Knew It From the Start

When God put Chip in my life, there was something about him that resonated with me. I knew so very little about him, but the feeling was palpable. It would be 3 or so months before I even knew his last name, several more before I knew what he did for a living or what his life outside our friendship was like, and many months/years later before I knew closely-held personal details. We were opposites in that way. He was an extremely private person and I'm an overshare-er. I honored his need for privacy always by never asking probing personal questions, but let him tell me things as he felt comfortable. He listened to me blab on and on about whatever, encouraged me to think about things differently (if I wanted to...only if I wanted to), and held my hand quietly as I expressed every last feeling (the list can be quite long in one sitting with me). It was a beautiful, perfect dichotomy.

As a believer in past lives, I believe that individual souls, God and the Universe conspire to put other people in our lives for a specific reason: to help us learn crucial lessons here on earth. Over the vast span of time, we learn our lessons that we choose in the Beyond before we return to our next life. We learn them, one by one and in connection to people in our lives, so that we don't have to return to the pain and suffering of life here to try again with those same lessons. The ultimate goal is to learn every lesson we set out for ourselves before our arrival, so that we are eventually able to remain in the beyond, reunited with souls from our multiple lives and never separated from them, God and the Universe ever again. I believe we sense these people in the way we sense danger or safety. There simply is no other way for me to explain why we resonate with certain people and why we don't resonate with others, or why people come into our lives at certain times (and why they don't always stay). It's visceral and subconscious. From the start, I was acutely aware that Chip was someone I had known before, somewhere and in some other time, and that he and I had chosen to help each other learn our pre-selected life lessons.

Chip was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2015, and then pancreatic cancer in 2016. Our lesson-learning in relation to each other was in its infancy, so we moved fast to support and guide each other. The promise of months or years together was never there. He moved into my and my kids' home after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis so that he didn't have to be alone, and so that the lesson-learning for both of us could intensify. I knew from the start of living together that I was likely to lose him too soon, though I was lucky beyond belief to have him far longer than his doctors or any of us foresaw. I will try to learn the lessons of loss and misfortune in a way that honors him and to face those lessons as he faced life and death, with indefatigable courage.