What If I die next Friday? #1

A different perspective of living my life.

By Adriana Herrasti Coqui

I'm sharing how a painful tragedy can transform positively a human life, or many.

From my point of view life is made of good and hard moments, you cannot delete the hard ones because those are the ones that can give you the necessary perspective to enjoy the good ones by contrast. You live them, you embrace them, you process them, and you move on to keep on living. The death experience of close family members has brought me a quite different perspective of life, I see more, I feel more, I sense more, I do more, I enjoy more, and I certainly love more. As the polarity of life is death, imagine how much life is brought into you once you figure out death and you give it a sense of logic. I think that our current vision of death must shift as something bad or something to be afraid of to something natural, expected, just a transitory passage, a means to an end. It’s when we become conscious and embrace the possibility of dying any minute that we can really embrace life to its full extension.

To Germán, for teaching me not to take life for granted.

  To my Mother, for teaching me how important is to process my emotions.

To my Dad, for introducing me to my light and my shadows.

ONE

His death Experience through my eyes.

He left. He was not there anymore. His body was not moving at all… completely still, soulless. The last time I had seen a dead body in a coffin was when my grandparents died, I was 9 back then, but I guess that it didn’t hit me that hard because it was the “natural way” to leave this realm. And they were ill for ages so I thought it was a good thing, at least for my aunts who took care of them both until the end- they were completely exhausted. But I was 35 years old when my brother Germán passed away, and he was only 46. That was not “natural” at all, or so I thought.

What the hell happened? He was a healthy human being, apparently.  It really took us by surprise, it was not supposed to happen. First mistake. What is supposed to happen? We are supposed to be born, grow up, live a long life like my grandparents (86 and 93), and then die by natural causes. Why on Earth did anybody tell me that someone could die so young? Maybe they did try to tell me, but I didn’t want to listen.

He was not the first man to leave this planet at a young age. Some of my friends at school had lost a parent or a sibling. I felt their grief, but I didn’t realize that it could happen to me.

And there I was at his funeral, watching his coffin. The embalmer had done a good job with his preparation. My brother looked calm, in peace finally. He had struggled for the last three months with a very rare illness that affects the liver, and his body started to break down very quickly. I cannot imagine what was going through his mind during this period, how he percieved his body, all the questions unanswered he had, the decisions he had to make, what was next for him…

This was not supposed to happen, but it did happen, and there was nothing that I could do about it. Oh! That feeling of impotence! The one thing I did discover though about myself, is that I felt very serene by his side even under such circumstances, as if I knew for certain that he was going to be fine, somehow. From my perspective of what I currently believe, his physical body was not useful anymore, but his etheric and astral body were finally free from it. I was raised in catholic tradition. At some point in my life, I didn’t resonate anymore with such beliefs, so for me it was not a matter of heaven or hell or even purgatory, but just going back home. He was finally free.

I realized that I was fine around death, just like with my grandparents. In those days, they used to keep coffins for a couple of days in the house for legal purposes before they were brought into the cemetery. And since mi my grandmother died three days after my grandfather, they were both there, in their living room, silently. I didn’t feel scared or uncomfortable whatsoever. At the end, they were resting in peace, or so someone said…

In this experience with my brother, I had the great privilege to be with him during the last full day of his life on Earth. Just being there, beside him, sharing a moment, just like so many moments we shared, but this was different, it was our last one together in the physical plane, and we both knew it. “What else can I do for you, bro?” I asked. He just looked at me and smiled, I smiled back at him, and we stared into each other’s eyes in silence, everything was said and done. Just being, that’s all.

That was our goodbye. He died the next day. June 26, 2007.

Happy Birthday Bro. 19.9.9