Soul Companion: A Memoir

Acknowledgements

As anyone who has ever written a book knows, it takes at least a village…. I have many people for whom I have great gratitude. First, to my writers’ group, The Assisi Mystery School, for giving me feedback on the many drafts of each header1 over a five year period—Shoshana Alexander, our skilled coach who convinced me to write a memoir, and writers Bill Kastenberg, Barbara Shor and Carolyn Shaffer.

Connie Crow did an in-depth first edit of the manuscript. I asked several of my friends to read the manuscript and give me feedback, all very helpful—Jude Corbin, Susan Edmonds, Jerrye Wright, Elin Babcock, Ronda Barker, Jean Bakewell, Kay Cutter, Sandie Black, Rebecca Kay, Pam Derby, Kathy Apple, and Nancy Wynkoop.

I wish to honor Mike and Elin Babcock for their deep generosity. I am very grateful to Ginna and David Gordon at Lucky Valley Press who took my manuscript, did much more editing, and made it into this book.

Debra Thornton, of Debra Thornton Photography, took wonderful photos of Puffin and me for the book cover. Thank you, Debra.

Thank you all, for your help and support as I, in Shoshana’s words, first became a writer and then an author.

Preface

This preface will end well. I promise it will. This book is joyful, with astonishing, life-expanding, jaw-dropping adventures you will not want to miss. But, I start here—

There was a time, almost five decades ago, when I was a 28-year-old head nurse of a coronary intensive care unit. The hospital was a prestigious and innovative place to work and I loved my job, the staff and doctors, and especially our patients and their families.

One ordinary day, we admitted Paul to our unit, a 45-year-old man with a life-threatening heart rhythm problem. The paramedics had shocked his heart back into a normal rhythm at his home and then again several times in the ambulance as his wife, Joanne, sat by his side. His heart kept going back into ventricular tachycardia—a rhythm that would not sustain his life more than a few minutes. Over the next few days, we had to shock his heart several more times, before the doctors were able to come up with the right combination of medications to keep him in a normal rhythm.

However, Paul was re-admitted to our unit every few months for the next two years for the same heart rhythm problem. We all came to adore Paul, a happy, funny fellow with bright blue eyes. He and Joanne had a joyful relationship, with laughter and pranks going on in his room.

And yet, he still went into the chaotic heart rhythm. He never lost consciousness as we came running into his room, pushing the defibrillator to his bedside, putting the paddles on his chest and shocking him, once or several times with each episode. He was always awake and it was very painful to endure. I have heard it is like being kicked in the chest by a horse. I have never been defibrillated but I have been kicked by a horse. It was painful!

Paul occasionally became less aware (as his body was not getting oxygen) until we could get him back into a normal heart rhythm. When we did get him back to a regular heartbeat, he joked about the experience.

This was a time long before implantable defibrillators and medications that could control his heart rhythm. The only treatment that worked was defibrillation, time and time again.

Each July, a new group of residents rotated onto our unit to work alongside the cardiologists. About two years after Paul became a regular customer in our coronary ICU, a new group of resident doctors began the cardiology service. It was a time for the team of doctors to review the medical records of our frequently admitted patients and decide on any new approaches to their care. The head resident would let me know about the new approaches for each of the returning patients.

I was shocked when it came to Paul. The team of doctors decided that the next time he was admitted to our unit, we were not to defibrillate him when he went into his chaotic heart rhythm. We were to let him die. The reason was that over those two years his heart had gotten more and more damaged and there was nothing in medicine or surgery that could help Paul. His only option was death—sooner or later.

I could not accept that plan! I went to the chief cardiologist to present my case for Paul. But the chief agreed with the plan. Nothing more could be done to save Paul’s life.

This was also a time in our cultural history when patients were generally not told their diagnosis or that they were going to die. This was true in Paul’s case. He was not told that we would not defibrillate him. And we were not to tell him. His wife knew the plan but was also not to tell him. How hard that must have been for her!

I could not imagine giving any of our RNs the terrible responsibility of staying at Paul’s bedside and not running to get the defibrillator to shock him back to life. It was too much to ask. As the head nurse, I didn’t take patient assignments so I could manage the whole unit, but I decided to take Paul as my patient the next time he was admitted.

And so I did, some weeks later. Paul had been defibrillated at home by the paramedics and admitted to our unit, as usual. I assigned him to me.

A couple of days later, while I was caring for him, he went back into that chaotic rhythm. I stood at his bedside and held his hand. Paul looked up at me with his beautiful blue eyes and anxiously said, Judy, go get the defibrillator! He said it several times, pleading with me to defibrillate him. I kept saying, It is going to be OK, Paul. But it was definitely not okay with me. I could not get the defibrillator because of the doctor’s orders. I would have done it anyway if I had really disagreed with the plan—but I didn’t disagree. I knew we could not save our beloved Paul—in the end, we could not keep him alive.

So, I just stood there, holding his hand and saying it was going to be OK. I listened to Paul beg me to go get the defibrillator. I looked into his eyes—and did not tell him I was letting him die. It seemed to take an eternity for him to lose consciousness. He finally did stop breathing and that chaotic rhythm came to an end. Joanne came in a few minutes later and understood what had happened. She was broken hearted, as were all of the staff—as was I.

I carried that guilt and pain of Paul’s death until December of 2012. At the time, I was in a place called the Monroe Institute in Virginia, to learn how to go to the Other Side of the Veil—the veil that separates our physical lives from physical death and whatever comes after that. All of this is explained in detail in Soul Companion, A Memoir.

But right now, I want to share how my guilt and pain over Paul’s death evaporated on my second day at the Institute. We were learning how to experience greatly expanded levels of awareness and consciousness as we listened to specifically created CDs which helped us get into a deep meditative state. Guided by Robert Monroe’s voice on the CD, we went to an expanded level of awareness he called Focus 15, where we would experience—no time—or all time—or past, present and future—all together.

As I took my first trip to that extraordinary level of awareness of No Time–All Time, I saw two people standing on a vibrant, shimmering, white bridge. They also shimmered with Golden Light—Light so brilliant I thought I would melt. They seemed familiar but were much less dense than people in physical bodies. These two Beautiful, Joyful Beings were laughing. As I came closer to them, there was handsome blued-eyed Paul and his joyful, radiant wife, Joanne. They were waiting for me—for me! They embraced me. I never felt so unconditionally loved and held before in my life. But I wasn’t exactly in my life—I was in a place beyond this physical existence and beyond this Earth.

As I was held and loved by them, Paul and Joanne told me I was not at fault for Paul’s death; that they had planned what would happen in Paul’s life before they each came into that lifetime. Paul’s life and death happened just as they had planned it. And I was part of the planning—each of us met on the Other Side before we were born into this lifetime. We planned that whole part of our lives together—where we would intersect and how I would lovingly support Paul in his death.

I stayed in the loving, joyful presence of Paul and Joanne for some time and then, Robert Monroe’s voice directed us back to this time and this space—back to the Monroe Institute and December 2012.

I came out of that experience sobbing, with wave upon wave of gratitude for the release of decades of guilt and pain over my handling of Paul’s death. Paul and Joanne took it from me that day. I understood Paul’s death at a deeper level than ever before.

There is more Healing, Love, Joy, Peace and Freedom to come in the pages of Soul Companion. I hope you enjoy it as much as I am enjoying sharing it. And I hope you have less fear of death and dying for having read it.

Judy Hilyard, RN, MN

February, 2020

Ashland, Oregon

Chapter 1

No Longer Lost

Jim paces around on an abandoned battlefield, mumbling to himself. As I view the field to the horizon in all directions, it is dirt brown and littered with war machinery in all stages of brokenness. There are small columns of smoke slowly rising from scattered areas on the field. The air and sky have a gray-brown hue. In a frenzied manner, Jim moves between machinery and the burned and fallen trees, continually repeating to himself, I don’t want to die. I don’t want my body in pieces.

This was the beginning of my time with Jim on the Other Side of the Veil that separates this existence from the Afterlife.

It was January of 2013 and I was at the Monroe Institute in Virginia, a participant in the Lifeline program. I was in my isolation booth with headphones on, listening to a Hemi-Synchronization CD broadcasting to all 21 of us taking that Monroe program. We each had an isolation booth and were connected to our facilitators by the headphones. The CD helped us into a deep meditative state where we could be aware of an existence beyond normal consciousness.

Our work in this Monroe program was to find people who had died but were caught up in a kind of mind-loop and didn’t know they were physically dead. They were alone and trapped in an in-between space or dimension. Our two facilitators prepared us the previous day to retrieve Souls that had died but were stuck in a space Robert Monroe called Focus 23.

The facilitators said we needed to be able to do two things when we met these trapped Souls. First, get their attention because they were caught in a mind-loop and would have a hard time noticing anything outside their own mental imaginings. Second, give them a compelling reason to come with us to a place where they could get help.

Jim was the first person I encountered during that expanded awareness process and the first person I was able to retrieve and move to the very loving and creative level of existence in the Afterlife called Focus 27.

Jim, and the place where I saw him, were incredibly vivid to me although it was not in what we could experience in normal awareness. I experienced myself on that battlefield. I could see the destruction all around me. I could smell the smoldering fires. There were no sounds I was aware of—more of an eerie stillness. I sensed that if I took a step, the dirt under my feet would billow up around me, a fine dirty dust that seemed to cover everything. I knew I was not in a physical environment but it felt very real.

I recognized Jim as a patient I took care of in an intensive care unit (ICU) in Connecticut 46 years earlier. I didn’t remember why he was in the ICU but I vividly remembered him and his frantic way of being. Jim was frightened of everything—people, pills, bed linens and IV bottles. He shook and quivered and reacted with panic to almost any interaction.

At the time I took care of Jim, I was a new nurse in my early twenties. I was a stoic New Englander. I couldn’t understand or appreciate Jim’s high level of fear and nervousness. And then, one day he told me his story and that changed everything for me.

He was a private in the army during World War II. His job was to go onto battlefields after the battles and pick up what he could find of American soldiers, sometimes a whole body, but more often, body parts. This psychologically damaged him too greatly to fulfill any future life he might have wanted.

As I arrived on the battlefield to connect with Jim, I had two Guides with me, my white Arabian horse, Ben and my white Samoyed dog, Kismet. Both of them died years before but had come forward during my training to assist me in retrieving Souls. Our facilitators asked us to invite helpers from the Other Side to be with us in this work. It didn’t surprise me that they would show up to help because I had a deep and loving connection with both of them during their lives.

A third Guide who came forward at my request was a Being I called Samantha. She didn’t seem to have a name. I thought maybe it was because her function was more universal than individual. She was very gentle and loving and new to me. Samantha would be in Focus 27 to meet me when I arrived with those I retrieved. She would take them to wherever they needed to go next. What I would find out later at the Monroe Institute was that any guides and helpers who do come forward are very likely to be guides who have known us and have been with us forever. That included Ben and Kismet.

As Ben, Kismet and I appear on the battlefield, Jim is shocked to see a white horse and a white dog. He says, What are these animals doing here? They could get hurt and they are certainly going to get dirty.

I tell him that we are there to help him. Jim lets out a deep breath, as if he is starting to relax.

As his shoulders begin to drop, he says to me, I am exhausted and I want to find some place to sit down. There is nothing to sit down on here without getting covered with dirt.

I explain, I can take you to a place where you can really rest, if you would like.

Yes, ma’am, I would love that. Thank you for your kindness.

While we are talking, Jim is closely eyeing my horse, Ben. I tell him he may ride Ben to where we are going. He jumps up onto Ben and we go to Focus 27.

Samantha is there to meet us. Jim hops off of Ben and salutes Samantha, saying, What are you doing here, Sir? My understanding is that Jim sees Samantha as an officer from his platoon.

During my time with Jim and all the others since then, I understand immediately what a person is thinking, feeling and saying while I am in the expanded level of awareness. Robert Monroe called it non-verbal communication and it works no matter what language the person spoke during their lifetime. There is nothing hidden on the Other Side of this reality. Thoughts, feelings and intentions are transmitted without barrier or time delay.

Samantha tells Jim she is there to help. As she says that, fanning out behind her as far as I could see, American soldiers in uniform come into view and all salute Jim at once. The awareness comes to me that these are soldiers whose bodies or body parts had been retrieved by Jim in his work during World War II.

I stand to the side of Jim. I can see him, Samantha and all of the soldiers saluting him. I weep with Compassion and Understanding for him and all those dead soldiers. Jim seems stunned by their recognition of his service. Tears roll down his face, leaving streaks of clean white skin under the dirt accumulated on the battlefield. In time, all of the soldiers surround Jim and escort him to a beautiful Healing Center.

The scene faded and I was back in my isolation booth. As I came out of that expanded awareness there were tears running down my cheeks. The love and compassion I felt for Jim was deeper than any I could remember in my life up to that time. I was moved by the honor and gratitude given to Jim by the soldiers. It was the first of hundreds of experiences I have witnessed of a depth of love, understanding and compassion demonstrated by Beings on the Other Side of this Time and this Space.

The chapters to follow will describe my journey from the person I was to who I am now—a Soul Companion. It has been a winding journey, as life journeys usually are for us Humans. I am grateful! And it will end wonderfully!

Chapter 2

A Celtic Shock

When you came here a few days ago, you were broken hearted. Now you are broken open, John said. He was right on both counts. I sat beside this kind social worker all four days of the beginning of an apprenticeship in the Anam Cara tradition. We were learning an ancient way of working with the dying, a practice developed in sixth-century Celtic Europe, that would one day be known as Hospice Care. Little did I know that first day I was being broken open to a new life.

Anam Cara is a Celtic term meaning Soul Friend, a loving companion, friend and guide who walks with another through their challenges and concerns as they prepare for death. It was a common custom among the Celts for an Anam Cara to companion a person as they resolved the grief of a lifetime in order to enter a peaceful death. These ancient roles were revived and developed into a modern-day approach by Richard Groves, founder of the