Sacred Stories
She posted a long entry on Facebook, “My sweet dad passed away two days ago.”
Her dad had been diagnosed with cancer about 8 months earlier. He was SO strong and resilient and yet so gentle and kind in spite of the pain he was experiencing. He wanted to survive and live, but cancer is so brutal and finally there was nothing more they could do.
“I am eternally grateful that I was able to see him several times a day for the last few months, but I hoped for 20 more years…” she wrote.
Some of his last words were to her step-mom, “Everything is fine. Everything is going to be OK.” Soon after he said this, he went into a deep state of transition.
Shortly, as she was leaving the hospital briefly to check on her kids, she was thinking about how she felt she’d received some messages from her little brother after he died a few years ago. She wondered if her dad would reach out to let them know he was OK. She wondered if her brother would meet her dad to help him on the path. And she wondered if she would notice if there was a message from her brother or her dad. Or maybe something meaningful from both of them to let her know they were both “fine.”
So she let these thoughts go and did what she needed to do at home.
She got in her truck to drive back to be with her dad. The radio was on and NPR’s “A Prairie Home Companion” was wrapping up with a live song.
Tears flowed. She immediately began to record a video driving along the road to share with her other brother later.
She hadn’t heard this song in years. Her dad had taught this song to her and her two brothers as they were learning to play guitar in the 90’s when they were young, early college-aged kids!
The Indigo Girls song was a family favorite—a feel-good song at the time.
She was blown away feeling so grateful for this message. The title of the song is “Closer to Fine”….
To top it off, as she pulled to the stop sign at the top of the hill, and pointed the video toward her dad’s old wood shop he built years ago (now for sale) the chorus rang out:
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine
The closer I am to fine
The closer I am to fine, yeah
This moment was a much needed respite from the grief she was feeling.
She shared the video and this image, and says, “I think this was my brother’s saying all is fine with him, but maybe my dad’s saying that too, since he was beginning to make his way home about this time.”
She concluded her post, “I don’t know what happens exactly when we leave this plane and move to the next, but I feel like my dad deserves the best of it…. ‘and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands.'”