Musings on testimonies from the Iranian diaspora about recent protests, and on how Americans and Iranians are historically interconnected through Cyrus the Great. Inspired by Saadi’s famous verse: “Human beings are members of a whole.”

History books rarely show the everyday person trying to understand what is happening to their country, or the mothers bidding farewell to their daughters as it falls.

In 1979, my grandmother, a strong pillar of a family of eight, embraced her daughter for what became their last goodbye in Iran. It did not feel like fleeing. It was not supposed to be goodbye.

Soon after, my grandfather, Baba Hossein, appealed to the authorities with dignity as property was confiscated and lives were upended. He remained, in spirit, a soulful citizen of Iran — once called Ariana, the Land of Nobles.

This is not a story offered as an argument, but as witness.

The world is now reacting to the killing of Ali Khamenei. At this critical juncture, some wish he could have been put on trial —and many ask whether this marks the beginning of war or a moment of liberation, or both. But to see it as new is to ignore the war that has never truly ceased.

Iranians, like any culture, have a wide range of opinions. But most agree on one thing: they want freedom from the regime, ideally without war.

There are different types of war: the kind struck by bombs from above, the psychological propaganda war fueled by Islamists and other outside forces on Western media and institutions — and a war from within, a democide: the murder of people by a government that has power over them. There’s even spiritual warfare.

On the whole, standing against all forms of war and for peace is noble. So if the mass killing of protesters in recent years, 47 years of repression, and the spread of Islamism in the West didn’t bring Iran into focus before, why does it suddenly feel urgent now?

Because the conflict and conundrum remind us, for better or for worse, that human beings and their nations are irrevocably interconnected. While debates rage over semantics — whether “we” are at war with no end, or funding a humanitarian intervention, regime change, or rescue operation — for many Iranians, war has long been a condition of daily life: a struggle for material and spiritual survival. That said, one can be cautious about foreign wars and still care about human rights. They are not mutually exclusive. And, peacefully, “we” can be reframed as humanity rather than one people seemingly separate from another.

“For many in this community, there have been a number of escalations, protest movements and international conflicts over the years involving Iran,” reporter Anis Heydari told CBC Daybreak Alberta the morning after our late-night chats.

“There were threats or warnings that senior leaders were at risk. It’s always been a possibility… but I think the fact that he is dead now has caused some surprise that it actually happened.”

Responses to Injustice: Woman, Life, Freedom, Green Movement, & the 2026 Iranian Protests

Since 1979, the leadership of Iran has not acted in the interests of its citizens. Resources are exported while ordinary people suffer shortages of water, food, and infrastructure. Contorted by an extremist form of Shi’a Islam, the regime has carried out imprisonment and torture of women, artists, and religious minorities, deeming dissenters spies and traitors. (The only reason why these “leaders” are not in the recently released files about harming children and young women is that they can get away with and scapegoat their crimes in different networks under Iran’s legalization of child marriage.)

In response to injustice, on January 8, Iranians risked everything for life itself. What set the 2026 Iran Massacre apart — even from Bloody Aban — was its scale. Between the Green Movement after the disputed 2009 election, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising of 2022–23, and intermittent protests sparked by economic and environmental crises, each time protesters revised strategies, the state refined brutality.

In January, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), alongside foreign armed groups (such as Hezbollah and other militia networks that receive support from Tehran), responded with bullets, arrests, and near-total internet blackouts broken only by fragments of connection. At least 30,000 were killed, largely in two days, from Jan. 8 to 9, according to reports citing alleged internal communications from Iran’s Ministry of Health officials, with many more injured or detained.

Executions did not stop despite hollow assurances. Neither did the protests. Bodies lined the streets in bags. Mothers searched for their children; families have been charged for the bullets that killed them. If they cannot pay, the bodies may still be held in morgues or buried without consent, sometimes labeled Basij militia to manipulate statistics. If families did get the body, they may organize a funeral — or bury their beloved in their gardens. Even using state media’s lowest figures, the killings over those days qualify as democide: comparable to Tiananmen Square.

Reza Pahlavi’s Role for a Free Iran

What sets this regime change movement apart is having a central figure for leadership: Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah. Exiled in 1979, he is supported by parts of the diaspora and many inside Iran calling for a transition to democracy. He has said he does not seek the throne, only free elections. Blending nostalgia with forward movement, he greets his supporters as “My Compatriots.”

On Jan. 18, Iranian state broadcasts were briefly hacked to air Reza’s message, urging Iranians and security forces to rise as patriots, not enemies:

“Don’t point your weapons at the people. Join the nation for the freedom of Iran.”

Wherever one stands on his politics, it was a brave, bold, big-hearted move. And it worked. Several regime members publicly defected.

Cyrus the Great & Civilizational Roots in U.S. Freedom of Speech

In times of conflict, philosophers have asked, “What do we owe to each other?”

We may owe more than we realize to Iranians. Long before modern constitutional democracies, Cyrus the Great articulated a vision of governance rooted in dignity for all peoples, which inspired one of the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Freedom of speech was never abstract — it was lived, embodied by those who upheld the right to think, believe, speak, and act according to their conscience. Americans may dedicate our voices, our expressed compassion, and our ears to Iranians in return.

Humanity is more connected than we may think. As the Shirazi poet Saadi wrote:

“Human beings are parts of one body,
In creation they are indeed of one nature.
If a body part is afflicted with pain,
Other body parts uneasy will remain.
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you shall not retain.”

Protestors in Iran, and supporters in other countries, carry the ancient lion and sun flag: the lion for bravery, sovereignty, and kingship; the sun for divine light. Iran’s civilizational roots long predate Islam, bound to the deeply held value of religious freedom, to Persian poetry such as Saadi’s, and the moral imagination of a people whose heritage has weathered conquest, yet whose voice has remained unbroken.

Testimonies from the Iranian Diaspora: Grief, Hope, & Relief

A friend’s parents live in Tehran, and her father has cancer. They could have left the city. They refused. They want to see what happens.

I can’t quite grasp the level of desperation and courage it takes to risk bombs and the grief that comes with them for the possibility of freedom. That mindset doesn’t come from any war machine — it is rooted in the principled goodness of an ancient civilization.

In Farsi, a pleasantry goes: “I’d sacrifice my life for you.”

I think that’s telling.

The city of Mashhad has endured some of the harshest state violence, where waves of grief meet constant courage. Among the names revealed is Hamid Mahdavi, a 38-year-old firefighter widely reported to have been shot while carrying wounded demonstrators.

As phone calls are monitored, connection itself has become risky; many in the diaspora now turn to social media to reach loved ones or communicate indirectly by viewing one another’s posts, finding creative ways to reassure each other amid the turmoil.

For some, these fragments of connection are all that remain between the uncertainty of distance and the depth of loss. Negin Amaro, a raised-Muslim Iranian who moved to the United States as a child, described what those fragile threads of contact carry.

“My family back home is safe for now, but I know friends who lost their family and friends in the protests,” she says.

“One of my friends from Mashhad went to the protests with his uncles and cousins. I have the videos of my friend’s family bleeding on the streets,” Amaro shares. “Several of his family members were killed by the IRGC, and his brother was injured while being carried out by the firefighter Hamid, who was helping protect protestors.”

“My friend was also badly injured by pellet guns, and one of his cousins was arrested and sexually abused by prison guards, ultimately dying as a result. The least I can do is stay in touch with him and make sure his mental health is okay.”

“At the same time, I see videos of people dancing in the streets,” she says, bearing witness. “I know my family is following my Instagram stories because of what they’ve been through and what’s happening now. We’ve been through so much grief and loss all these years, but it feels like we’re finally close to freedom.”

Courage, beauty, and humanity are not simply conceptual — they are lived, breathed, risked, and borne witness to in the flesh. Iranians are not abstractions within geopolitical debate; they hold diverse opinions that deserve fair and equal consideration through democracy.

My mother, Bahereh Khodadoost, once told me:

“Sometimes I feel for 47 years, I have held my breath… can’t wait to exhale soon.”

Her words are not theory. They are the language of poetic justice. Iranians are people of fire and tea, of earth and air, who remember the art of living — who pray, or choose not to; who study, sing, and mourn; who risk everything for the precious dignity of choosing their own future.

How we perceive this moment is a test of the collective conscience. Iran is not to be merely a movement consumed or a narrative weaponized, but a call to recognize what is good, right, and true.

***

This essay is the second in a series, sparked by my Substack, tracing what responsibility looks like in the world we live in: the ethics of intervention, the currents of propaganda that shape belief, the hidden architecture of power within regimes, the quiet cost of global silence, the inherited memories of raids, prayer, and protest — and above all, the enduring question of what we, as human beings, owe to one another when conscience itself is called to witness. Thank you to everyone who is engaging with a human rights perspective and for supporting my work all the while. Be well.

We Are One Body: Americans, Iranians, and What We Owe to Each Other was originally published in ILLUMINATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My Child,

I have already freed you

Azadi towers above and beyond my borders.

I have already freed you,

And yet you keep looking back

Through a black mirror

Which distorts my face

And forgets my soil.

—

Radiated

Is my soil

In soul and in power

However nuclear

Remains the pure ground

That birthed you.

—

Each seed sown in every Grandmother,

Your Maman Joon

Homing you and your mother

In her womb

While my earth stirred

And your seed stirred in me.

—

For while you were conceived

And born

In the West,

Your seed was sown

In the East’s mid-drift.

—

My second generations

Held in my primordial palm,

Then born noble,

I have already freed you

—

And yet you keep looking back

Toward Cyrus’s son rising in the East

When your future is set

In the stone of the West.

—

Yes, your egg, like a seed

Was created in me

But freed

To be a lion,

A shirzan,

A girl now a woman

A zan with zendegi and azadi,

Life and liberty.

—

Please you need not be

Shrinking your light

Lit by Zoroaster,

Your pen inked by Rumi.

We pass the torch and pass the pen

But then you be free.

—

My Children,

Fair and dark,

Of hair that’s fine and coarse,

Brown, black, blond, and red

Do not take to bed

Ridden with guilt or obligation

You do not need to speak for me.

—

From the cool mountains to the Caspian sea,

I can roar for my children

And now gently, surrender my sword

And withdraw my claws, dormant.

—

For without force,

The Truth,

When released like a lion,

Can defend itself.

—

My love letter to you,

My Child,

Is not to dwell

On the unpleasant things of life.

—

While I drove your mother

To leave my land,

You went without a choice.

You had no reasons,

And now hold no obligations,

But to remember where you were created,

Remember the wombs who carried you

To the West

Whose soil’s soul marinates

In the blood of ancestors

Whose sins need not be your burdens.

—

Let the seeds of Persia’s poppies

Spread and let the blood

Bloom boldly

In ecstasy.

—

My Child,

I watch your waves

In the wind,

Your flowers,

Your teas

Touched by the women of Iran

Who carried you.

—

The labor ends here, my dear.

I have already set you free.

-Maman Iran

Mother Iran, مامان ایرا

A Poem from Maman Iran for the Second Generation was originally published in ILLUMINATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To everyone who has extended their respects in the wake of my father’s passing, thank you for making the transition, in part, curiously magical.

Fear of “finding him” had faded when his body still lay warm, his spirit near yet free. Remarkably, his purest presence was able to provide comfort more than his earthly self could have offered in his previously pained state.

Artists are too rarely taken seriously for their pain. Deep feelers frighten the forces attempting to weaken the human capacity for love, for passion, for authenticity. This is a flaw in the failing, disintegrative system being replaced by a courageously integrative spiritual order in every individual. An intuitive wisdom breathes in birthing groans, in restorative healing, in soothing freedom — the liberation of burdens not meant to be kept secret by blameless souls.

My father’s last few months were very healing. Through my dad’s final reflections, a parting of regret, as many often have, revealed a surprising serenity as we began to remember my childhood — or what I sometimes call “our childhood” — when we played, created, mused, and made life as best as we could, however flawed.

Playful and still serious in tone, my dad Walter Ivan Heath called my mom and me “scary women.” Near the end, his soul grew to admire feminine strength and gravitated toward its power, encouraging me to remember my worth and how much I deserve — we all deserve — in this fleeting life. And it was as if his words, seeking the spiritual realm as its veil feathered faintly, manifested more than I could ever imagine, leaving the qualities I thought I would be left yearning for — one being the power of a sharpened intuition.

Months ago, I had imagined this period to be one of the saddest times of my life and yet, while occasionally tears do flow, there is a gift of renewal in my belief in God’s love and divine justice. Earthly death is but a mirage. Our material lives, perhaps, are but a sliver of the soul’s capacity for growth. And I believe my dad’s soul is flying beyond the planes of his father and his father before him.

Death is, in fact, a messenger of joy.

*

Thank you, also, to Aeh Jay Chuenjit Hollenbeck for continuously sharing his grieving process of his mother. When I started reading his writings, I hoped that my family’s process would be meaningful in its own distinct way and am now grateful to be experiencing the unity in diversity of deaths as we all are born into this world noble and if we’re lucky, leave with as much grace as humanly possible.

There is a war on our water, our food, and our flowers.

With the global push toward highly processed, corporatized foods and the demonization of local farms, grass-fed beef, and localized systems, we desperately need to uplift our health and our happiness from the grassroots.

A Japanese saying states: “It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.”

Embodying the warrior spirit and the innocence of a child, every individual can walk in the garden with purpose, seeking workable ways to co-create a more beautiful world.

Planting victory gardens in the midst of a war on agriculture and on culture itself, we can rise like wildflowers. We are free to grow outside. Our health is in our hands.

Food freedom and seed sovereignty offer answers to seemingly unsolvable problems. During this series, we will explore food as medicine and natural remedies free from big pharma.

We’ll reveal advice for novice growers from green-thumbed gardeners, permaculture practices that nourish natural beauty, plus playful experiential learning activities and ways to accomplish the divine art of homesteading.

Addressing the threats to liberty in related fields, gardeners, farmers, nutritionists, homeopaths, artists, educators, writers, homeschooling parents, and other food and flower enthusiasts will provide exciting solutions.

Prose and poetry will illustrate the style of establishing food and flower companions and resisting the urge to pair antagonistic plants (and people) requiring proper space to grow.

Families of people and plants possess a pure power.

The universal language of artful agriculture can create a much-needed momentous unity if growers of all kinds lead by inspiration, not force.

Let us unfold interconnected communities from the grassroots. Musing on how agriculture can serve as the fertile soil for an organically forming society, I’m Sienna Mae Heath and this is Food is Freedom.

Check out the 5-minute launch video below and subscribe to Free the People’s channel to get notified of the first episode tomorrow:

One of the reasons why I love the Baha’i Faith is the illustration of humanity being flowers of one garden. This metaphor illustrates unity in diversity in a poetic and practical way.

ʻAbdu’l-Bahá says: ‘Consider the flowers of a garden. Though differing in kind, color, form and shape, yet, inasmuch as they are refreshed by the waters of one spring, revived by the breath of one wind, invigorated by the rays of one sun, this diversity increaseth their charm and addeth unto their beauty. How unpleasing to the eye if all the flowers and plants, the leaves and blossoms, the fruit, the branches and the trees of that garden were all of the same shape and color! Diversity of hues, form and shape enricheth and adorneth the garden, and heighteneth the effect thereof. In like manner, when divers shades of thought, temperament and character, are brought together under the power and influence of one central agency, the beauty and glory of human perfection will be revealed and made manifest.’

When we consider the plant world, there are companion plants and antagonistic plants. Companions are pairs or small groups that often mutually benefit one another.

Planting companions can be compared to the process of cocreating healthy friendships in which both friends practice good virtues.

In the same manner, family members need proper spacing in order to have a healthy kinship.

Some plants, like people, don’t get along. For example, strawberries and cabbages are antagonistic plants.

The roots of cabbage secrete a substance that prevents strawberries from growing to their full potential and producing fruit.

And even cabbages need to be spaced generously to produce a bountiful harvest. Likewise, companions need to be spaced wisely.

With youth in my local community, we planted containers of food and flowers, specificially mint, geraniums, and petunias.

Their benefits to one another are practical and aesthetic in nature.

The scent that geraniums produce repels some pests and attracts beneficial insects… and the height of the plant shades the mint in the hottest time of the year, producing a balanced ecosystem.

Also, geraniums are set apart from the differing texture and contrasting color of the petunias.

Last year at the Desert Rose Baha’i Institute in Arizona, we deepened on virtues like Self-sacrifice.

For example, the Geranium flower surrenders to a beetle infestation so that the rest of the food and flowers can live just like Jesus Christ sacrificed himself for us to live.

We also deepened on the virtues of Problem Solving, Teamwork, Creativity, and Patience.

Our guiding prayer for youth at the camp was:

‘O Thou kind Lord! Graciously bestow a pair of heavenly wings unto each of these fledglings, and give them spiritual power that they may wing their flight through this limitless space and may soar to the heights of the Abhá Kingdom. O Lord! Strengthen these fragile seedlings that each one may become a fruitful tree, verdant and flourishing. Render these souls victorious through the potency of Thy celestial hosts, that they may be able to crush the forces of error and ignorance and to unfurl the standard of fellowship and guidance amidst the people; that they may, even as the reviving breaths of the spring, refresh and quicken the trees of human souls and like unto vernal showers make the meads of that region green and fertile. Thou art the Mighty and Powerful; Thou are the Bestower and the All-Loving.’

-‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Baha’is believe in the societal, spiritual forces of disintegration and integration. In the context of gardening, death makes way for new growth as we deadhead wilting blooms and engage in the process of composting.

Meanwhile men, women, and children, as stewards tending to the garden, encourage growth and fertilization.

We can think of the garden as God’s third work of art (which he created after the heavens and the earth).

On my journey, I’ve been inspired to bring to light the metaphor of humanity being flowers of one garden — or food and flowers of one garden.

Ultimately, why I love the Baha’i Faith is due to its prayerful calls to action to cocreate a more beautiful world.

Watch the short video

Humbled to be releasing this short video for Nabil Moghaddam’s new project, Unite The Hearts. Thanks to him and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Jafar Fallahi for guiding the recording process to uplift the Baha’i Writing on the spiritual power of unity in diversity in “God’s Garden” where each individual is loved in their full humanity as members of the human race (not to be confused with seemingly similar slogans in the secular world).

Watch the 5-minute video recorded in Madeira Island, Portugal below, and feel free to leave a comment and subscribe to this new channel. Check out the photos from my latest virtues-based gardening workshop for youth at Little Pond Retreat Center on Facebook.

Unite The Hearts: Why I Love The Baha’i Faith was originally published in Age of Awareness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday, my dad did everything right. Greeted by a curiously configured chorus of birds serenading him outside his window, he was freed from his earthly cage. He waited to make the moment easier for my mom Bahereh Khodadoost and me until his favorite nurse aide arrived at his bedside. Exactly how he wanted, he chose to be with us near, at his home, surrendered to the birds, and, thanks to loving friends, got his wish in his last hours to have a burial arranged at a local cemetery with fellow members of the Baha’i Faith rather than at a far-away military plot. He is now liberated from this material realm to the Abhá Kingdom of Heaven.

Being of the Baha’i Faith, my father Walter Ivan Heath believed in “death as a messenger of joy,” a concept foreign to me until recently when, in his last few months, he smiled as he imagined a mystical place (a pristine island of sorts) where everyone and everything was good. On Tuesday, he admitted he was nearing the end. His cool blue eyes watered as he lay on his back in bed. He was a boy again. And I had become the mother. So I held his shoulders and said, “Dad, you get to go! You get to go to that place you’re making and make it however you want to!” He laughed gently, with relief.

My dad’s 79-year-life began, like all of ours, at birth, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was a son of pilots, the late Winifred R. and Lucy Eleanor (Bishop) Heath. As a boy, Walter soared like a bird in airplanes with his father and played quite fearlessly with his brothers Raymond and Roger. Captivated by the sky, my dad also took a keen and lifelong interest in UFOs (one of the last topics brought back to his attention the morning before he passed away).

Walter was sometimes anxious in temperament though that didn’t stop him from exploring the world and creating a legacy in his adulthood. To start, he served in the U.S. Air Force, later graduated from the University of Tulsa with a Bachelor’s degree, and continued to Pittsburg State University in Kansas where he earned an MS degree meanwhile having his first daughter, my half-sister Heather.

Breathing life into his microcosm of our world, he worked in various hospitals as a respiratory therapist. Next, he came into a career as an artist and educator before retiring.

A pure soul, Walter set his sights on God by becoming a maker of clay art including Japanese-style teapots, tea bowls adorned with the texture of Indian corn from which we drank herbal teas grown in our gardens, and Hadgini drums for Paul Simon’s percussionist. All the while, he was deeply valued by his students, one of whom, Tony Williams, called him “dad.” His education career ranged from developing an art program for children with autism at the Colonial I.U. 20 to inspiring college students in ceramics classes.

Outside of work (sometimes during), every time my dad stirred up trouble by climbing on a ladder he was deemed too frail to climb or embarking on a sacred burn of a garden plot, his inner child felt a fool’s joy.

Through his purity, however dimmed by the challenges of this material reality, he showed me how to ride waves of sorrow and joy. He met me at the low points and lifted me in those waters with humor. In the end, he guided me to do the same. As his breath slowed, I gathered a bouquet of thyme in the garden and one echinacea bloom from a cluster of three (leaving two). I placed it in his hand, still warm, and said: “Dad, this is your thyme.”

No one laughed.

Except him, in spirit.

.

My mom and I planted thyme on Dad’s grave after the service and lunch with loved ones.

The Service

Celebration of Walter Ivan Heath

(October 17, 1944 – August 22, 2024)

Eternally grateful for the friends and family who attended the service at Fairview Cemetery in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on August 24, 2024 and have shown love and respect for my mom Bahereh Khodadoost and me online, in person, and in spirit.

“A Little Song of Life”

by Lizette Woodworth Reese

Glad that I live am I;

That the sky is blue;

Glad for the country lanes,

And the fall of dew.

After the sun the rain;

After the rain the sun;

This is the way of life,

Till the work be done.

All that we need to do,

Be we low or high,

Is to see that we grow

Nearer the sky.

Baha’i chant/song:

We all come from God and unto him do we return

Like a stream flowing back to the ocean

Like a ray of light returning to the sun

We all come from God and unto him do we return.

(Led by Bridget George)

Baha’i Prayer for The Dead (The Departed)

Read by Laura Lawrence

O my God! This is Thy servant and the son of Thy servant who hath believed in Thee and in Thy signs, and set his face towards Thee, wholly detached from all except Thee. Thou art, verily, of those who show mercy the most merciful.

Deal with him, O Thou Who forgivest the sins of men and concealest their faults, as beseemeth the heaven of Thy bounty and the ocean of Thy grace. Grant him admission within the precincts of Thy transcendent mercy that was before the foundation of earth and heaven. There is no God but Thee, the Ever-Forgiving, the Most Generous.

Let him, then, repeat six times the greeting “Alláh-u-Abhá,” and then repeat nineteen times each of the following verses:

We all, verily, worship God.

We all, verily, bow down before God.

We all, verily, are devoted unto God.

We all, verily, give praise unto God.

We all, verily, yield thanks unto God.

We all, verily, are patient in God.

Bahá’u’lláh

.

The live recording of the service can be viewed here: https://www.hdezwebcast.com/show/walter-heath-service

His obituary: https://www.jamesfuneralhome.org/memorials/walter--heath/5476936/

Eulogy by my sister Heather: https://www.facebook.com/share/SXyyHvJgwUeDchMR/?

My Father’s Death: “A Messenger of Joy”

Read next and explore more photos of his clay art: https://siennamaeheath.medium.com/my-fathers-death-a-messenger-of-joy-4ba96ee01c69

I found the liberation process of my father’s dying and death to be very moving, a form of ascended creative freedom. We both had been terrified of me finding his faded body at the end of his life, whenever that time would come.

But nearing Thursday, I asked our social worker if it would be better for him to pass in solitude or in the company of me and my mom.

Since grief, including pre-grief, as well as dying itself is quite personal, she replied:

“Think about the type of person he is.”

My father, like many men, struggled to be alone. I later teased at the service that he was a codependent, and so of course he would want to pass amongst family.

But it wasn’t solely out of fear and anxiety that he desired company. I believe the desire for connection originated from a desire to be loved in a way that he yearned for as a boy.

Of course, the moment he passed, I experienced sadness. But, to my surprise, after all the build-up and what I assumed was the immaleable molding of my mental health that dictated that I would cry at his bedside, wishing for him to resurrect (like Simba did with Mufasa), I smiled.

“Have you said everything you want to say?”

the social worker had asked.

Curiously, yes. It wasn’t like in the movies when the grown child holds the parent’s hand, with her head bowed low, wishing they had more time. All that was left was a brushing of his teeth, a watering of his tongue, the holding of his hand and head, and a series of prayers. And the sharing of a UFO sighting in California, one final moment of father and daughter normalcy.

But of course I cried. I was losing, at least in the material, my favorite conversation partner (my mom is tied for first), my beloved adventurer, my fellow green comic, my friend, and my father.

When sadness stems from love, it translates into gratitude. Relief cleanses the body as my loved one is liberated from the pain that transmutes mysteriously into joy.

How on earth death could be “a messenger of joy” was beyond me until the early morning prior to his mid-morning death in this material realm and rebirth in the spiritual.

Around 4am, I had a funny dream. I watched a skit between a man and two women at a restaurant, the details of which will remain personal. But believe it or not, I woke up quietly giggling. I know, how inappropriate given my father was breathing shallowly in the next room.

My dreamland had never welcomed humor, only worry, scattered scenarios, and the occasional vision that came true and manifested in the waking world. For this reason, I’m certain that my dad sent me this recent dream. He didn’t want me to be sad, but rather to learn that death is indeed a messenger of joy — a reminder that humor heals.

Over the past 5 years following his diagnosis and the unfolding of events on this planet, many of us took life too seriously. Little did I consciously know, I was missing the adventures, the laughter, the art.

To my surprise, reverent and irreverent humor flowed my and my sister’s eulogies at the service. Nearly all my jokes were unplanned (except it being “his thyme”). I wonder if after his ghostly spirit walked the cemetery site testing the soil for clay use, he held the figurative microphone.

My friend, my father, could almost always meet me in my lowest of lows. When others would call me too sensitive, he would suggest that sensitivity is a strength, an inspiration in fact, that when I’d reach the top of the next wave, an actively artistic way of life would be waiting in those waters. He reminded me that the bottom of the wave is just part of the process, but not to dwell there.

Regarding the creative process of his work, he wrote:

“In our lives, there are ebbs and tides. Sometimes you are at the top of a wave and you can see everything. Sometimes, you are at the bottom of the wave and you can only see the top of the wave behind you and in front of you…..what you need to understand is it is just part of your ocean. If you can see the top of the wave in front of you, then believe, if you just wait patiently, you will be delivered to it…today, I have to again remind myself of this ..I must know that, with time, I will be seeing from the top of the next wave…..but it’s hard”

“I wrote this to a fellow artist who was experiencing creative block. As I read it back to myself, I thought about Robin Williams and all of the rest of us that experience depression…..if only he could have been able to make it to the top of his next wave:

I’ve been through this before, many times. Being creative is like an ocean, there are ebbs and tides. Sometimes you are at the top of a wave and you can see everything. Sometimes, you are at the bottom of the wave and you can only see the top of the wave behind you and in front of you…..what you need to understand is it is just part of your ocean. If you can see the top of the wave in front of you, then believe, if you just wait patiently, you will be delivered to it…..I’ve found the best way for me is to start working, especially when I feel I can’t. ….before I know it, I’m alive and seeing from the top of the next wave.”

To all who I have comforted over my dad’s material death, do not fret. He lives within you. His soul is progressing. And no doubt, he is transforming into a witty angel.

Now get back to work.

About Walter Ivan Heath: Father, Husband, Clay Artist

The live recording of the service can be viewed here: https://www.hdezwebcast.com/show/walter-heath-service

His eulogy: https://siennamaeheath.medium.com/eulogy-for-my-father-walter-ivan-heath-30fa984ff17d

His obituary: https://www.jamesfuneralhome.org/memorials/walter--heath/5476936/