Your Family Waits for You

Your Family Waits for you on the Other side. It was never brought home to me more clearly than during my last trip to England and Scotland. One of my relatives that I call Rob Henderson from about the 1200s told me his story over Greenland on my way back home to the United States from Heathrow Airport in London. I faithfully recounted his story as he gave it to me and I found myself crying there on the plane (a United Boeing 777) as the full import of this story he told me sank in. This (a series of Greats and then Grandfather) of mine shared his story with me as a gift to a Great Grandson. He is still in a Heaven realm since the 1200s by his own choice. What this all means to me is that our relatives wait for us on the other side.

Here is his life story: The Spirit of Rob Henderson

I have had a hard time of it starting with when my Grandmother who raised me died in 1978. I was driving my 1976 Blue Toyota truck (an SR5) as fast as I could from California to Seattle where my Grandmother lay dying so I could see her once more before she passed away. Because she was very elderly she had moved from California where she had helped raised me when she had lived with my parents and I from my birth to age 21. When I was 22 she moved to Seattle to live with my two aunts (my mother's sisters) so I didn't see her from 1970 until this day I was driving to see her one last time. In 1978 I was 30 years old and was a single father with a 4 year old son that I was raising by myself. As I approached about 5 hours from Seattle and Kent where she was I started to cry and felt sort of like I was having a nervous breakdown. It was the most bittersweet and powerful experience thus far in my life. However, when I reached Seattle I found that my experience was perfectly timed with my Grandmother's passing 5 hours before we arrived. My experience then of my grandmother's passing was of the feelings of extreme regret that she wasn't going to see me and my mother before she passed at age 90 (She was born in 1888) tempered with her joy of being released from her physical form because her life had not been an easy one, starting with leaving grade school because of dyslexia at age 8 and then raising her 11 brothers and sisters until marrying and raising her 3 girls and then raising me from birth. After Grandpa left her and my Mom when Mom was 18 my mother financially supported her mother by working making pocketbooks and then working for Bell Telephone company until she met and married my Dad at age 27. Grandma (Nana we called her) never worked outside the home her whole life.

No one ever told me why my son was born dyslexic nor did I know until he was almost ready for college. Even my mother didn't tell me about her dyslexia or her mother's until she was in her mid 80s. It was an impossible topic before the 1960s or 1970s here in the U.S. because of the stigma attached to it in general society. Though I am not dyslexic two of my 3 children are. So, even though they are very brilliant with very high IQs they are still dealing with being different thinkers to some degree or another. What I always tell them is: Einstein was dyslexic too. So, always remember that. I found being raised by two dyslexic women and my very brilliant father that I could think either way so this is quite an advantage I find. I find dyslexics tend to be extremely intuitive whereas brilliant people tend to be able to be extremely pragmatic and logical and easily cut through the crap of life to what is important. So I find I have the best of both worlds.

The next person waiting for me is my father that I lost in 1985 when I was but 37 years old. Losing my father destroyed my life. This isn't his fault. It's just "How do you replace someone larger than life" "How do you replace a spiritual John Wayne in your life?" The answer is: "You can't" so everything about my life then changed. I knew my marriage wasn't for life first of all so we divorced within 9 years of his passing. My mother became like a ship without a rudder and moved and moved and moved from one place to another to another. (Luckily my father had left her well provided for so she could do this). She lasted until 2008. First, my wife's father passed away and a few months later while my wife and I were taking his ashes on the plane to be buried in St. Louis with his parents I got a call while we were changing planes at Los Angeles International airport that my mother had died. So all I could do in public was walk in shock over to the window and watch the planes while the tears rolled down my cheeks from my loss. Though she died from senile dementia and had been in a coma for a month or more the loss was still as great as if she had been well and just keeled over. So I told the funeral home to put her body on ice until I returned from burying my wife's father. Then I walked into the crematorium and kissed my now popsicle mother on the forehead and pushed her body into the furnace and then walked outside to watch her smoke travel up the 1 foot diameter chimney into the air. I thought to myself how much my mother would have liked this going out into the air like that. I put her ashes in a blue velvet case on my grand piano for a year until my son could process her death and then we rented a yacht and put her in the ocean where John Denver crashed his plane off Lover's point. She really loved John Denver and his music. I used to play guitar and sing his songs for her as well. Mom sang like an opera singer and she passed her musical gifts to me as well. I found that when my father died in 1985 I stopped playing the guitar and piano pretty much except for Christmas singing carols with my mother. This only increased when my mother died. However, even though I'm not a blues singer I feel I owe it to my children to try to start playing and singing music again somehow.

As you can see here I was always very close with all members of my family. The Scottish Clan consciousness of my mother and Grandmother were very strong. Loyalty to family and country is very very strong among Scottish people and so it became a part of me too. My father really needed this closeness as well for though his family was all very brilliant and country and wild there wasn't the kind of loyalty among them that my mother's family had. So, my family was always a very good one which made being in my 20s all the harder. I've noticed that people with not so good families often do better in their 20s than those with good families. However, my 30s and then my 50s until now and beyond have been very very good to me and those around me. I'm very grateful.

So, when I say, "Your family waits for you on the other side." I hope you agree with me because they do.