How she made death a birthday party in the room next door

Artist, dream teacher and hospice volunteer Valerie McCarney helps the dying to prepare for the journey into the next life by remembering and sharing their dreams. I asked her to write a guest blog about her moving experience of helping an elderly woman in hospice care to follow the road of dreams to a birthday celebration in a "room next door".

Guest blog by Valerie McCarney

As a hospice volunteer, I have been blessed to be there when people transition from this world to the next.

     Such is the case of a wonderful woman who died last week. I will call her B.  She was 94 and sharp as a tack with a great sense of humor and a love of laughter. We had the most wonderful conversations over these past months.

     Her daughter usually went south for the winter but did not want to go this year because her mom was so sick. But B would not let her stay. I will be fine, she said. I have plenty of other people caring for me. Her daughter called her every day. B was happy that her daughter was off having fun and living her life.

     Her daughter came back two weeks ago. I thought when I went to see B, she would be ecstatic because her daughter was home. That was not the case. She was very anxious. I asked her why and she said, "I prayed every day that I would not die until she came home. Now she is home and I am going to die. I lie in bed and wait for my heart to stop." So we talked and she eventually calmed down. Then she started to talk of the dreams.

     She was having many dreams that frightened her.  I told her about others who have had similar dreams and how they were gifts. I told B, "The people that love you are here and will help you make the journey."
     The hospice chaplain visited her and reconfirmed how common these dreams were for people. I knew her faith was strong because of the worn Bible next to her bed.  I think the chaplain’s reconfirmation of the importance of these dreams helped her open up. She said, "I pray for contentment to meet what is happening without fear."

     Over the last two weeks of her life, we talked about her dreams. She told me of being in rooms with people she had known in may periods of her life. She was surprised to find that now they were all in the same room. She walked around looking at them. She noticed they were all surrounded by shimmering light.
    She saw her husband and her parents. Their appearance had changed. They all looked to be the same age, and they all looked good. She was really enjoying her dreams. She started to say "I think dying must be like going into another room.  You are still there, only people can’t see you!" Another time she said, "Maybe death  is like a boat going over the horizon."

   She said that sometimes in dreams she was holding a rope and knew that when she dropped it she would die. I suggested that she might fly up like a balloon when she let go. She liked that. 

     Then one day she saw someone very special. He was floating and looked like a tiny angel without wings. It was her firstborn son, who only lived four hours.  This dream helped her the most. She had never forgotten him and remembered his birthday every year. Had he lived, he would have been 72 on May 9.  She announced, "I think this year I will celebrate his birthday with him for the first time."
    She did exactly what she said she would do.,  B died on May 9.

    I think when she opened the door to her dreams and allowed herself to step in all her fears left. She found peace and contentment.

    I came home filled with thoughts of her and all we talked about over the past weeks. I went directly to my studio to work out my own grief.  I do a technique I call Expressive art, where I pick two colors, put on music and with each hand scribble on a huge sheet of paper hung on a wall.  I scribble with my eyes closed until it feels right to stop. Then as a child would do looking at the clouds, I pick out the images I see.
    B’s face was right there so I darkened those lines, a man in a boat, the sea, a Cheshire cat with a fish in its mouth, her son swimming towards her and a bird.  From our conversations I knew each image was there because we had talked of them. I used metallic paint for the shimmering light she described.

    I sat back after I was finished and could almost see the boatman bringing her home. I wrote this poem.

You knew this would happen once she came home

You waited for her even though the dream people were reaching out

Nervously, you read “ the bird is not anxious, he trusts in the lord”

Listening for your heart to stop

You pray for contentment.

Peace arrives in the hands of your infant son

As your body like a clock winds down

You step onto the boat

The boat that is waiting to take you home.

Text and art (c) Valerie McCarney

Make dreaming together part of the fabric of family life

Dream teacher Valerie McCarney has shared a dream that inspires us to make dreaming together part of the fabric of family life - within both our biological families, our communities of friends, and our intentional families. In the dream, she met a remarkable guide after she decided to dream on the mysterious tragedy of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370 that has moved so many of us over all the weeks the families of the passengers have been hoping and praying for some definitive word.
    Here is Valerie's narrative:

I was watching tv and the Smithsonian station had a documentary on the missing Malaysian Airline flight. I thought I am not taking all that sadness to sleep with me and turned it off. Then I thought, I will set an intention to see if I can find out where the airline has gone. I dreamed:

Surrounded by the fabric of life,  she speaks

I am in a bazaar some place. I am in an area filled with colorful fabrics hanging all over . They are beautiful and I am walking through looking and touching some. I come to one area and there is a woman standing there. I smile at her and she watches me touch the fabrics on her table. She is Asian, maybe Malaysian. She speaks to me.
   She says, "I want to tell you that you need to teach dreaming to families. Teach them to share their dreams with each other, the simple dreams , the silly dreams , the big dreams. They need to get comfortable doing this. So when there is trouble they can help each other through the dreaming process. If the people on the Malaysian airlines flight did this, by now some of their relatives would have shown up in their dreams . They would have told them where they are and what happened. It would give the families much comfort . In turn they could share the information with the other families who have lost a loved one."
    She said this quickly in a matter of fact way without changing the expression on her face. I just listened. When she was done speaking she turned and started to fold fabric. 

    I started to leave and she said, "Oh wait a minute, tell Hillary Clinton to be careful when speaking to large crowds."

I awoke surprised that I got so much good information.The last bit about Hillary Clinton mystified me. What was that about?

    My first action was to honor the dream by painting the woman among all those fabrics.

    The following week, I heard that Mrs. Clinton was speaking to a crowd and got a shoe thrown at her. I paid attention. This seemed like confirmation that the woman in my dream knows what she is talking about. I took the incident as a strong signal to so what I was being advised to do, where I am able to make a difference.
    My next action will be to get my own family dreaming together on May 10th, the World Day of Active Dreaming. I will be with my extended family on vacation that day.Many members of my family, especially but not only the women, are vivid dreamers who are no shy about sharing what they dream.
     I will set up a group intention for us to meet some place we all know and visit with family members that have passed on . I am very familiar with doing this but most of my family is not . We will set the intention at the beginning of the week and watch our dreams.  Then on May 10th we will see what we have.  Since some of the other dreamers will not be there with us I will email them and ask them to see what dreams come up during that time as well.

    By doing this I believe I will be honoring the wisdom of the dream guide, weaving an even stronger family fabric, and maybe seeing what is going on behind the veils of ordinary understanding.

Art (c) Valerie McCarney