On this day in 2016, after surgery, I raised a glass of fine Oban whisky to toast and thank my father. He had died nearly nearly thirty years earlier, but he had turned up for me again, in the most vivid and helpful way, with a health advisory I acted upon.
Early that month, in the liminal space between sleep and awake, I found myself on a high rooftop with sweeping views over a great city. In a corner of the rooftop terrace, standing near the edge, I saw my father.
This was a tremendous surprise. Let me clarify. The reason for my surprise was not that my father was deceased. We had seen a lot of each other since his death. At his funeral, I felt his loving presence and his joy at being released from the confinement of an ailing body. Not long after, I was blessed by his direct intervention to make peace between family members.
Soon he was able to present himself, in dreams and visions, in a youthful new body, resembling the one he had had as a dashing young cavalry officer, the equestrian champion of the Australian Army.
Over several years, he often came to me in dreams and visions with specific guidance for the family, playing counselor and protector, As he moved through his transitions on the Other Side, he was able to share his experiences. As he remembered more about the multidimensional self and the relations between members of soul families across time and space, he was able to talk to me about our identities and connections in other life dramas. Eventually, he explained to me that he had graduated from his current life school on the Other Side and had made his choice about his next life experience. It was clear that we would no longer be able to see each other so frequently, if at all.
Hence my surprise when I saw Dad on that high rooftop. I know he has been fully engaged in life adventures in another time. I did not expect to see him again this way in my own time..
As soon as I saw him, I found myself standing in front of him, as if one or both of us had traveled without moving.
. My father pointed a finger at my upper lip, at a spot on the right side. He said, "Go to a doctor and get that checked out."
This was our entire exchange.
I acted on Dad's counsel right away. I had had a spot just above my upper lip for a couple of years that did not look like a regular mole. It had started bothering me after I cut it while shaving and it took a long time to heal. However, I tend to avoid doctors and had not mentioned it to my general practitioner.
Because of my father's intervention, I called a dermatologist when his office opened that morning. "That is something," he declared when I pointed to the spot above my lip. He did a biopsy. Wearing a Band-Aid mustache over the hole this opened in my face, I went ahead with my plan to make a personal odyssey to Yeats country in the west of Ireland. I got the results of the biopsy on the morning I caught a plane back from Dublin. The spot was what the skin doctor suspected: basal cell carcinoma.
I was scheduled to lead two weeks of trainings, and went ahead with these, allowing my students to guess about why I was sporting a Band-Aid mustache. When I met the surgeon for a consultation, he told me that the procedure would leave a scar. We agreed that I could tell people that this was the result of a close encounter with a bear.
The surgery was a complete success. It took a little while for the wound to heal and the sutures to come out and my lovely new "baby skin" to bloom but I felt absolutely fine.
Problem solved, because my dead father found a way to get my attention.
My father was a Scot by ancestry, and whisky was his preferred drink. The whisky in the glass looked like liquid sunlight.
"Thanks, Dad!" I said aloud. "Here's to life!"
Drawing by RM
