News from Jules | 04.14.2025 | Crossing Over: Part 1
We are on our own.
I was still sipping on my celebratory beer at the lodge after a long day of skiing with my friend from REI when I saw the voice message pop up. My gut clenched, and a tear welled up in the corner of my eye before I even opened my iPhone to listen. I just knew. I tucked my phone back into the pocket of my puffy coat until I was home.
After my friend dropped me off and I put my gear away, I immediately went upstairs to my bedroom and grabbed my lighter, a candle, and a blanket. Then, I drove a mile down to the Deschutes River trailhead tucked into my neighborhood. Just like I’d planned. At this twilight hour, all three parking spots were open. I gathered my supplies and walked down the dusty trail toward the bridge and to the large boulders underneath it.
I set the mason jar candle holder made by my nephew and nieces on a boulder and lit the Aloha Bay “Love” chakra candle that I bought a week earlier.1 Then, I crawled up a nearby boulder, wrapped my fleece blanket around me, and opened my phone.
There at the top of my messages list was the voice memo from my best friend of 25 years. My freshman roommate at Boston University, life twin and soul sister. Someone I can be completely human with—sharing the best and the worst of ourselves and everything in between.
I looked out at the pale blue sky gently fading from light into darkness—from winter into spring on this first day of the new season. I listened to the water rushing through the rapids—as it had all day and as it would all night, constantly flowing no matter the season. And I took several deep breaths—inhaling and exhaling the crisp air of change.
Then I pressed play.
Her voice was calm and quiet as she told me the news: Her Mom had passed away. A loud rainstorm echoed in the background in the stillnes of her Mom’s house as her voice wavered and choked up, relating the hardest past few days and the many more hard days to come.
My tears flowed with hers. The same as they had in early January, when I was out for a walk and stopped at this very spot on the river to listen to her heartbroken voice memo that her Mom had started at-home hospice care. These tears had been welling up since our phone conversation last October while walking along this stretch of the river when I learned the cancer prognosis had become terminal.
Tears that flow like a ground spring—water naturally flowing from within the earth that emerges from cracks or fractures in the ground—from deep sorrow and suffering, whether we’ve already lost a Mom like I have, we’ve lost a Dad like my friend already has, or we know that day will come.
That day when our sense of the world shifts. We are on our own.
It doesn’t matter if you’re two or twenty or forty or sixty, from everyone I’ve talked to, it’s the same. That moment of crossing over. Like those wobbly first steps away from our first caregiver’s arms.
It’s inevitable, necessary even, but scary nonetheless.
It’s one thing to step forward toward independence, yet knowing someone is there behind you. Whether they’ll help dust you off and get you back up when you stumble or fall is irrelevant to their presence. Someone is there.
The presence of provision, protection, guidance, even if it is an illusion. So, it is a fundamental loss to look back and see that someone is gone. Especially to look back and see no one.
Something I’ve been scared of for 22 years.
Especially since my Dad has always been the more reliable source of provision, protection, and guidance, even if it’s been offered alongside confusion, doubt, and some judgment.
Just a couple of weeks after I learned that my friend’s Mom was in hospice care, I learned that my Dad had been in the ER overnight. His first time staying in the hospital in his impeccably healthy 77 years. What had been a seemingly harmless but persistent and unresolved health issue since the fall had compounded into something bigger. Since my paternal grandfather didn’t pass away until he was 96 years old, I’ve been hoping for another 20 years, but suddenly the loss of my Dad felt very possible and very real.
“Well, of course, I’m going to die someday,” my Dad said matter-of-factly when I called to share the sad news about my friend’s Mom. “That’s totally natural,” he reassured me. Luckily, his health has stabilized over the past few months, and his care team is getting closer to a hopefully curative diagnosis for his “old man problems,” as he’s calling it.
And yet, sitting there on that big boulder beside the ever-flowing river on Equinox, hearing the news of my best friend’s loss, it did not feel natural. I could feel how her world had shifted. Yes, there was still the presence of siblings and nephews and nieces and aunts and uncles and cousins, but she no longer has parents to talk to, to laugh with, to hug.
I cried until it was dark out and the only light came from the flickering candle of love beside me. Even though she was 3,000 miles away in her hometown of Philadelphia, I was with her in spirit.
And I knew that I would be with her in person at the funeral soon.
Right by her side.
During this important time of crossing over.
May you sit with your sorrow this week.
Love,
Jules
Chakra palm wax votive candles by Aloha Bay are wish-fulfilling companions that convey and promote positive life intentions and affirmations that I discovered years ago at a small shop in Kauai, but are also sold at Natural Grocers. The Love (Svadhishthana or Sacral) chakra is about sensuality, emotions, and intuition. It gives the ability to relate to others in an open and friendly way, moving to a fulfilling emotional life.
So touching. I can feel your pain and that of your friend through your words. Thank you for sharing such a moment, one that is often very private. I am fortunate to have both of my parents still, and both are in excellent health, but I fear the day when they will be gone. I already know it will hurt more than anything I've ever experienced. But I will *see* them among the trees in the forest, *hear* them with every chirping sound of the birds, and *smile* at them when I look at little flowers in the meadows. That thought will hopefully give me comfort and strength when the time comes.
May your dad continue to get better and stay healthy for many more years.