9 April 2023
Two months ago I found myself in my annual—perpetually unexpected—round of mourning and despair. It took me more than a week to recognize this as my recurring cycle of deep reconnection to the week of my baby son Jesse’s birth and all-too-sudden death in February 2004. I was drifting along listless in my unacknowledged state of infinite silent déjà vu. As a result, I was finding it pretty much impossible to do the busy things I had thought I was going to do, such as write and record my supposedly weekly installments of this Soul Planet Channel communication with you all.
Gotta get through January
Gotta get through February
Gotta get through January
Gotta get through February
Gotta get through January
Gotta get through February
Gotta get through January—Van Morrison, “Fire in My Belly”
Jesse Santiago Hartley was born on February 2, the Groundhog Day for 2004, not quite three months after my son Dylan’s death on the 14th of November in 2003. Four days later on the 6th of February Jesse died suddenly. By February 8th of this year 2023 I finally recognized the source of my unexpected season of despair. That is when I began these notes on this annual process of mourning and memory. It took me until today, the 9th of April—Easter Sunday, in fact—to complete this meditation on loss and resurrection.
I now share this with you in hopes that this might be some comfort in terms of recognition for anyone going through your own rounds of unacknowledged travel through the Underworld. As February gives way to March, I eventually, slowly pull myself out of this round of things. Even though that first Spring after the deaths of my boys came as a great cosmic insult—How dare those daffodils bloom in a world so scarred with loss?—I eventually learned how to live with the days and events and loves and losses to come in this beautiful magical round called life. I wish the same for all of you.
I am Gabriel Hartley, and this is episode #60 of my Soul Planet Channel on the 9th day of April 2023. Today’s episode is entitled “Knocked Off My Horse by Groundhog Boy (Again and Again)—The Annual Return of Jesse’s Death.”
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8 February 2023
The 6th of February was a heavy day. Each year it sneaks up on me and knocks me off my horse. This year that particular February day was the 19th anniversary of my son Jesse’s first death at four days old. I say “first death” because, in what turned out to be a macabre shift in things, when Jesse arrived at the hospital about an hour after he died just four days after being born, the emergency team somehow managed to get his heart beating again.
For me, this was one of the greatest horrors of my life. I knew at that moment that, whatever might have caused his death (which couldn’t have been anything good), his brain and body had been so deprived of oxygen and blood circulation during that hour of death that there was no way his brain or body could ever function without life support. In fact, he never regained any sign of brain function, even if he did have a beating heart and breathing lungs while on machines. Four days later he died for the second time on February 10th as I held him in my arms just after they took him off of life support.
So that moment comes back in unexpected ways each year as his groundhog-day birth and twice-dying anniversary sneaks up on me again. When your job as a parent is to protect your children, it’s quite devastating to find that you couldn’t do that with either of your older sons. One complicating factor in my ability to deal with Jesse’s death (as if his death itself wasn’t complicating enough) was that he died, as I have mentioned already, less than three months after my first son, Dylan, died at age 16 of brain cancer. The death of two children in less than three months still strikes me as a particularly peculiar event, statistically speaking. Emotionally speaking, it was completely paralyzing and demolishing.
But one of the immediate benefits for me in terms of my own psyche and sense of self was that my inability to save Jesse made me feel slightly less guilty for not having been able to save Dylan. My abilities as a faith healer came crashing up against a wall of alternative cosmic intentions.
This particular lack of super healing abilities became graphically evident to me when I tried to administer CPR on poor little Jesse’s fragile and lifeless body. First of all, how could I push my paalms on his sternum to try to pump the blood through him between my breaths on his mouth when at any moment my fingers might crush his entire rib cage? I kept imagining my fingers plunging right through his heart. Moreover, Jesse lay on my lap exactly like a rag doll, limbs dangling down over my legs, his jaw ghoulishly slack and lifeless.
In the two or three times that I performed CPR on Dylan during his seizures in the weeks before his death, he actually responded and sprang back to life and consciousness from out of whatever deathlike dimension he had sunk into minutes before. I felt like a super-dad, the only one who could bring my boy back from the land of the dead—which, as it turned out, wasn’t really the best thing for him, given how much damage each momentary death caused to his brain functions and consciousness. But I felt like a father doing the only thing I could possibly do in such a moment.
Another debilitating factor in my emotional and intellectual response to Jesse’s coming birth in the months ahead of time was my sense, irrational but very real, that I could never love another child after the death of the child I was not ultimately able to save. Wasn’t this a kind of perverse exchange of one child for another? Wouldn’t this in some way betray my relationship with Dylan? And wouldn’t this also seriously betray any relationship I could have with this coming child when he would be born into such trauma and suffering and brokenness? How could I ever love this child about to be?
And yet, miraculously and completely unexpectedly, the moment I first held my newborn Jesse in my arms, I fell in love with him completely. I realized on the spot that any fears I had previously had about not being able to love him in the midst of turmoil were completely unfounded. The impact of his birth, of his very physical being, was unexpected proof of the ultimate rightness of the universe under any circumstances. Jesse taught me that, despite losing the struggle to save Dylan from death, I had not lost the ability to love a new child. Jesse’s birth miraculously healed me in my darkest moments as a father. There was never a question in my mind that I might stop loving my daughter Katy if Dylan died. So why did I have such fears about Jesse? Again, I think it grew out of the sense that this was some kind of unasked-for exchange, of trading in one son for another. But as it turned out, this was the furthest thing from the truth once the very real flesh-and-blood Jesse had leapt into my life.
So in ways that might seem perverse to people on the outside of this state of being and consciousness, Jesse’s birth and death were both miracles for me. Of course, I would rather have had him survive whatever it was that caused his brain to explode on his fourth day, before he had ever had a normal poop or had ever had a chance to catch on to what nursing was all about, before he had ever fully eliminated the meconium from his system and before the breastmilk that was to feed him had ever fully come in. Boom—he was here and then he was gone, just like that, in the middle of all those things that were supposed to take place in the week following birth.
Another miracle for me in his so brief coming and going was that after these experiences, I was later able to approach the coming birth of his sibling August without the crippling fears and guilt that had plagued me before Jesse’s arrival and sudden departure. I knew this time a little more than one year later that this new coming child would bring about the same kind of healing and affirmations of love that Jesse had shown me. The birth of August proved that at times we are permitted to witness the victories that life, sometimes unexpectedly, offers us. I was now able to embrace this new being with a sense of cosmic love and grace and assurance. The difficult marriage I had always seen as such a mystery was what in the end made these two miraculous births possible. Now I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Each year as the anniversary of Jesse’s coming and going surprises me all over again—and again—I find myself knocked off my horse once more. I sink down unexpectedly into the groove of mourning and sorrow before I’m ever aware of it. I spend a week or so in this state of unnoticed depression until I recognize its source, its relationship to the cycles of the calendar and of the seasons that have been overwritten by these narratives of loss and helplessness, a despair that circulates dormant through most of the year, only to manifest itself in silence once again each February.
But then, as an eternally recurring miraculous recovery, I finally wake up one morning a bit later in February and recognize this deep unconscious drift into sadness for what it is—the unacknowledged reminders written into the very fabric of late winter darkness and frozen stillness. And once I recognize this source, I also remember the blessings that Jesse’s coming and going, so soon after Dylan’s departure and relatively soon before August’s victorious arrival, provided for me as a father—having to learn hard lessons about life and death and everything in between.
Sometimes an odd pair of swans floats across the lake surface, having forgotten, it seems , their ritual season of flight southward into sunnier and warmer conditions. They remind me that we are built to survive, built to mourn, built to repair, and built to renew as we step deliberately into the dark of day in its sonambulic beauty and dark atmosphere of continuity, love, hope, and life.
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This year I had the chance to ask the collective multidimensional entity known as Monitor what I might learn this time around in this February swoon in darkness. In fact, I had been urged to abandon one of my planned questions for this season’s question-and-answer Zoom session because I was alerted by Monitor themselves, intuitively and telepathically, that this might well be my last chance to contact Monitor through their channel, Harvey Grady. That turned out to be true, and cause for even more familiarity with death and loss and continuity. I miss Harvey greatly, yet I am grateful for having known him for more than eleven years.
Here is the material from that recorded conversation:
MONITOR & ME
Today is the 19th anniversary of the first death of my son Jesse Santiago Hartley. He died at four days old of SIDS a little less than three months after my son Dylan James Hartley died from brain cancer. What was the greater purpose of Jesse being on life support for four extra days? Could you tell me any significant information concerning my boys’ previous lives, what their purposes were in their short time in this life, and how they might be doing today? What role did they play in the lives of my family members and me?
Monitor: We see that your sons were members of the spiritual family that tends to dominate within your physical family. The opportunities provided for the short life span allowed the High Self of that son to make adjustments in the etheric body utilizing the grounding forces of the physical plane. Those adjustments were positively created and are carried forward from that point on. The other son involves a similar progress, with some variation. Yet the response to your question is that their High Selves sought the use of physical manifestation as a way to build improvements in the higher bodies of both the children. The mental body, when connected with the physical body, is able to reorganize in certain areas of function. And that then is some consolidated and confirmed by the interaction that occurs between the mental body and the physical body of the child. Thus those relationships, while brief, continue in the third level of the astral plane.
Me: And their mental bodies were still active during the times they were on life support?
Monitor: Yes. The process was one of utilizing a specific procedure that is normally used in the course of more than 1600 lifetimes.
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Music Credits:
Intro — “Kind of a Party” by the Mini Vandals
Interlude 1 — “Float” by Geographer
Transition Snippet 1 — “Glimpsing Infinity” by Asher Fulero
Transition Snippet 2 — “Out On My Skateboard” by Mini Vandals
Transition Snippet 3 — “Snowy Peaks pt 1” by Chris Haugen
Transition Snippet 4 — “Glass” by Anno Domini Beats
Transition Snippet 5 — “Fire in the Belly” by Van Morrison
Outro— “Read All Over” by Nathan Moore
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