The Ultimate Transition - 

Lessons learned from my mother's death

By Jack Beauregard, founder and CEO - Successful Transition Planniing Institute.

My mother died last month. Through her death process, she taught me a lot about the Ultimate Transition.

As we spent time with my mother in the hospice, I told the hospice nurse that I so admired what she was doing. The nurse said that she was the lucky one since what she got from the people she helped was an incredible gift.  I said that we were both in the transition “sand box,” my working with Baby Boomers to help them leave their companies successfully and she helping people leave this life in peace.  I, who am in the transition business, would like to share with you lessons that I learned from my Mother’s Ultimate Transition.

Awareness:
Awareness that death is a natural transition phase of life helps us accept the fact that we are all going to die.  This is a terminal planet since everything that is alive, dies.  Even the sun is going to die, the earth is going to die.
Watching my mother lose consciousness as she died, I witnessed the power of awareness. During the past few weeks, and especially when it took all the energy that she had just to breathe, she was well aware of the presence of the people who loved her most in this world.

For example, when my mother was on the verge of no longer being able to speak, I was sitting across from her. She said something and I did not understand what she had said. My wife and father, also sitting with her, both repeated that she had said, “Nice to see you, Jack.” I was deeply moved by this.
Looking at my mother’s body during the wake, I realized that all the elements that made up her body came from the death of a star, and the 20 % of her body that came directly from the Big Bang would all transition into the creation of new life.

Love:
The conditioning that she was brought up in, which was the filter through which her love was expressed, fell away at the end. It was when my mother was in the dying process during these past four weeks, that I truly experienced the power of a mother’s love, which I will always remember and cherish.
As my mother began the final descent into the death process and I went over to say goodbye to her, she reached out her hand to me so I could hold it.  I spontaneously said “Thank you, Mom,” because I realized that it was the love that she had for me which gave her the energy to touch me for the last time.

Who we are at the core of our being cannot help but manifest itself at the time of death, since the effort and energy that it takes to keep up a façade are no longer there.  Death is not only the ultimate transition for the person who is dying. It is also a major transition for the people they have loved in their lives. The survivors have to carry on, knowing that they will never see their loved one again.

Meaning:
We all have heard the statement that “the apple does not fall far from the tree.” I experienced a reverse fact that the tree is not far from the apple.  My ninety-year-old father, who was with my mother for 70 years (68 years married), announced at the wake that he was starting his “new job” on Monday. He will be working at a Food Bank three days a week and has already figured out activities for the other two days of the week. When he told me that he had created a Plan-B for his life without my mother, not only was I proud of him, this helped me realize even more the importance of being able to move successfully through transitions.

The experience of my mother dying gave me a new perspective on death:   Rather than viewing death as the “grim reaper,” it can be transformed into a catalyst for new meaning. I realized that the following questions can help us use death as a catalyst to live our lives to the fullest:

    How do I want to be remembered?
    What do I want to leave behind?
    Have I touched the lives of others?
    What do I want people to read about me in my obituary?
    Is the world a better place because I have lived?

Jack Beauregard is founder and CEO of STPI, the Successful Transition Planning Institute in Cambridge, MA.

About the Author

Jack Beauregard, founder and CEO

A nationally recognized expert in transition planning, Jack's strategic planning steps, proprietary principles and decision making techniques have been helping people experience lives filled with meaning and purpose for over 20 years. In 1983…

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