My dad was found laying on the floor where he had fallen covered in blood and feces not knowing who he was or where he was...

He was taken to the hospital and put in Isolation.

We went by to see him. It was awful. Skin pale and blotchy with cuts to his swollen face. Teeth missing.

My brother and his wife suited up with gloves and masks on and entered the glass enclosed room. I watched from outside.

I was the only one in my family that didn't go up to my mother's coffin to view her. I couldn't.

It wasn't her.

This wasn't him.

This is him devoid of his personality. I think this absence is a better version of him. Kinder. Frail. Humble. No personality, clear as glass.

He's scared I'm sure. Nicer, though.

In the room I could see their mouths move as they spoke to him. I could see he was completely lost. He looked like an alien.

I began thinking of something I read in Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country:

"I think we are, each of us, more a wave front moving across time than a single individual. Each 'person' that we are exists in a single bubble in the foam of this wave, a bubble which reflects only its own reality.

However this extraordinary experience is described very well by Meister Eckhart, when he admonishes us to "become as a clear glass through which God can shine."

When you do this, you cease to belong to the illusion of a single world, and become one with many."