Chapter 6
Death of a Loved One
One of the many challenges provided by life on Earth, death of a loved one is perhaps the most universal. Unless we die at a young age, it is likely we will lose someone we care about. The fact that virtually all of us share this experience suggests it offers profound opportunities for growth. Were it not so, we as souls would be less likely to seek lives on the physical plane.
Yet, death is much more prominent in some lives than in others. To understand why a soul might plan before birth to lose loved ones, I talked with Valerie Villars. Forty-two at the time of our conversation, Valerie had lost two people whom she loved dearly, including her only child, Dustin, who had passed away three months earlier. Valerie felt it would be healing for her to talk about her experiences, and she hoped to bring healing to others. I am grateful for her willingness to speak with me at such a difficult time.
The loss of not one but two people in Valerie’s life, both unexpectedly and at relatively young ages, seemed to indicate that these deaths were part of her pre-birth plan. If so, why had Valerie chosen to experience two such losses? And why was one her only child?
Valerie's Story
“I did everything with him,” Valerie said of Dustin, her son by her first husband. She had since divorced and remarried. “We did Indian Guides together, all the baseball and the basketball. I remember one time when he was little and was going to try out for baseball. We drove up to the field. As soon as we got out of the car, we saw these little Mickey Mantles whizzing and hitting balls like — wham! Everybody was really, really good. Dustin and I walked over to the fence. We were standing there, watching. Dustin had never even had a glove on his hand. He said, ‘It’s okay, Mom. I want to try.’ He ran out there, not knowing anything, with all these kids who look like Mickey Mantle. I was never so proud of that child! He had guts. To me, that was quintessential Dustin.”
To Valerie, two other outstanding traits were Dustin’s intellect and nonconformity. His intelligence shone in his work with computers and cars; once he even assembled an entire automobile engine on his own. His nonconformity was evident in the way he constantly, restlessly questioned the world. “It’s like he always knew a better way,” Valerie observed. “Many things he had a hard time dealing with in society because of the lack of common sense in the way things are set up.”
Valerie never knew just how many friends Dustin had until more than 250 of them came to his wake. “One by one they all started coming forward,” she recalled. “Like Judah came up and said, ‘Your son was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.’ They just kept coming and telling me the same thing. All of his peer group looked up to him.”
One week before Dustin’s death, Valerie was sitting quietly by her living room window, lights off, as a gentle rain fell outside. Dustin walked in and sat next to her. As he reached to turn on a lamp, Valerie told him, “No, Dust. I like natural light. Natural light is good.” Together, silently, they watched the raindrops run down the windowpane.
Dustin was nineteen when he died. He had come home on a Friday night and walked into Valerie’s bedroom, where they talked briefly and then hugged goodnight. “I love you,” Valerie told him. “I love you, too,” Dustin replied. To Valerie’s surprise, Dustin let her kiss him; he wasn’t usually a touchy-feely type of person.
In the morning Valerie drove across Lake Pontchartrain and into New Orleans. On her way home that evening, as the causeway once again lifted her above the water, “I looked to my left — pink clouds, a beautiful sunset,” she remembered. “Sometimes, I wonder if that wasn’t the exact moment Dustin died.”
When Valerie arrived home, her dog, Tessie, came running to greet her, just as she always did. “Hey Tessie, how are you doing?” Valerie asked, patting her on the head. The house was quiet; Valerie assumed Dustin was out. Then “I opened the door to Dustin’s room. He was lying on his bed with his feet on the floor, but like he had fallen back. He had both arms out to his sides, and his head was turned to the right. When you’re a parent, from the time you have the little baby — I don’t care how old they get — you’re always going into their room and checking to make sure they’re still breathing. It’s a mother thing. I walked over to him, and I could see he wasn’t breathing! I said, ‘Hey, Dust.’ No answer. I screamed it louder. ‘Hey, Dust!’ No answer. I kept screaming it louder and louder until it was echoing in the room. I picked up the dog and threw her over by Dustin to see what she would do. She didn’t even blink at him. He wasn’t there for her. “I ran into the living room, saying to myself, God no! This can’t be happening! This is a nightmare! This isn’t true! I thought, If I’m really emphatic about this and I say it emphatically … ”
Just then Valerie saw her husband’s headlights in the driveway. “Dustin’s not breathing!” she shouted from the door. Her husband rushed inside and administered CPR. “Come on, Dustin! Come on, man!” he yelled as he pounded Dustin’s chest. Meanwhile, Valerie called 911, then ran outside to wait for the ambulance. When the paramedics arrived, they seemed to Valerie to be moving in slow motion. She pushed them into the house, yelling, “Hurry! Hurry!”
Not long thereafter the paramedics told Valerie that Dustin was dead. The cause of death, they said, had been an accidental drug overdose.
“Dustin had just taken his exams in college, and he was happy,” Valerie said sadly. “He had gotten good grades. He had gone out to celebrate. He had just written me a beautiful letter for Mother’s Day telling me how much he loved me. He’d never written one like that. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have your child there one day, and then all of a sudden they’re gone.”
On the day of Dustin’s wake, Vicki, Valerie’s sister, came to Valerie’s home with something important to share. “Valerie, Dustin came to me last night. I never felt that much joy and happiness in my life. He was brilliant. He was light. And he said, ‘Aunt Vicki, tell my mom I’m natural light.’ I’m sorry, Valerie. I don’t know what that means.”
“I was so happy!” Valerie exclaimed. “It was Dustin’s way of confirming through the person I trust more than anybody in the world that he was alive and well.”
Two nights later, Valerie suddenly awoke from a sound sleep. “At the moment I woke up, I lifted,” she said. “It wasn’t my body that lifted; it was me. At the moment I lifted, I felt the essence of my child. There was no time to it. I knew everything all at once. There was an energy. It was the most powerful thing I have ever felt! I was him, and he was me, and I knew everything about him in those few seconds. He was happy. I knew that. I could feel it.”
Dustin’s death was the second devastating loss in Valerie’s life.
Twelve years earlier, Valerie had been working as a waitress and attending college. As classes let out one day, she decided to visit to her cousin Lorraine’s husband, Brad, who worked near the school. On that day, Brad’s friend D.C. was also visiting. Brad introduced them; Valerie thought nothing of it.
Brad called Valerie later to say that he and D.C. had plans to go to a casino in a few days. Would she like to join them? “Sure, that would be great,” she told Brad. When the appointed night came and her doorbell rang, Valerie opened the door to find only D.C standing there. Although D.C. denied it, Brad had — at D.C.’s request — bowed out so they might have their first date.
Valerie and D.C. began to fall in love that night. “It did seem that I’d known him before,” Valerie said wistfully. Their affection for each other grew quickly. “Every minute we spent together was romantic. Our relationship was very much in the moment because we didn’t know when he’d get called offshore.”
D.C. was a commercial diver who maintained the pipelines to oilrigs. The work is dangerous and physically taxing, so much so that most divers don’t continue that kind of work beyond their forties. Often, they don’t know when they’ll receive their next assignment. “You have to set up your whole life around the fact that these men could be gone a week or two months at a moment’s notice,” Valerie said.
“We started going out September 28,” she recalled. “On February 17, D.C. proposed. We were in my condo, sitting on the bed, talking. There was a cardinal in the tree outside. D.C. said, ‘They always travel in pairs. Just watch a minute, and you’ll see the mate come.’ And sure enough, we did. So, really quiet, he said, ‘When are you going to marry me?’ I said, ‘As soon as you want me to marry you!’ I was so excited!”
Less than an hour after he proposed, D.C. was called for a diving assignment. He and Valerie drove across the causeway to his apartment, where he packed his scuba gear. Johnny, D.C.’s friend and fellow diver, picked him up. “I can picture it like it was yesterday,” said Valerie. “He got in the truck with Johnny. I stood in the street and waved. And that was the last time I ever saw him.”
Two days later, as Valerie was waiting tables, she looked up and saw Brad and Lorraine. They pulled her into the restaurant’s empty wine room. “Valerie, there’s been a terrible accident,” Brad told her. “D.C.’s dead.”
“No, he can’t be dead!” Valerie screamed. “He just asked me to marry him!”
Lorraine and Brad, who had not yet heard about the engagement, stared at each other in disbelief.
The next day Valerie received a letter from the diving company:
At approximately 1400 hours, first diver Dave Copeland descended to a depth of 285 feet. Over the loudspeaker he voiced the desire to come above.
The letter stated that a series of grunts was then heard and that Johnny was sent to investigate. When he arrived D.C. looked into his eyes for an instant, then pushed him away. Johnny would later say that he knew in that moment D.C. was going to die. Then D.C. pulled his helmet off.
“He wasn’t committing suicide,” Valerie explained. “He had been diving for fifteen years, so he was a pro. He knew something was terribly wrong.”
Valerie still isn’t sure what happened. She does know that about a week earlier, D.C. and Johnny had been watching a football game at Brad’s house. “When D.C. came over later that night,” Valerie remembered, “he had a huge knot on his forehead. I said, ‘What happened to you?’ He said, ‘I’m just so happy I met you. I was thanking Brad, and we were cutting up and butting heads.’ I suspect that when he butted his head — which ironically he did because he was so much in love with me — he had a hairline fracture or concussion that gave him incredible pressure when he went down there.”
The pain from D.C.’s death was so overwhelming that, for a short time, Valerie turned to alcohol to anesthetize herself. It took two years, she said, until she felt normal again.
“Before he died,” Valerie added, “we were sitting on the couch, and he looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry it took me so long to find you. I promise I won’t take so long next time.’ I didn’t question it.
“He was my real love. They don’t walk through your front door every day. I lost my future, or so it seemed to me.”
>>>Next Valerie’s Session with Deb DeBari
Photo credit Krzysztof Falkowsk
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