Ask Amy: Grieving While Not Believing In Death

Q:  After Ken Wapnick passed away, you wrote on Facebook that you will cry as much as you need to.  Why do you feel like crying if you are truly applying the Course, which teaches us that death is not real?

A:  What I wrote on Facebook was, “Only his form is gone, but I will cry as much as I need to, even as my mind remains clear that Ken is always with us, always.”

Intellectually and intuitively I know that we are spirit, there is no death, there is no world, there is no body, and there is nothing to fear.  But I am not yet fully established in this Knowing.  Early in the Text we’re told, “The body is merely part of your experience in the physical world.  Those who [deny its existence] are engaging in a particularly unworthy form of denial.” (T-2.IV.3:8, 11)

When I heard that Ken had died, there was an immediate reaction in the body.  It could have reinforced the ego’s agenda, but because I was willing to use it for the Holy Spirit’s purpose it became a release from the belief in loss.

Tears came.  I didn’t fight them.  They were sweet with Love.  Somehow, there was a paradoxical experience of sorrow without pain.  The result is an increased conviction that we are a Oneness joined as One.

In Chapter 21 we are asked, “What if you looked within and saw no sin?  This ‘fearful’ question is the one the ego never asks.”  I looked, with the Holy Spirit, at the ache which moved through the human heart, the sense of disbelief that Ken could be dead because he had always been so youthful and healthy.

I looked at my concern for Gloria, his wife, and his staff at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, who had been with him for almost 40 years.  I looked with the Holy Spirit and trusted that, “The Holy Spirit has the task of undoing what the ego has made.” (T-15.III.5:5)  Peace moved through my body with the quiet knowing that all is well.

I remember asking Ken if he missed Helen, and he said no, there was no need to miss her — she wasn’t gone.  I also asked him how he felt about his stutter, and he said it was nothing, he no longer gave it any thought.

Ken and I shared a similar background, both growing up in New York City, and both entering the fields of psychology and ministry.  To me, he’s “Uncle Ken,” the only family member who doesn’t think I’m crazy for knowing I’m not a person.  I speak in the present tense because there is no past and Ken lives in my heart.  His warmth, his wisdom, his humor — still here.

I turned to him many times to better understand and apply Course principles.  He helped me discern the voice of the ego from the Voice for God.  He helped me “get it” that we are a Mind, not a body; that we are Innocence, guilty of nothing.  He helped me when I first began formally teaching the Course.  The joke was that after I turned to Jesus, I double-checked with Ken.

“Within the dream of bodies and of death, is yet one theme of truth; no more, perhaps, than just a tiny spark, a space of light created in the dark, where God still shines.  And as you see [your brother] shining in the space of light where God abides within the darkness, you will see that God Himself is where his body is.” (T-29.III.3:1, 6)

This is how I choose to see Ken.  As he himself says in his YouTube video called Q & A: Death, “You never were in the body.  What happens when you die is nothing.”

Click here to read my interview with Ken Wapnick.

This Q&A appears in the Ask Amy column from the March-April 2014 issue of Miracles magazine.  Miracles is a well-loved  staple in the ACIM community.  To get a subscription, email [email protected] or call 845-496-9089.  To ask Amy a question, email miracles (at) amytorresacim (dot) com