligence, her spirit traveling up the Shishumna, what I know is the Shishumna, the central nerve channel of the spine. Back then I didn't have that language, and I thought well this is odd. It seems like her life force is traveling up her spine. I didn't understand that. But I also felt it from her perspective. And I saw that to her it was a tunnel. And I saw that this area was the light, right? So, there was this light for her. And I saw that it was taking a long time.

I saw that for her it was different. For us it was a few seconds. But for her it was taking its time, and she was actually doing some kind of life review. She was having an experience and then she emerged and as I said it was just a few seconds, and I felt her coming out right here at the crown of the head and going into this beautiful space of light which was in the room but way more expanded and there was a huge welcoming committee. And

I recognized immediately as she exited her body, she recognized her daddy. Now, I never met him. He died when she was young, she was four.
But I recognized their embrace. Like I knew exactly who he was. She has talked about him so many times and I felt, oh, this is her dad. And so, there was that embrace, and then there was her friend Ralphina, who I knew.

She was my best friend's mother, and she had died maybe 10 years earlier of cancer. So, there was Ralphina, and then there were all these family members, some I recognized, some I didn't. And so, she was just in the joy of this being greeted. Meanwhile we're on the bed and I'm like she's gone and we're all crying. We're all just crying and all of a sudden, she turns around and notices us and I'm experiencing this both in my body and from her perspective.

She sees that we're weeping and she sends this pulse of light, this stream of light, and as it penetrated each of us, like it was like this shock, like there was so much joy and so much love, but the tears stopped. And so one after another, we feel this pulse of joy, and we stop crying and look at each other, and we're like, did you feel that? Like she's so happy. And all of us felt it. I was the only one who actually saw.

And so, a few more moments of sort of this love flowing to us from my mom and from her welcoming committee, and then they were gone. And I experienced her just kind of flying. And then we said to each other, oh, she's gone. She's gone to be with our brothers. Our brothers were not there with us.
One of them was in jail. One of them was at the mission training center. He'd left a few days earlier for his mission.

I got a call while I was waiting tables working in Santa Fe from my cousin saying, "Mom collapsed at work today." She had been working in a spa as a massage therapist. She said, "We just found out that she has stage four colon cancer." Toward the end, at one point, you know, we talked and she said, "Are you going to want to be with me?"  I said, "Yes, I'm going to want to be with you when you're dying."
She said, "OK." We kind of had a little bit of an agreement that I would kind of be her bulldog and make sure the space stayed the way she wanted it to.

She finally said to me, "Sonia, you know, I've gotten to a point where eating is more painful than not eating, and I just want to stop eating."  I said, "You know, that's fine. You do what you feel like doing, and we'll just keep you comfortable."

I had stayed pretty much visual with her 24-7. My cousin and I would sleep on the floor next to her. And at one point, my cousin said, "Sonya, you've been up so long, why don't you just go upstairs and go to bed for a little while?" That was probably at midnight. My cousin came up around five in the morning and said, "She's passed."

So she passed without me present. When I came back down, the two of us, this is weird to talk about, but the two of us decided we wanted to make sure she was dressed in something beautiful. So my cousin asked me to go in the closet and pick out what we put her in.

We noticed the strangest thing. Her mouth started going into like a smile, which was really odd, and her body stayed warm for much longer than I expected. That  was also very strange to me. The room went from like a regular room to a cathedral. It felt huge and especially one corner of the room felt like it expanded out. The room had a certain light to it that I can't even describe. There was a really strong sense after a while that she'd walked out.

After she was taken away, there was such an empty feeling for me. I suddenly was sitting at the table with my cousin and her family and realized that my purpose there was completely gone.