Is my experience unusual? Are others now surrounded by death as their lives continue to expand?

My Dad died nearly two months ago, at 96. A few days ago, my friend Doug’s dad died. During the week before that, two friends of mine here in Bloomington, both in their 80s, both deeply humanistic, gentle, and kind, died.

Then George McGovern, the first U.S. senator to oppose the Vietnam War in the late ’60s, died, at 90.

Here’s Chris Hedges, on McGovern.

McGovern: He Never Sold His Soul

And now, today, another hero famous in South Dakota, Russell Means, the Lakota activist who took on the U.S. Government at Wounded Knee back in 1973, and who recently sought to liberate the world from western “occupation, and said the United States was one big reservation, and we are all in it, has also died, of advanced esophageal cancer.

From the statement by his family: “Our dad and husband now walks among our ancestors.”

The intense energies of this extraordinary time of increasing light and increasing darkness either squeeze the life out of us, or force us to open, even wider. And those who die, open wider too.

No one ever, really, dies. It’s well to remember that. For when we do, we realize that there is nothing, literally no thing, to be afraid of. So be of pure heart. Act on your finest intentions. Let nothing get in the way of dying to your ego to be born again in service.