It isn’t every day that we get to read our daughter’s innermost thoughts in her journals.
But then, it isn’t every day that our daughters drop dead from a medically unexplainable cardiac arrest.
That is what happened to my 22-year-old daughter Teal. One moment she was with me, sitting across the table in a nice restaurant, chatting and enjoying dinner. Then a few hours later she was gone, never to be heard from again.
And yet… she was.
Unbeknownst to me, Teal has been a dedicated journaler for many years. And so I was given the gift of knowing my daughter in a far deeper way, after her death.
Now I’m not saying that reading Teal’s journals wasn’t done without a pang of guilt, or at least some consideration. But in truth, I was so wrecked by her death that I was desperate to hang on to at least a small piece of her. I devoured her journals hungrily.
In particular, I dove into the beaten-up red spiral notebook Teal had stuffed into her backpack, and carried it with her on her travels around the world. This notebook was filled with small sayings, and bits of channeled wisdom.
I found it when I was cleaning out the room she rented in San Francisco. And the first time I flipped through it, I knew exactly what it was.
I remembered her telling me that she’d begun to hear phrases in her daily meditations. They came from the panoply of spirit guides and goddesses that she felt she deeply connected with. “What should I do with them?” she asked me.
“Write them down,” I told her, and thought nothing more of it. But I was a self-involved workaholic then, who had little time for my daughter’s more esoteric concerns.
In fact, not long before her death Teal decided it was her mission to become a healer. It was these small phrases that became her driving principle. Now they became mine as well.
The first time I sat down with her notebook, I read this:
“Give fearlessly, and you shall never want.”
and
“Looking to the future is an escape from the present, rather than being and feeling your wants
and needs and getting that. Looking ahead is what you do when you are unhappy.”
Her words resonated right off the page at me. Mainly because as I sat beside Teal’s body and watched her die in the hospital, I made a firm decision. If she was going to die, I had to become a much better person. A more present person.
A person Teal could be proud of.
Page after page of her curving handwriting revealed more and more wisdom as the years went by. At first, I was stymied by some of what I read. But over time, as I slowly evolved, more and more of it made sense.
“Surrender is the key to the unknown and desire,” she wrote.
This was cryptic to me at first. But after I’d lived in the void of the unknown for a good long while, it became clearer. In fact, I didn’t work or earn a living for two entire years after Teal’s death. Instead, I lived in a friend’s guest room, surviving on my savings and keeping my head down.
Suddenly everything I’d taken for granted—my business, my income, even the relationship I’d been in and the home that came with it—was gone.
Now ‘the unknown’ she wrote about was my world, and I had literally no idea how to navigate it. In the end, it turned out the only way actually was to surrender.
The same went for the word ‘desire’, which I read to mean anything I longed for that I no longer had. Like a home. Or a partner. Or a job. Sometimes that longing overwhelmed me, until finally I learned to relax about it.
Yet again, I had to surrender and accept. And so I did.
I also discovered that Teal may have had some kind of inkling of her death—or her ultimate spiritual ascendance, despite the fact that her cardiac arrest was completely unpredictable.
She journaled about a voice that told her she would ‘die soon’, which she decided meant she would transcend an old way of being. She had other insights about this as well.
Written on the inside corner of the notebook’s cover, in a place of prominence, she’d noted:
“You will be in your power when you are overtaken by the light, and you can see everything as an opening to freedom.”
Also this:
“You were born to lead packs of people through spiritual life journeys, and now you are about to discover what that is.”
Teal’s learning and her personal evolution seemed to speed up as the pages progressed in this notebook. Perhaps it is that near the end of life, that we naturally sense we soon must leave.
It’s as if we are being prepared for death. For this is when everything suddenly snaps into perspective.
“You are increasingly sensitive,” she wrote near the back of the notebook. “Be open to light, love and being present.”
And this:
“Learn to love every moment. Every moment is beautiful. Every moment is a lesson.”
I was particularly blown away by an account of a sunset walk Teal had taken along Italy’s Amalfi Coast. As the sun was sinking below the sea, she came upon an old cemetery, and described it thus.
“It was white marble and really amazing…overlooking the sea, cliffs, mountains, and towns…So, I chose to go in and meditate, and I got this: ‘Open your heart, open your soul and be.’
The whole ‘be’ thing really made an impact on me. I realized in life I am never really there. I tend to be thinking about the future or past or something someone said instead of being in the moment and taking it in for all its beauty.
After this meditation, I knew I had been transformed because I looked out over the ocean and mountain scene in front of me and started to cry. I was really able to take it all in.
I finally realized how blessed I am to be here, and how many beautiful things there are here.”
Reading this entry was nothing less than transformational for me, as well. Because I knew in my heart, I had been far less present than my dear daughter was in her lifetime. And I was ready to start again, and embrace life in its fullest.
What I know now is that my free spirited, wandering daughter with her guitar and her backpack was indeed a channel, a beacon. A light. For me, yes, but perhaps for everyone else.
At the boom of many pages of her notebook, she wrote these simple words: “Just be.”
On others she wrote, “Be and you know.”
For this was Teal’s ultimate takeaway, and now it is mine. We can busy, ambitious, harried and full of big plans. But then one day the bottom drops out.
It’s only in the quick of the moment that we can come back to ourselves, and back to the sheer, unparalleled beauty that is in this simple moment, here and now.
I thank Teal every day of this life, for what was and what will be.
But most certainly, I thank her for what is.
