Almost a year ago my mom, Stanka Gojkovic, died. I took care of her for the last three months of her life. (I was with her for a number of years before that, but it's the last three months I will talk about here.) It was one of two hardest experiences I have gone through in my entire life.

The reason I want to write about it is because of the gigantic disparity between how the dying process is looked upon in our society today and my own experience. There is a whole spiritual process that happens that is labeled as a disease.

My mom came to her death by having a stroke a year previously, then just before she went into hospice she had a gall bladder infection which, as I understand it, is typically operable, no problem, unless you're 96 years old. Then no one operates.

These two events were my mom's way of slowly moving out of this world. We all choose a way to die; our soul does. This was how my mom's soul decided to do it. It was a slow process.

The stroke allowed her to shift realities. Her stroke made her forget everything at first; her memory came back slowly, but after that, it was patchy where she would have clarity, remember things, and forgetfulness.

In essence, her soul was moving away from this physical reality, leaving it behind, focusing elsewhere.

They call this dementia. I would say, the person is simply no longer exclusively focused in this reality. They're moving on, letting this reality go, forgetting about it.

In the Seth Books Seth talks about the way we all leave our body when we are asleep, and volitionally if we choose to learn how. He talks about how we travel further and further away from this realm of existence and when we are very far away, we simply no longer have memory of this existence. I think this is what dementia is--traveling way out away from this physical body and only occasionally being here, again.

It is a marvelous way to integrate spirit and matter.

During that year before hospice, my mom moved through all sorts of experiences. She was in contact with the relatives that have gone before her. She revisited her childhood and mostly stayed there; she was living with her mom and dad and her three sisters.

She was between worlds, there and here, traveling between them, integrating them, extracting from both something she was learning.

With the gall bladder infection, she started not being able to eat. She'd lost weight after the stroke and with the infection, she lost more weight. She was still a good weight, but only a about two weeks after that infection, one day, she simply could no longer walk. It was sudden. It wasn't because she wasn't eating enough or was too thin, she just could no longer walk.

To me, this was the sign--her soul was saying, we're leaving.

After that it was a horrible struggle: trying to get up/wanting to get up, but not being able to; wanting to eat, but not being able to; the physical body was doing its thing, wanting to function, yet not being able to. She tried and tried. We all do. Our bodies never give up. It's built into us to survive.

She slept more and more. In other words, she was spending more and more time in the spiritual realms. Sometimes I'd hear her talking to her mom. One time, as I entered the room, she was calling after her mom who, apparently, was leaving--but was there before I entered the room.

She'd ask me about her mom and dad and sisters because she was seeing them, but when she woke up she didn't see them and she didn't know what was going on.

She'd come back from the spirit world and not know where she was--not always, but sometimes.

As she got closer to leaving, she talked about leaving. Two times I found her out of bed: she was trying to leave. Often I'd wake up and find her with her legs over the edge of the bed; she was trying to leave. One night she was very agitated. She said she had to go, but didn't know where she had to go.

Three days before she left, she pulled me toward her and told me, I love you. Never in my entire life have I heard her say that.

She was in hospice care with a hospital. They'd showed up with all kinds of medication: in case she hallucinates. That's what hospice calls when a person is aware of the souls of those who've past, hallucinations. And to give her medication so she wouldn't hallucinate.

To say this concept is maddening is a huge understatement. It completely ignores the soul's journey out of this world and it can really do harm. One thing that's clear is that it's best the soul leave the body in a completely clear state of mind because once out of body, the person will be in whatever state of mind they left.  Leaving your body permanently is confusing enough without being under the influence of some drug.

To be honest Hospice was almost more trouble than it was worth. I could hardly get any rest from all the phone calls and people coming and going. I found out they did that so the hospital could make money. It wasn't necessary. They said it was necessary--a lie. I called Health and Human Services and discovered it was a lie. When I tried to have them come less, they fired us, this giant non-profit, lying hospital. I found a private hospice that was respectful of our needs and they served us well 'till the end.

We all have to leave this plane of existence and our soul chooses how we go. My mom's decision was to go slowly. I would guess it was best for her because--maybe because she was on earth 96 years, almost 97--she had plenty of time to integrate her life experience with her soul knowledge and whatever came next.

And the dying process is definitely a process, her process, she had to go through and not much could have been done about it, maybe slowed down, frustrated, but not stopped. Sometime in the beginning of those three months, she was calling me so much during the night that I set it up to sleep in her room with her. That went fine for a while and then one night I had experience I could not explain and that I've never had before. I felt prickles on my whole body, pin needles on my whole body and I was clearly told to leave her room. I did. Never went back to sleep there. And going forward she no longer called me during the night.

It's a personal process. There is only so much we can do to help. And the best help is to allow them to go through it with least amount of interference.

​So, I woke up one morning and her legs were over the edge of the bed. I moved them up, but she didn't wake up. She had left sometime in pre-dawn hours when, it is said, the veil is thinnest between the worlds.

Robert Monroe, in one of his books, said it was hard to leave the body these days with all the medical interventions keeping it alive. I agree. We could have put mom back in the hospital, etc., but it was so clear she wanted to leave and that it was truly her time, I did not want to torture her by putting her in a hospital.

Seth of the Seth Books says we incarnate here to have certain experiences and sometimes the experience is only of living a certain amount of years and when medicine extends those years, it is torture for the person and they will still go.

To me it was clear my mom wanted to go, that it was her time to go and I had to help her leave. That was it.

For a fact, my own end is clearly in sight. My mom leaving made it plain that all of us are just passing through--our souls wearing human form for a very, very short time--even though that time seems limitless when we are young.

I think we all go through a life review, when a person is leaving, not only the person leaving. Lots of memories have come up of what I've done in my life, people I've known. Lots of regrets I didn't do this or that. In the end, though, it's always about having done the best you knew at that time. But, more importantly, there is no perfect life. We would not be here if we could live a perfect life. The main thing is that we learn, the rest simply does not matter.