Comfort For Those Mourning Death Of A Loved One

Written after two NDEs (Near Death Experience)

In the summer of 2010, when Madina Lake was on break from touring, I intervened in a domestic dispute on the streets of Chicago. I rescued the girl, but has my skull cracked open and was dispatched to a coma for several days. I flatlined twice throughout the life-saving brain surgeries and I wrote this after I woke up. I hope you enjoy it:

Letter for a Friend, 

This is a confluence of what I know to be true about life, and subjective assertions from what I know to be true about my life. And there is no ambiguity about which parts are which. I’m cognizant that our individual perspective is developed from our own stew of nature & nurture, experience, environment, family construct, friend and peer groups, social spaces and so on. I lost my own perspective for several years until I got my bell rung in 2010 and spent the following year + becoming the world-class couch surfer, solos category, champion.

That year didn’t change me, but it changed my experience of me. From the day your soul takes up refuge in a pre-construction skin suit, you are a collection of sub-atomic love particles and energy/frequency vibrations. Life’s trillion-piece orchestra gives a 9 count and boom, you’re in. If you’re lucky you have two very passionate loving maestros working together, in sync, and selflessly, 24/7 to keep your rhythm section locked into a baseline tempo, allowing a margin of flexibility to serve the song, and choosing the best-suited venues, supporting players, and sound systems to inspire your orchestra, pleading for a safe, reasonable, happy, and healthy tune.

Stepping away from the music analogy, now you’re born. And life happens hard, fast and in abundance. Your tapestry becomes a windshield cruising down a wide-open highway at the peak of the locust migration. You develop emotions and have experiences which begin to shape a character that will never fully be defined. You achieve you fail, love, lose, obsess, dismiss, you work, you rest, you idle. You discover passions, form friendships, relationships…yada yada..

But just beneath your consciousness your physical body, subordinate to your spirit’s direction, begins storing all the data in the trillions of cells that will come and go, but they won’t forget anything. They imprint the information and leave a ledger for the new cells to not lose a micro detail as cells regenerate. I learned that, during this process so much more is happening behind the scenes while your spirit negotiates trillions of real estate deals with your physical body. I flatlined twice, the second time lasting around three minutes and separated by three months. 

If you can conceive of an experience without time and space, do so throughout this metaphor, which is the only way I can describe this. Our species is imbued with five senses to interpret the physical world. But worms don’t have these same five senses and their perception of time is dramatically different to ours. If you pick one up and move it, it won’t have any idea that it’s been moved for days, by our comprehension. To help you understand my experience(s), I attributed physical qualities to this illustration. I should note, the experiences were identical to each other, minus the communication.

In the exact moment I went flat, a blissful euphoria that words fail to define, overcame me.  My interpretation of what was happening was crystal clear; The negative events, experiences, and subsequent emotions from conception, manifested into toxic cells, and took refuge in my joints, muscles, and fatty tissues, resulting in a subtle, gradual and exceedingly pervasive trajectory of pain.

Leaving the body was shedding the skin suit, and its toxic composition of pain caused by the toxic events experiences and my emotional evaluation of each. If you add a grain of salt to a meal every day for over 30 years you wouldn’t notice it from one day to the next.  If you took a bite 30 years ago, and another one now, back-to-back, imagine how salty that might be. Every feeling of regret, loss, shame, gluttony, tragedy, guilt, and so on…vanished from existence in an instant. And it is the most liberating mental and physical feeling that you probably can’t imagine. In death, you are rid of the skin suit.

But very satisfyingly, your consciousness is very much alive and well and you remain you. I was in an experience that can be described as vast and endless space to a proportion that you also can’t imagine. Space so endless it takes your breath away. Now, picture a series of horizontal rings, stacked vertically with space in-between them.  The rings glow and hum with an energy that is greater than anything on Earth. Each ring has four of what I interpreted as power generators. The bottom ring was fervent and frenetic with countless energy waves blipping in and out constantly for split seconds at a time. With each ring upwards, the blips or spikes of energy intrusions became less chaotic, and a harmony emerged in contrast to the dissonance.

On the second flat line I was one of these energy waves on the top rung with an enormous vibrant ball of radiant light energy and love. All of my loved ones existed here, and we were (are) together, whether they were still on earth or in this existence. Everything felt and was and is perfect. There was and is harmony, unity, love, individuality and pure altruistic natured beings. I was suddenly imbued with an invitation to join the giant ball of euphoria while having the choice and being informed that if I chose not to that would be fine but would cause a lot of physical pain. With there being no chance I would ever leave Nathan, there wasn’t really a choice and that’s what I conveyed in response before waking up from surgery. This giant ball of pleasure wasn’t shitting around. It hurt.

But here’s the takeaway:

Most people fear death, mourn loss, and don’t like to deal with their own mortality, primarily because of the unknown and the what if’s. What if this is it and it’s over? What if I never see my loved ones again? What if heaven is boring, what if I don’t get in?? Where does all the Love go and where am I in this?

Here’s the simple truth:

You are YOU. You take your consciousness with you. Your loved ones are right there with you, only with more uninhibited, raw, pure adulation, familial connectedness, oneness, eternal.

There’s no such thing as time, so you won’t get tired of it.

The natural order of life on earth imbues us with instincts that tell us what we need to survive, tell us what we need to feel and be good. Teach us about balance, that giving feels good, harming feels bad loving feels good, stealing feels bad. Life is hard for everyone. Life has also taught us that if you work hard and you are a good person can you have endured life you will be rewarded.

If you exercise every day, you will be in shape and feel better. Working out, for me personally, hurts to do, but there is reward. Life is like that, only protracted over the duration of our existence. But at the end, the reward is immeasurable.

You are connected with your loved one more than ever and so is your entire family. You have nothing to be sad about except for missing them here, in the physical domain, for a bit. Don’t worry. You are always together. You can deal with this part.

I know this was long, tangential and weird, but I know it to be true from experience, and science speaks to it too.

I hope you will consider this to be as true and as real as I know it is. Whomever I’ve sent this to, I’m sending it because I love you. Please be well, sink into the unrivalled beauty of familial and friendly love. I wish you and your family the very best. 

Matthew