And our dead still live on
Continuing a relationship with the deceased is a natural response to loss.
I got the dates wrong. Thinking I was heading to an early All Souls Day service on Sunday morning, I gathered a few photos for the altar I’d read about in an email announcing the service — including an old, recently framed photo of my paternal grandparents. Both of them staring at the camera, my granny looking stylish and dignified in a pink dress, my granddad wearing a slight scowl and an expression that hinted at bewilderment, or maybe resistance, to find himself where he was.
When I arrived at the church, scanning the sanctuary for the altar, I learned I’d mistaken the dates and the service would be next Sunday. I lowered myself into a pew and stacked my photos beside me. Several moments later, I suddenly felt my granny’s presence wash over me. A quiet warmth and gentleness, as generous as the smile she was always quick to bestow. As we rose to sing the closing hymn, “Here I Am, Lord,” one she, too, loved, I became unexpectedly weepy. And though I valiantly tried to keep the tears in check, with every line we sang, I felt the tug of a rending in my chest, some deep and tender emotion yearning to make itself known. I let the tears come, singing and crying and hearing my granny’s voice, imagining it entwined with mine.
It was a moment that caught me utterly by surprise, yet that is the way of grief, crooked and unpredictable. Capsizing what we know or think to be true of our own healing journey, wanting in whether it’s been five or 10 or 20 years. Calling us back to its maze.
Of course, it is also the week of Halloween, Samhain (the Celtic festival of the dead and celebration of the end of the harvest season), Day of the Dead and, as I thought I was planning for on Sunday, All Souls Day. Occasions when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead are said to thin, making communication and connection with our deceased easier.
Perhaps Granny had been perched in this liminal space, waiting to get my attention. Did I call her in with the photo? Was it the hymn that brought her near? Or was it my intention to honor her that briefly brought our separate realms into contact?
I do not really need to know, for these are questions for the mind. And feeling connected to our loved ones, whether in this mystical season, or any other time of year, is about moving from the heart.
It’s about intuiting and making space for the ways we feel close to our deceased. Whether that’s listening to music they loved. Preparing their favorite foods. Walking where they enjoyed walking. Finishing a project they started. Writing them a letter. Asking for their advice. Wearing a piece of clothing that belonged to them. Sitting in their favorite place. Creating an altar or ritual in tribute to them. Doing whatever it is that honors the bond we shared, the ties that still remain.
The ways we can connect are limited only by our imagination. Whatever feels right, whatever invites us into a deepening relationship is what we’re meant to do.
For grieving isn’t about leaving those relationships behind. We don’t eventually arrive at some place of closure where we pack up our memories and stories — our person — and store them away, ready to move on with our lives.
If grief is forever, then, so, too, is the love we shared. And being intentional about making space to feel into that love, to laugh and talk and be with our dear departed ones, is not only how we keep their memory alive. It’s how we keep our connection robust and growing. How we learn that new, intimate and evolving relationships are possible after death, and are helpful and comforting, too.
Recently, a friend was baffled when I shared the ways I’d felt my dad’s presence around the anniversary of his death last month. “Was it a ghost?” “Was it energy?” “Did I sense his personality?” How could that be if, in her view, we return to Spirit when we die?
I honestly couldn’t give her a clear or satisfactory answer. And it certainly didn’t help to admit I’ve done everything from dancing and walking with my dad to setting a place for him at the dinner table. Yet her questions reminded me of how so many try to intellectualize the experience of grief, to think their way through what the body and heart know.
Much like grieving, communing with our dead isn’t a mental exercise of right and wrong and following rules. Nor is it woo-woo or strange or a practice rooted in the malevolent.
It is a completely normal and healthy response to adapting to the gaping absence in our physical lives. To weaving together the threads of our living, loving and longing. To creating our own sanctuary spaces around grief, where we can go for solace…and just maybe find a loosening of the fears we may hold around death, knowing we carry our beloveds with us as we continue to journey through life.
Learn more about nurturing bonds with the dead
Register for this free, three-day international festival on grief, death and dying here
Grief care for the holiday season
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More grief care for the holiday season
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