Upon learning the sad news about how the late singer Whitney Houston’s daughter Bobbi Kristina was found unresponsive in a bathtub and hearing reports that she is brain dead, it’s hard not to wonder at the irony that she could be passing over to the other side only about three years after her mother. While many people are commenting about the tragedy of it and how she was so depressed upon losing her mother that she was headed in this direction, it’s actually not uncommon for very close souls to leave a life at around the same time.
Sometimes we hear stories of an elderly couple in which the husband died and the wife died months later. Or two people who’d been best friends for fifty years succumbing to illnesses around the same time. I once knew of a father and son. The father had been sickly but when the son died unexpectedly in an accident the father passed away within 72 hours.
There are numerous reports about how close Bobbi Kristina had been to her mother, Whitney Houston. They were described by some as closer to best friends than mother and daughter. Since Whitney Houston’s death, it’s been evident that Bobbi Kristina has been struggling. She has been hospitalized a couple of times since her mother’s death, she’s crashed her car and she reportedly has had a problem with drugs and/or alcohol. While some could point to her substance abuse problems or her depression as being the reason for her problems today, there is a very real phenomenon in which souls sometimes choose to be together over living a longer life apart.
When someone is grieving, they must at some point make a choice to keep living. When someone loses a very close loved one to death, the first few years are critical to the healing process. While it’s totally normal to feel distraught, depressed and despondent at the death of a loved one there comes a time when one must decide to move on. The grief doesn’t go away. The sadness may fade, but it doesn’t go away. Yet a person who is grieving must decide that despite the grief and the sadness there is something that is worth holding onto.
If not, you’ll often find that a loved one becomes terminally ill in the years following a close death. Or the loved one begins a pattern of dangerous or reckless behavior — sometimes under the guise of misplaced grief. Sure, they are grieving, but there is a very real phenomenon of having a death wish whether it is a conscious thought or not.
The good news is that there are ultimately no right or wrong choices. As our souls evolve, we all eventually get to where we need to be. If a soul decides it doesn’t want to live right now without another soul who has already passed away there is nothing inherently wrong with that choice. It is that soul’s choice to make.
The case of Bobbi Kristina Brown is a very sad one and her family will have a hard time dealing with this tragedy not even three years after the death of Whitney Houston. The fact that the circumstances were so similar with both of them being found in a bathtub will likely make it even more challenging to deal with this crisis. But the one bright light if in fact the rumors of Bobbi Kristina being brain dead are true is that her soul is reunited with that of one of her soulmates. Their work, in this lifetime at least, will have been done.
