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I'm Over All That and Other Confessions - Shirley MacLaine

The laws of cause and effect are in play all the time, in every moment of our lives. I wish that this law was part of our education. As my father said once, "It's too bad we have to get close to dying before we understand what it was all about in the first place."

As he lay dying, he would visit his mother and father in his sleep every night. The doctors and nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital crowded around his bed every morning to hear what he told them. They had heard it from many dying patients before. My dad was not on medication that would have produced delusions. The dying process was the "knowing the truth" process.

My mother on the other hand, in her last days didn't visit her relatives as greeters to heaven. She went back in time to when she was a very young girl. She talked to her mother and sisters in the past, working out problems that had occurred. She also was living what had been her dreams and fantasies when she was young. She created the reality of living what she had dreamed of.

It was fascinating for me to hear and observe. I was on location with Guarding Tess when she passed away. We were shooting in Baltimore, where she had met and married my father and had conceived me. I believe she chose to cross over while I was there because she knew it was familiar territory to both of us.

I got a call from her nurse telling me she had taken her last breath, but I already knew it because a few minutes before the call, the alarm spontaneously went off in the house I was renting. Mother's voice came into my head and told me exactly where to locate the alarm in the house. I went straight to it (on a high shelf in a hall closet) and turned it off. Mother then instructed me to drive to my childhood home in Arlington, Virginia.

I called the set, explained what had happened and told them I wouldn't be able to come in that day. They said, "Go, no problem." I drove to the house in Virginia. In my head, mother's voice instructed me to go to a drawer that I hadn't known existed in a cupboard. Inside the drawer, I found an envelope. I opened it and read the letter inside. It was about some unflattering things involving my ex-husband. She then said she hadn't wanted to tell me because I needed to learn it all for myself, Then she directed me to my father’s underwear drawer in his bedroom. She said there would be a valentine under the clothes. There was.

She instructed me to keep it.

She directed me to another desk where she kept some poems. I never knew the location of any of these things. I found the poems and keep them to this day. When I returned to Baltimore and the house I was renting, I opened the front door and the lights flicked on and off by themselves. Then the TV in the living room went on and off I knew it was Mother saying she was with me. She then said, "Look out at the swans on the lake. I will be with them, watching you till you finish your picture."

As I looked out the window, a pair of swans glided into view on the lake. I never broke down over either of my parents' passing, because I knew that was just what had happened-they had passed. They didn't die. Their souls are with me when I need some advice or have a good laugh at the absurdity of what we believe is the "truth" here on Earth.