Going Home

Sitting beside my mother-in-law in her final days, I cannot ignore the quiet cruelty of dementia. It has been a slow erosion — not only of memory, but of presence. A gradual stripping away of the familiar self. The stories. The expressions. The subtle spark behind the eyes that said, I am here. It is a peculiar grief to lose someone before they have fully left — to feel the person receding while the body remains. Time no longer marches in such moments. It hovers. It breathes slower.

When someone we love stands at the shoreline of whatever comes next, our thoughts stretch past the visible. We begin to ask questions we usually postpone. What is this transition? Is it an ending, or a widening? Is it collapse, or expansion?

For some, it feels like a threat — the great unknown rising like fog. For others, there is a quiet expectancy, almost a subtle curiosity. The same doorway, yet different inner weather.

I sometimes wonder if we are each tuned to slightly different dimensional frequencies. As though life has been calibrating us all along. Some dials set toward fear of loss. Others set toward trust in continuity. Perhaps what we call death is not an abrupt severing, but a shift in bandwidth — like moving from one octave of reality to another that our current senses cannot quite register.

Is there a thinning of the veil as one approaches? A soft dissolving of density? We speak of “crossing over” as if it were a cliff’s edge, but maybe it is more like mist lifting. Less a leap, more a release.

And throughout our years — consciously or not — have we been constructing an exit platform? Not in a morbid sense, but in the quiet architecture of our inner life. The beliefs we hold. The trust we cultivate. The reconciliations we make. The forgiveness we allow. The orientation of our heart toward contraction or expansion. All of it perhaps shaping the texture of transition.

Do we resist the current, clinging to the shoreline of form? Or do we loosen our grip and let the larger tide carry us? Fighting requires tension. Surrender requires trust. One tightens the body; the other opens it.

Maybe what we name “ascension anxiety” is simply the mind realizing it cannot control the next frame. The ego prefers maps. It prefers guarantees. But the deeper self — the one beneath the narrative — may recognize something familiar. Not foreign territory, but a return to a broader field of belonging.

Is ascension something we strain toward? Or is it something we relax into?

As I sit here, watching her breathing rise and fall, I sense that whatever this passage is, it is not abrupt in the way we imagine. It feels more like a dimmer switch than a trapdoor. Gradual. Subtle. A recalibration of presence.

Perhaps the question is not what waits beyond, but how we are oriented within. Anxiety and anticipation may be two interpretations of the same threshold. One framed by resistance. The other by receptivity.

And maybe — just maybe — the transition is less about leaving and more about unveiling. Not departure, but expansion beyond the narrow bandwidth we have called “here.”

So I sit. I breathe with her. And in the quiet, I hope her apparent fear softens into something gentler — not certainty, but trust. Not answers, but a widening.