Redemption in the Dark

By Regina Bogle

What makes healing happen? Is it a moment or a lifetime of moments? Can departed loved ones play a role from the other side of the Veil? Perhaps, a past life is waiting to be remembered…

 

So often, our most significant and meaningful experiences begin, unfold, and end in unseen places. In their seemingly sudden emergence into consciousness, we may pause to wonder…

 

Redemption in the Dark is the story of Arielle who as a child suffered the loss of her beloved grandparents. In her response to the inexplicable and persistent feelings of fear, grief, and despair that plague her throughout her life, she explores many traditional as well as unconventional modalities in her quest to heal. Through her encounters with mentors, psychotherapists, astrologers, and energy medicine practitioners, she learns about her own empathic abilities and how they have impacted her feeling-based memories. Later, when she works with shamans, she discovers her attunement to life beyond the Veil, a vivid past-life memory explains many of her ongoing struggles, and unhealed ancestral wounds reveal their poignant contributions to her life's unfolding. All of these experiences not only explain the roots of her heartache; they guide her in how to heal. Ultimately, she learns to trust her capacity to journey into hidden places where she consciously reclaims the power of her heart and retrieves and redeems the light of her soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regina Bogle
• Release date: Jan 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781943190256

Book preview

1

The End

She always loved the dark. The twinkling stars in their plentitude as splayed across the night sky never failed to capture her imagination. The Pleiades in particular often sparked a wonder: perhaps they were her true home. A full moon sharing its light on gently rippling water evoked in her the breath of awe. The skyward tilt of her moonlit face reveled in a soft evening breeze … the perfect place to die.

She held that wishful vision for most of her life. She thought about death for most of her life as well, wishing it would come quickly during the first half. The second half had morphed into a big surprise, but now it, too, was finished. Her last breath awaited her final appreciative gaze upon the scene of her dreams. She would take the peace of it with her to the Other World … along with the memories, the lessons and, most importantly, the love.

Throughout her life, from childhood fairy tales to adult myths and the personal biographies of clients and friends, she had always valued stories. This was hers …

2

Germination

The seed of a person springs from multitudinous lines of ancestors eventually converging into two people who happen to meet and mate. She knew her people came from several countries: England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; Italy and Greece. Cold and hot. Reserved and effusive. Distant and enmeshed. The gifts, talents, traits, appearance, intelligence, sensitivity, and ancestral karma jockeyed and bundled for manifestation at just the right moment. Her soul orchestrated it perfectly. She would have her astrological birth chart for navigational guidance during this long trek from home. The moon and stars and all the solar system’s planets accompanied her on her earthly journey from beginning to end.

In order to meet the appointed time of her birth, conception needed to happen at just the right moment as well. Her parents complied from Love’s point of view. They caught up with the social expectations later. The families attended her early arrival with welcome and judgment. She would dance with polarities for the rest of her life.

3

Roots

Michele

Italian sunshine warms the heart, blesses the making of babies, and helps plants and people grow. But in the early 1900’s, some people were poor and times were hard. America promised opportunity, beckoning the dreamer and the desperado to venture across the great ocean. At 14 years of age, Michele knew how to trick his father, forge his signature, and get himself on one of the boats to the promised land. He came to Philadelphia and worked as a tailor in a factory. He matured into a quiet man who cultivated roses, loved his growing family and his dog, and worked hard to support them through the Great Depression. In his basement he could pickle some delicacies and make a perfectly fitting suit without ever measuring the man. Despite his seeming reticence, his extensive kinsfolk loved him. When he eventually died, the receiving line for his funeral wound its way down several South Philadelphia blocks.

Faustina

Faustina’s father came to America from those same sun-soaked Italian shores. He worked in the West Virginia coal mines until he could send enough money for his wife and children to join him. Just one year after their arrival, the mine collapsed leaving his wife, Maria, to raise their children and a newborn alone in a foreign land. They moved to Philadelphia where Faustina found work in a sewing mill and eventually met Michele. They married before too long and had seven living children. She never learned to write or speak much English, but she could read the American newspaper. She later entertained her obvious intelligence by instigating fairly regular upheavals among their four daughters. As matriarch, she expected her ever expanding family to gather every Sunday in her home in North Philadelphia. Adults spoke Italian in the kitchen where she held reign. The grandchildren were entertained in the living room by their in-law uncle who probably much preferred Go Fish! to the fishy business that went on in that kitchen.

Michael

Michele and Faustina’s fifth child and second son, Michael, grew up during the Depression and learned at an early age how to hustle. He gave all the proceeds from his various part-time jobs to his mother to support his family’s needs. At the local public high school, his athletic reputation far exceeded his academic performance. In fine family tradition, Michael forged his father’s signature to play baseball. On the football team, they sent him onto the field to take out the fierce opposition that others could not circumvent. His math skills were a carefully guarded secret that delayed his graduation one year. In other words, he flunked, on purpose, to continue his involvement in sports. The army nabbed him before he could walk down the graduation aisle, however. He played baseball on their team until D-Day.

Charles

Charles grew up in Manayunk, a section of Philadelphia where his ancestors populated St. John’s Cemetery as far back as their exodus from Ireland’s potato famine. His father appreciated spirits and used them to manage his wife’s sudden death. A heart attack overtook her while she cooked at the stove, stirring the stew with one hand and holding their two-year-old son with the other. As a young teenager, the oldest of their brood went to work to support the family, while Charles, the second oldest, quit grade school to stay home and save his younger siblings from an orphanage. His father eventually married a German woman who restored some semblance of order to the home, but not in time for Charles to fulfill his dream of becoming a physician. Instead, he installed carpets and later founded his own business. His meticulous nature made a success of the venture and pervaded every aspect of his life and his work.

Ethel

Ethel lived nearby and helped her struggling childhood friend Charles as best she could. All accounts described her mother, Helen, as a pip. When Helen threw the possessions of Ethel’s sister out the window to protest her intended marriage, this only reinforced their mother’s reputation. Helen also divorced their father at a time when women did not do such things. To this day, no one knows if Ethel’s father really was guilty of alcoholism and abuse as charged. Ethel later married Charles and cared for her father in their home. Even though no one would corroborate any of those allegations, the divorce papers recorded all the nasty details for posterity. Sometimes, such stories take on a life of their own. They permeate the ancestral line and support beliefs that need a future healing.

Myra

After Charles and Ethel married, they had three children. Because Ethel liked to keep her children close, she insisted that Myra, her oldest, stay home an extra year before releasing her to the wilds of first grade at the local Catholic parish. Myra loved music and learned to play piano. She also played violin in the high school orchestra. When she turned 21, her sweetheart since seventh grade became her husband. Sadly, his untimely death two years later brought grief to their whole extended family. Myra then wanted to become a nurse and join the WAVES, but her father refused to give his permission. Instead, she worked as the bookkeeper in his carpet business. One year after her husband’s death, Myra felt ready to consider the suggestion of her sister’s husband to meet his friend Michael.

Michael and Myra

Meanwhile, Michael had several dates lined up when his mother insisted that he call that girl!! Reluctantly, he cancelled one of his dates and obeyed his mother’s command. They made plans to double date with Myra’s sister and husband and go dancing. Michael arrived at Myra’s doorstep as the blind date even as his awestruck gaze beheld her beauty.

As they partnered for the Tango later that night, he said to her: You will laugh, but I predict that one year from now we will be married.

She did laugh. They were married a little more than one year later. It might have been one year to the day if Charles had given his blessing when Michael respectfully requested to marry his daughter. Charles didn’t though. Thus, the seed was planted before their wedding three months later.

4

Stem

While a hurricane raged outdoors, Arielle arrived as a separate being on the earth plane through a fog of ether in a big inner-city hospital. She met her mother, Myra, face to face after the fog lifted. Her first breath coincided with Neptune aligning with the Sun in the evening Libra sky. Arielle would experience much Neptunian sensitivity for the whole of her life, only coming to appreciate what that meant for her much, much later. In the meantime, that empathic part of her nature hid in the dark.

No doubt her parents wanted her and loved her. The day after her birth, however, her father found himself unemployed. Under those circumstances, Michael did what he knew to do. He hustled and offered to do odd jobs in the neighborhood until his work situation improved.

Life as an infant has its perks if one is lucky enough to be born into a loving, healthy family. Yet most people remember nothing of their infancy, no matter how good or bad it was. Perhaps family members tell stories that a child-turned-adult may live by. Not until her early thirties did Arielle discover some details regarding her distant past.

She grew up in a world of feeling where no one talked about how they felt. Her mother’s grief from the loss of her first husband, her father’s worry about how to support his family, his occasional angry outbursts, and the whispers about her conception prior to marriage filled the space around and within her, impacting her sense of the world. She carried memories of her father trying to rock her to sleep on a warm summer afternoon. How odd that she remembered her push against his chest to back away from how he felt to her, his push upon her back to bring her close – then viewing the rest of the scene from the other side of the room. Was she learning to dissociate even then?

She also remembered lying in her crib on her tummy and hearing the doorbell ring. She pushed herself up to raise her head, while her consciousness went into the hallway to see the doorbell chime hanging on the wall of the stairway. She heard adults gather at the front door. Her memory had no words, only sights, sounds, and physical sensations. It took her more than 50 years to appreciate just how fluid her consciousness could be.

Her sister, Marcie, joined the family fifteen months later, and Arielle had to learn to share her parents’ attention. Yet as they grew, life took on an air of enchantment whenever their grandmother Ethel shepherded them to amusement rides, ballet performances, and picnics on her living room floor. During one such picnic, Ethel was the one to receive the call on the black telephone announcing the birth of their brother, George. When Arielle was five turning six, she remembered his ceremonious arrival into their home, but even more so the muddled, mixed feelings that accompanied the event. She had no words for those feelings then. Just the memory filled with the physical sensations they sparked.

Arielle didn’t know that less than two years before her brother’s birth, her beloved grandmother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had had a mastectomy. She also didn’t know that a recurrence in her other breast was brewing when George made his home debut. Her grandfather knew, however. Given the many losses of his own childhood, he likely couldn’t handle it. Charles coped as his father had done before him: he drank. Martinis to be exact. Arielle bore the memory of her grandfather, dressed in a three-piece suit, holding his martini, olive included. It offered a much better memory than what came later.

He grew ill. Myra went to their home to help Ethel clean the house and take care of Charles, and Arielle accompanied her. Her grandfather lay prostrate on the sofa, gaunt and covered in a gray-maroon-plaid blanket, seeming to be in agony, emotional more than physical.

Arielle remembered asking her mother, What’s wrong with Grandpop, Mommy?

Her mother replied, He’s sick, honey.

Arielle also remembered his funeral not long after.

This all transpired a few months after Arielle began first grade at the same school her mother had attended. The special perk of each school day included having lunch in her grandmother’s kitchen just half a block away. Ethel would provide hamburgers served on white bread with the crust cut off (Arielle didn’t like the crust), pitted black olives (one for each finger of Arielle’s right hand), and a piece of striped chewing gum – except on Fridays when peanut butter and jelly would be served instead. This welcomed island of predictability soothed Arielle’s sensitive soul as autumn came and went.

Still, she had some challenges to face. One day, they forgot to trash the chewing gum before returning to school, and a boy told on Arielle. It was embarrassing but worth it because her grandmother had given her the treat. When boys teased Arielle and pushed her to the ground on her walk home from school, her grandmother morphed into a fierce protector who came to her classroom the very next day to defend her. To Arielle, Grandmom offered love, protection and magic. What more could one ask for in life?

With the arrival of winter, another memory – this one of a snowy day when the emotional tones were quite heavy and confusing – joined those memories already accumulating in her young brain and heart. She had departed for school, walking as she always did, this time with snow on the ground piled into mounds on the side of the walkways. She stepped into one mound at the corner of her street, and when she stepped out, her boot was missing. She didn’t remember the part about walking home in her exposed sock and shoe. She did remember her mother putting her father on the phone to entertain her sister while her infant brother sat in his crib. Her mother went with her to retrieve the boot before having Arielle continue on her way.

The desperation of the morning pervaded the rest of her trek. She fell once or twice and arrived at the corner of her grandmother’s street, just outside the schoolyard, crying. Older girls came by and asked what was wrong. She stood there paralyzed with indecision: go to school or go to her grandmother’s. With her six-year-old wisdom, she opted for the latter and arrived cold and wet to her grandmother’s welcoming surprise. Only later, as an adult reviewing the memory, did she realize that her grandmother was both grieving and sick. Still, she warmed up Arielle’s smiley-faced mittens on the radiator just as she warmed Arielle’s heart with her presence.

Meanwhile, tensions were mounting at home. Michael would have frequent, unpredictable outbursts of anger that terrified Arielle and confused her. Yet she loved her father dearly. He was the one who made life fun, especially when her grandmother was not around. Myra, on the other hand, had a dining room table full of accounting books and legal papers to sort through in her role as executrix for her father’s estate.

Often Myra was overwhelmed and emotionally elsewhere, even as she still had an infant to care for. Observing her mother, Arielle learned how to emotionally retreat; unlike her mother, she opted to hide in the child’s world of fantasy. She had little interest in playing nurturer to baby dolls, however. Instead, she much preferred sitting her dolls in rows and teaching them the things she was learning in school.

As the weeks passed, Ethel’s medical condition worsened. Eventually, she came to live with Arielle’s family, and Myra cared for her mother, now bedridden. Arielle remembered standing a few feet from the foot of the bed, watching her mother give her grandmother a bedpan. The feeling part of that memory, she later came to realize, included her grandmother’s feelings for her. Helplessness, not to mention all its associated emotions, became an issue that needed healing attention. That healing did not come for decades, however. In the meantime, Arielle made many life decisions in an attempt to manage those feelings (to be told later in the tale). At the time, however, nothing was said about any of this …or at least nothing that Arielle remembered.

More time passed and Ethel needed to be hospitalized. Arielle’s first grade nun suggested that she make a Valentine’s Day card for her grandmother along with the one for her parents. Arielle drew violet frills around the heart – her grandmother’s favorite color. Otherwise, she remembered nothing about the winter months, not even what she did for lunch when her grandmother could no longer provide it. Oddly, Myra couldn’t remember either. It remained a blank for both of them for the rest of their lives.

In May, the inevitable occurred. They released Ethel from the ventilator. Arielle remembered sitting midway up the stairs, looking down on the scene in the living room, when the news came that Ethel no longer lived on the earth plane. Arielle held on to the wooden balusters, frozen in time and space. While she grappled to understand it, deep in her core she knew life would never be the same …

5

Air

Her family made the decision. The physical body that once housed Ethel’s soul and consciousness no longer functioned. The doctors turned off the ventilator. Within the hour, her final agonal breath became the last gift she gave to the planet.

Ethel’s consciousness was now free to roam the ethers. The first consciousness to greet her was Charles. Neither one had a body any longer. Neither one needed language to communicate, but Ethel had to reorient herself to this reality. Her soul remembered it, of course. This was more like the Truth she had known eternally. Still, having a body does something to one’s awareness and she needed to regroup.

Ethel took inventory: no body, no discomfort, no sensations at all. No gut-wrenching emotions. Just a sense of light, awareness, and peace. The comfort of Charles’ presence felt just as good as it always had – even better, actually. No worries or pressures or complexities. Just simple love. She realized, not for the first time, that their love predated their meeting during this last lifetime and that their love would go on no matter what else transpired.

As she continued to adapt to this new territory of sorts, she realized they were not alone. What she had called angels on earth surrounded them now. It truly felt heavenly, peaceful, filled with love. She sensed that Charles wasn’t completely happy, however. In wordless ways, she asked, What’s wrong?

Wordlessly, he responded: I abandoned you. I am so deeply sorry.

She replied, I understand why, Charles. I forgive you. You know I forgave you even while I lived on earth. You need to forgive yourself.

Charles confessed, Ethel, I can’t. I’ve come to realize I also abandoned Myra to a financial nightmare, not to mention our other children who are already arguing with her. Our youngest, soon to graduate from college, will be on his own because I checked out. And the grandchildren … what will become of them? I have left them a legacy I’m not proud of. I need to make amends.

Ethel responded, How can I help you? We have always met our challenges together.

Charles agreed then said, Thank you, Love, but you deserve better. Your consciousness can now move on to eternal peace. I’ll catch up with you once I have done my work to atone.

Ethel disagreed: I have free will and I choose to stay with you, Charles. Besides, you know I’ve always enjoyed keeping a watchful eye on the kids. As they grow, I want to see what a soul can do from this side of the Veil to help them know a greater Love. Will you let me accompany you?

With some relief Charles replied, Of course, Ethel! You’ve always been there for me, and I suspect your guidance will help me figure all this out faster. I trust you know how much I love your company, even without a body.

I’m still getting used to that! Ethel exclaimed. Actually, Charles, I’m sensing this will be fun.

Charles then cautioned her: "I must tell you that there is one rule here that cannot be broken. If you are going to join me, Ethel, you have to know it and promise to keep it. This path we take has incredible joys, but it also can be heartbreaking. Earthly life involves both states, and as we watch, we cannot intervene unless asked. You are setting yourself up for a kind