If you ask Renee Moor what inspired her to found Journey Home, a non-profit community service dedicated to “empowered living and dying,” she can list many ways her own life has prepared her. It began with proving herself after being told, as a late-developing child, that the best she could hope for was assisted living; it continued through two decades as a behavioural therapist helping parents cope with autism diagnoses for their children; it carried on through her practices as a Buddhism psychotherapist, a student and instructor of yoga, and as a master in the art of reiki healing. But even these, compounded by the deaths of her father and husband within 18 months of each other, don’t complete the story.
The experiences that locked into place the final piece of Renee’s life puzzle came in her dreams.
“My dad just kept coming and coming in my dreams and guiding me,” says Renee of the years after her father’s death. Seated in the space she has created for people to meet, share, and learn from each other as they go through their individual experiences with death and dying, Renee is relaxed and confident. “In all my twists and turns of life,” she says, “I found my way.”
Already a reiki master and busy yoga instructor at the onset of the Covid pandemic, Renee found herself in the same situation as many: cut off from her livelihood and society in general. It was in those dark days alone at home, with the time to fully process the loss of those she loved, that she began to thoroughly embrace the practices of meditation embedded in both yoga and Buddhism. Then came a series of visions and vivid dreams that inspired her to train as a death doula.
Much like a childbirth doula, a death doula supports a dying person and their family through the dying process, first by helping them gain information and insight, by connecting them with available medical and community supports, and finally by helping make the last moments a positive experience.
“I saw a huge gap in services, because doctors and nurses focus on treatment; funeral homes and crematoriums focus on the remains—but, there’s no one there for the death.”
In contrast, says Renee, her father showed his family that death can be beautiful. “He made his dying about us and we made his dying about him.
“He knew he had six months to live after his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and after his fear, anger and sadness, he chose acceptance and love. Each day he showed up to life as fully as he could, both on his good days and his bad days.
“We as a family have beautiful, funny and grateful memories of the season my dad died. After his dying, I wanted everyone to experience a death like this, but life had other plans for me then.”
As time went on, though, says Renee, “He kept coming to me in dreams and meditations. He would offer the most profound philosophies, and now I see he was preparing me. As I opened my heart and mind, his message became clearer to me.”
Renee looks back on three dreams as pivotal to placing her where she is now. One came not long after her father’s death, where she saw him striding down a rocky slope with arms wide open. “Don’t worry about me,” he called to her. “I’m in a better place.”
Some time later, as Renee’s life went through more changes and she began to focus her energy on services for those touched by death and dying, her father appeared in another dream. He asked her to meet him on Dundas Street, which is a stretch of highway that connects the city of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada, with the city of Toronto, about 65-kilometres away. For Renee at the time, this location was symbolic of her life adventures up until then.
“… [N]ow I see he was preparing me. As I opened my heart and mind, his message became clearer …”
As she walked down the street to meet him, a large building seemingly made of white lights guided her toward him. Again, her father held his arms open to her and she ran to him. As they met, Renee’s car keys caught in the back of the sweater he was wearing. As her older sister helped disentangle them, Renee’s father said, “Don’t worry. We all get a little lost sometimes, but now you’ve found your way.”
Soon after that dream, Renee became aware of a location for rent in a small town next door to Hamilton. Surveying the bright, high-ceilinged space inside a large heritage building in the centre of the community, Renee knew this was the perfect location for Journey Home. As she stepped back outside and looked toward the main street, she understood the true force of that dream: Journey Home would be located in a town called Dundas.
Not only that. As a student and instructor of yoga, Renee knew that the entanglement at the back of her father’s neck had significance. It sits opposite the throat chakra which represents how we express ourselves, how we listen and how we communicate. For Renee, Journey Home is more than a suite of services for an underserved segment of the population; Journey Home is her means of expression.
All the same, championing an organization whose services centre around death and dying is a daunting prospect. While people who work in hospice care and a handful of medical professionals understand the value she brings to her community, the majority of health practitioners have not been so receptive. Despite having established a board of directors, together with a group of supporters and co-workers to help ensure Journey Home’s success, there are days when she feels very alone.
But, says Renee, her father has an answer for that, too. In another dream, she came upon him carrying large sacks of flour up a stairway. “I’ll do the heavy lifting,” he told her. “You just keep baking the bread.”
Editor’s Note: Until recently, the retail space next door to Journey Home was occupied by a thriving business called The Village Bakery.
The Meaning of Forever Project continues to accept stories of comforting experiences with loved ones who have passed on, and of near-death experiences that have helped to show the continuation of life beyond the physical body. You can email your story to us atthemeaningofforever@gmail.com and you can find more about our project on our Facebook page, and our Meaning of Forever Website.
David was twenty-nine years old when his father died at home of cancer and the undertakers came.“You might not want to watch this,” he was told as they brought in the gurney. David isn’t sure where the words came from but he replied, “That is not my Dad, only his body.”
It was the beginning of a decades-long search for the answers to questions that ran deeper than, “Where do we go when we die?”
Raised in a Roman Catholic home, David struggled with the idea that his father’s body would someday be resurrected. He kept in his heart the priest’s explanation at the funeral that his Dad was a soul created by God and was, therefore, eternal. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder, “Why would my Dad, as eternal soul, want to come back into a body that was messed up?”
Today he’s convinced he’s found the answers to his questions.
David had other questions that priests couldn’t answer satisfactorily; like: “Is there a meaning to Life? What happens to the love given to others throughout the lifetime of an individual that has passed? And, more importantly, where did that love come from?”
Eventually David left the church and became what he calls “a seeker”. Today, he’s convinced he’s found the answers to his questions, and it all comes back to that idea of soul and his father being more than a body on a gurney. Each of us is soul with free will and conscious of ourselves, he says. Further, we are unique creations of Divine Spirit, which is an aspect of God. We exist because God loves us.
“I began to get a glimmer of understanding that soul manifests God’s love through its relationship with Divine Spirit.” In David’s lexicon, Divine Spirit is another term for Holy Spirit, or the creative energy that brought us into existence. “It is through the physical form that soul uniquely manifests that light of love here on this earth,” he says.
David built on this concept when asked to write his mother’s eulogy. He tried out the idea that, as souls, we come into this world with only love to give, we give that love throughout our lives and take that refined ability with us when our physical bodies die.
He tried out the idea that, as souls, we come into this world with only love to give…
“I posed a question: People remember how we each gave out love; that is why we are here to honor my Mom. So, is it our sole purpose here on earth to better learn to give out God’s love?”
And, he took the idea further: “Maybe it is to recognize God’s guiding hand in this world and help Him make it a better place by allowing His love to shine through each of us.”
David believes evidence of our creator is all around us in the form of light and sound—the fundamental energies that make up our existence.
“Throughout our lives, as each of us as soul refines our ability to give and receive love—and as the light passes through soul—the resulting vibrations resonate on this earth as well,” says David. “This is why we sometimes feel relaxed around certain individuals we meet. Their vibrations are compatible, or in alignment, with our own.”
David believes it was that compatibility which allowed him to see his mother in a dream as she gradually became comfortable with the next world while still in this one. In his dream, he saw that, prior to her death, she passed nightly into the next world, then returned to her body. This made her transition easier when her time came.
“All I could do was give love, melding my memories of Mary Lou within the flow of Spirit and letting them go.”
More recently since the passing of his sister, David has found himself applying all of what he’s learned—but the learning isn’t finished.
“Since I understood that we are all connected by Divine Spirit, I asked my spiritual guide to show me how the soul that was Mary Lou is doing.” he writes. At first, he was taken aback at the reply: “Don’t interfere.”
Yet, he trusted his inner guide and accepted the advice. “All I could do was give love, melding my memories of Mary Lou within the flow of Spirit and letting them go,” he says.
“I had been expecting to have a dream experience, or to see her inwardly somehow. Not being able to do that was very hard to deal with, but I felt a strong reassurance from my inner master.”
Still, he felt hurt, “until I became aware of Divine Spirit filling the void with God’s love. I know my memories of Mary Lou will always be within me as soul, and those memories of her will add their own uniqueness to the light that shines through me into the world.”
David’s written poetry for his mother, his late cousin, and for his sister.
One way David has found to fill the emotional gap left by the physical absence of his departed loved ones is to relive heartwarming memories, then put them down on paper, either in story or poetic form. He feels that most of us can do the same, by finding a quiet place to open our hearts to memories of our loved ones. Using this method, David’s written poetry for his mother, his late cousin, and for his sister. Here’s an example:
Mary Lou
After struggling throughout her life with many health woes,
Sensing that her time on this earth was coming to a close
My sister was led to comment on a recent day,
“Nobody knows when, but everyone dies someday.”
What did we say to the one who has passed from this Earth,
Stuck in the middle of us and a survivor from birth?
What memories of the Soul we knew as Mary Lou?
Remember the feeling of her love given to each of you.
Love, that invisible and unbreakable strand that binds us all,
Guiding us home while listening to God’s beckoning call.
Her body ravaged by cancer is now in its final resting place,
Look deep into your hearts and see her in God’s loving embrace.
The Meaning of Forever Project continues to accept stories of comforting experiences with loved ones who have passed on, and of near-death experiences that have helped to show the continuation of life beyond the physical body. You can email your story to us atthemeaningofforever@gmail.com and you can find more about our project on our Facebook page, and our Meaning of Forever Website.
The Meaning of Forever 