My younger brother set his fingers to his guitar and started singing. Not good to die alone, except we all do in a way.

My mother died yesterday.  Crossed over after years of living in a home, where they took care of her body, while her mind went spirit-walking.  She was 92.

Her final illness had a lot of pain.  We'd thought she had permanently checked out, but my younger brother went to her at the hopsice Monday and Tuesday, and found her moaning in her bed.  The nurses couldn't rouse her, but she would twist and moan, until...

My younger brother set his fingers to his guitar and started singing.

Not good to die alone, except we all do in a way.  Soon as the songs came, the moaning stopped, the twisting ended.  Her body would relax and her face too.

After making up songs about her husband and her life and her children (3) and her grandchildren (10) and her great grandchildren (6), he'd stop and just hold her hand.

He sang to her and touched her Tuesday night from about 6 to 8 pm and then left to be home with his family.  She crossed over an hour and a half later.

My older brother crawled back in the bottle when she went in the hospital, even though he lived two blocks away.  He's way down the vertical axis now.  I live 1200 miles away and just wrote e-mail stories of her last days to the spread out family, as told to me by my younger brother on the phone - both us working the horizontal axis with stories.

Steiner mostly taught us about the upper aspects of the vertical axis of the Cross.  The lower aspects are just as real, and equally important.  Got to travel up and down, joy and sorrow, dancing and crying.  We cry for joy sometimes, and dance in sorrow too.  Up and down, up and down.

Feelings are the soul-soil in which thought seeds are laid by the life forces of the will.  These feelings have darkness in them, just like the Earth.  What flowering pictures do we grow in this garden of the mind?

Life - the biography - takes us up and down the vertical axis of the Cross.  Also left and right on the horizontal.  If we are lucky, we are not too alone, and have the companionship of the horizontal axis.  Both axis can be joined and surrounded by a circle - a community.  In this time of individualism, many of us have the harder time fitting into a community.  Even so, we still go up and down, up and down.

Got to feel, not just think.  Can't help it, but I love both my brothers, and I'm happy my mom is done with the Earth for a time.

"The world will drag on you. Use his love to pull you through. Find the mission of YOUR LIFE and start to BE"  Moody Blues song: One Step into the Light. http://www.music-lyrics-chord.com/Moody_Blues/127314-One_Step_Into_The_Light.html

joel