Passing On

This week my father-in-law lost his two-and-a half-year long battle with cancer.  His cancer was well advanced by the time I received my attunement enabling me to do distance Reiki, but since then (and in fact, a couple of weeks prior to) I have been sending Reiki to him on a regular basis.  In the past couple of weeks, as his life was reaching its conclusion, my two daughters (recently Reiki I trained, but not yet able to do distant Reiki) and my husband, who has received no Reiki training, joined me.  I had been woken up in the night by a ‘dream’ encouraging us to send healing as a family.

I see little point in wondering whether the outcome would have been different had we learned to work with Reiki earlier.  There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the Reiki helped.  When I first started sending he frequently made mention on the phone that he could ‘feel’ the Reiki energy, tingling and pulsing sensations in and around his tumour, despite the fact that he was in a different country, and hadn’t really believed it could help.

Last week the family asked the specialists to try to give some sort of prognosis for life expectancy.  The Doctor replied that it was impossible to say.  They were in uncharted territory, he said, because ordinarily given what he had been through he ‘should have been gone months ago’.  I am not claiming that Reiki was the only factor. I have never met such a genuinely kind, caring and cheerful man, he had a laugh and a joke for everything, and no matter what the circumstances he met it with a smile. I'm sure his positive and optimistic outlook on life helped him enormously.  But I do believe that the Reiki made a significant contribution.

You might have read my earlier blog about the Venus transit.  On the day that she was making her crossing I remarked to my husband that I would not be surprised if my father-in-law either made a miraculous recovery, or chose the next few days to make his exit.  The energies felt so beautiful and so loving that I could understand why anyone struggling with life might choose that moment to move on and reconnect with something so paradisiacal.

When we got the phone call to let us know he had started to deteriorate my husband and two girls started the long drive back to the UK to visit him.  Just before 4.00 am I woke with gut wrenching fear and panic in my solar plexus.  I cannot explain how, but I knew it was my father-in-law, despite the fact that although we were on very good terms I was not ‘close’ to him in the same way that I would say I’m close to my mum, my husband or children.  Nevertheless, I could strongly sense his emotion and we had a surreal ‘conversation’, without using any words in which I said ‘You can’t go yet, they’re on their way to see you’.  I later found that just before 4.00 am the nurses had had to sedate him.

The following morning my husband arrived at the hospital and apparently his Dad looked so poorly that he almost didn’t let the girls in to see him.  At around 10.30 am I sat in the garden and sent Reiki and prayed that everyone would be able to say their goodbyes.  At around 10.30 am I’m told that he opened his eyes and perked up, so much so that the girls and their little cousins were able to go in to see their Grandad.  The cancer had reached his bowel, his liver, his lungs and most probably his brain, yet he needed virtually no pain relief.

Again, I can’t explain how, but I knew he had gone long before we got the phone call to say that he had passed on peacefully in his sleep that night.

When I phoned my mum to explain, she told me that the night my Nan had passed away, she too had been woken with a feeling of total panic, as if someone was sitting on and contracting her chest, at exactly the time of Nan’s death.  She said that a few days later she had a vision of her Mum which she found extremely disconcerting, clippy-clopping jauntily along in her shoes, looking much younger and joyful, as if to say ‘It’s okay, I’m alright, I’ve found peace’.