What Color is Your Sky?
by George Anderson

 Perception is a funny thing--what we see is not always what we get.  Take the sky, for instance.  It's easy enough to look upward and see a clear blue sky.  A least that's what we think we see.  I remember, as a student at Our Lady Of Perpetual Help High School, when we were herded into the gymnasium to watch the Apollo 11 crew launch its way into the sky.  I remember watching the sky go from light blue, to deep blue, to black as the rocket propelled itself toward space.  That's when I began to realize that the sky may not, in fact, be blue at all.  It's only our perception, from where were are standing on the earth, that makes it blue.

I find myself thinking back to that revelation whenever I speak to people who are bereaved.    Their world is a matter of perception, at least to me.  They know I speak to the souls, they know the souls speak about their beautiful world, and yet, to the bereaved, they are gone.    What I perceive as blue, they perceive as black. No matter what we are told, no matter what we come to understand, the loss of a loved one is a loss to us.  But are we looking carefully enough at the concept of loss, or are we so grounded on the earth that we can't see from another perspective that what we know may not be all we understand?

I've been trained over the years, mostly by the souls, to look at the world from my vantage point, but also the vantage point of the souls.   Where we see loss, the souls see gain--they have gone to a beautiful world, and gained reward for having struggled on the earth.   They took that trip through the atmosphere just as the astronauts took their trip to a whole new level of understanding.  For the souls, their perspective about everything on the earth has changed--mainly because they can see it from a better perspective--they are there.  They see the earth now much the same as we see images of the earth from space--remote, undaunting, serene, beautiful, and small.  They see their new world  as vast, open, filled with possibilities, unending, yet still linked to the world, the people, and the lives they knew.

Even with everything we know, with everything we've been taught about the world hereafter and the souls--about their journey through this lifetime and their exit to a world of joy--we can only still see their passing as something terrible.  It happens because perceptions are hard to change, and old ways of thinking are hard to break.

So how do we change our perception of our lives and losses on the earth, and try to see from the perspective the souls see?  It begins with seeing ourselves as "souls in training."  Astronauts, before they delve into space, rely on simulators to help them adapt to the changes they will experience once they get into space.  How I wish we had a program here to help us understand the transition our loved ones go through, by simulating a beautiful world, filled with joy and peace.  But it's not ours to have, just yet.  We have to try to understand from everything the souls have told us about their world, and try to imagine the life our loved ones now live.  It's not easy--our world is filled with pain, especially after loss, and it's filled with more questions than answers.  In a way, each of us has to create our own "flight simulator"--to imagine our loved ones in a world of joy, and to think of them not as lost, but as found.  They are found in the most beautiful of circumstances, and we do know that, even if we don't always feel it.  The souls continue, we know that.  But we need to think of them as "continued" and not ended.  When we think of our loved ones, we need to focus away from measuring their world with our inadequate tools, and to think of them in their world, finding joy in the simple things they do, finding peace after struggle, and finding ways to send all they have learned back to the earth.

We can perceive our loved ones as dead, or we can perceive them as living.  When we think of the souls, we need to think of them in their surroundings, not ours--otherwise the sky will never be blue for us.  Even as we acknowledge our loss, we have to go one step further and acknowledge their gain--a new life in a new world that we will also see, when it is our time.    Maybe, in time, we can change the perception of what it is like to have a loss--maybe we can be sad for ourselves but overjoyed at the reward our loved ones now live in.  It takes time, and it takes a willingness to change our perspective to see from a different lens than we are used to looking.  But it can be done because the souls have shown us time and time again that their world is beautiful and worth dreaming about.  When we find the peace and serenity to see our loss as a gain for those we love, our sky can be any color we imagine it to be, and our loss will only be a short, painful separation until we see our loved ones again in their beautiful world.