My husband drowned in July 2022 on our family vacation, he was 57 years old, I was 56, we had been together for 36 years. Our 3 daughters and I witnessed the attempts to resuscitate him. He has visited me in dreams many times since he died, the first time was 5 days after his death. My father (who died of a a sudden heart attack in 2016) visited me after his death, and I had told my husband about the visit, that I knew I was sleeping, that I knew it was my dad, that I could get information from him (I asked him "Dad, you're dead now, what's the deal, is there heaven?" and he said "well, there is, but it's not like what you'd think", and when I asked him "what is that supposed to mean?" he said "love binds us all"), so I knew my husband knew he could reach me. He appeared in my bedroom, I did not know I was asleep, he did not have a corporeal form, but a shape of shifting light, with his face coming into and out of focus at all the ages I've known him. He shouted at me "I'M HERE!" and I said I saw him, he said "It's really me" and I told him I understood. I told me financially we would be fine, that he was sorry it was such a mess (both things I did not know that have both turned out to be true), and then as I embraced him, I felt his despair, his agony at having to leave our girls. He said, stunned "I'll never see them grow up, I'll never walk them down the aisle". I told him he could find them here, just like he had found me. He said it was hard, really hard to get there. I said "but you're doing a great job!". Then he took a cigarette off the wall (we both used to smoke in our 20's but sadly gave it up since it's so bad for you, but we always missed it) and his form sucked into a smaller and smaller mass, like a star collapsing and he was gone. He has visited me many times, and our children, and other family members and friends. He has told me things (such as things that were in his autopsy report) that I did not know but which I later found out were true. He told our daughter that dying was like being born in reverse, being born into a new reality and that you understood everything you had done, and your affect on everyone, and that he would always be with us. But we needed to do our part and believe him when he came to see us, to believe when we felt his voice. Because it was difficult to do, to show up or give signs, but that he was beside us all the time.
For awhile he was sad during these visits, then he said he was just alone. Then, about 2 months after his death he came to see me and he was young, so young, and he was only going to be with me for a short time, and we saw friends coming up the path, so I knew he had to go. I begged him not to go, but as he climbed the stairs past me, he leaned over me and turned into a light as bright as a thousand suns, and then he was gone. Since then he comes to see me and he's happy, eating a sandwich, dancing with our children, just coming off the tennis court. In the visits I have with him, I know I am asleep, I know he is there, and I can ask him things, we can spend time together. I wake weeping from these visits sometimes, because I miss him so much. It is terrible being separated.
Like when you see a whale breach, and nobody else sees it and they think "she thinks she saw a whale" but you know what you saw...I have seen. And I know when my time in this body is finished he will be waiting for me over the threshold. I ache to be with him again, and I am not afraid.
"He said it was hard, really hard to get there. " I believe this to be true. To appear again in something like this mortal coil, to conjure up some semblance to a human form once we have shed our earthly body, (the word our is meaningless, there is no more our, no more us, we are not anymore,) to re-turn takes supreme effort and only happens when it is absolutely necessary for some kind of comfort-closure, or in the case of some examples given in this forum, to save someone A child, from untimely death.
In Wim Wenders film, 'Wings of Desire' beings from another dimension, angels we might call them, watch over us, ease our discomfort, but ultimately cannot interfere. It takes sacrifice to return.
Yes, the laws of energy and matter (which quantum physicists learn every day we do not understand) surely create limits…it isn’t magic, so there are laws that would bind, that will restrict what is possible. One of my children said “what would he have to do to tell us ‘I am still here, I am still with you’ that we would not discount as ‘only’ dreams, or ‘only’ coincidences?” These things he has done. “It takes sacrifice to return” sounds utterly true to me.
I am so sorry for your loss. My deepest condolences to you and your family. Thank you for what you shared - I am so grateful to you for telling this story.
I love that: love binds us all. Even in my day to day life in my working life as a lawyer, when I know the team is working well together I know it's a kind of love at work. I would never say such a thing even to my team, but I know it's true. And if it's true in life, it makes sense to me that it would be true after life also in some way shape or form. Love binds us all.
My deep condolences on your--and your daughter's--loss. Thank you for the gift of your story today. I read it twice over coffee and found it impactful and moving. The strange shimmer at the edges of things matters: I love that you can spend time looking where most of us don't take time to look.
What a beautiful experience. I do believe our loved ones connect with us in ways we may or may not see. Your ability to connect with your father and your husband are gifts you have been given. Thanks so much for sharing your stories, Leah.
This is so beautiful and amazing. Thank you for letting us read your words. I'm so sorry about your husband's death, and also very happy for you that he visits you in this way.
Thank you for sharing the experience of your loss, Leah. Yes, wise words “love binds us all”. It’s the only thing that’s important in every aspect of life and death.
Leah, this is so beautiful I don’t know how to respond to it other than with gratitude. And reverence. More are more I’m reminded how close grief and joy are to one another.
Thank you for sharing this. I know it is hard to put these experiences into words. I know exactly what you are saying. When I felt my grandmother with me on two occasions, the only sense I could make of the feeling was that it was just love. Love binds us all. What an extraordinary gift to be given this message. We should all heed it.
This is beautiful. Leah. My beliefs about the afterlife can be summed up into that line, “love binds us all.” I believe our connections continue and can progress (which makes me excited for what’s to come, especially with those gone from this life too soon). Thank you for sharing those sacred experiences you’ve shared with your husband.
My son John. He demanded 200%love and devotion. He was mentally handicapped. Had seizures and behaviour made other parents glad he wasn’t theirs. He died suddenly when he was 11. I was gutted. My family fell apart. I struggled to survive. I would dream of John. Lots of anxiety. But then he visited me..several times over the next ten years. Yes that’s how long I grieved. He had a companion with him to tell me he was safe. The last time I saw him he talked to me with wisdom and understanding He knew I loved him. The world scared him which is why he was so misbehaved. I said “John you’re dead” the companion told me he was safe and alive. That was our final meeting. Sometimes I see him in my dreams but I know that is only my memory. I don’t tell people this because it is so precious to me I don’t want to weaken it. It was my lesson. Not anyone else’s. But you asked…
I dreamt once I was walking up the driveway to my childhood home and my mother held open the door, and all the pets I had over a 20 year period came out the door in a line so happy to see me. My mother looked beautiful and free of her usual anxiety. I went inside and my family was sitting at a large round table along with other more casual relationships from parts of my life, my current landlord, my NYC neighbor, a teacher in college, my gallerist, coworkers, etc. Everyone was talking and laughing about the parts they played in the previous life, and imparting what they learned. People were deciding who they wanted to be in the next life and what they wanted to learn. We were all part of a close family and we could each decide if we wanted to go back. In another life my father might be my mother, my mother might be my daughter, my sister might be my neighbor, etc. This dream sticks with me into waking life. Maybe this is what happens?
I'm sure your dream was/is real Valerie. Not so sure that your dream, actually, has anything to do with any reality which may, or may not, exist beyond this life we've found ourselves born into and journeying through.
Just my POV, passing in the present moment, freely expressed.
To express a contrarian perspective, just a freely: what if your Mum. the pets, the people were, actually, your glimpse of reality from within the dream life that you're living?
Thanks for your post Valerie; valent with genial provocation; a fine post on the back of George's from deep in Red Rock Country.
This is such a rich discussion. The simple fact that everyone is fully committed to exploring thoughts and evidences of an afterlife shows care and, majorly, some responsibility. This is why we’re here, actually. It’s more than anecdotes, should one wish to take up the challenge of coming to terms with one’s own mortality, looking from this side of the mirror.
(Tapped out on iPad, I hope this message is coherent. The keyboard broke/went wonky on Thursday and the new one has not arrived yet.)
*Immortality and Reincarnation 101*
Don’t—repeat, do not—repeat, do not—do drugs. (Coffee and tea are all right.) Drugs as we currently define them disrupt and damage the fine electrical fields of the human being which you need to survive—in whatever form you have earned—beyond this life. Marijuana rips holes in the electrical fields (thus the ‘high’) and depletes the human systems of the energies they need to get one out of here, which is the whole point.
The head is the finest piece of machinery, you could say, on planet Earth. You don’t want to mess with it in this way or, say, break blocks of concrete with it. (That’s obviously a misuse of the energies, which Eastern practices such as karate, etc. have a deep, ancient knowledge of.)
So—Patrick Stewart, Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConnaughy (sp.), Willie Nelson, et al.—you are poor role models for us and future generations. Of course that is just one part of you, but your ignorance of the matter will likely erase you, extinguish you. Translation: no afterlife. Live it up now, but die forever.
Potheads are just that—potheads, for what they are doing to their head… The head, with the pineal gland activated, is meant to be radiant, not shut down, the energies diverted into ‘highs’. The Buddhists have this much right. (But much of Buddhism has gone off as well, one has to look at the monk’s or nun’s eyes, the bearing, the glow or lack of it.)
The same goes for LSD, mushrooms, etc. Don’t do them. They are shortcuts to highs rather than development. (I think George Saunders here has this right, encouraging wonder, awe, discipline, fun, writing and revising, not drugs.)
Next: don’t cremate. You’ve been told… I’ve 29 years of research, and this is a sure way of erasing you forever. That means, one life (the one you can remember), then, gone, over, finito. A person with high development might take off before the cremation, but most of us would probably be over. Gone.
The Chinese, as just one example, have always had a strong aversion to cremation. They knew that, if one got it right, one’s destiny was in the stars. The Communists undid this, however. Only certain religious minorities in China are permitted burial.
We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, but the reverse. That is, spiritual, or electrical, beings first.
Our close neighbor, two doors down, had pains five weeks ago. The diagnosis: lung cancer, with metastases throughout. Three weeks later, legs and arms bloated to double their size, doctors applying radiation treatments randomly, he died. One week before the diagnosis he had been skiing in the Alps.
My wife, who studies Buddhism, which can tend to heighten clairvoyance and sensitivity, felt Johan’s presence. Again, without the development, most will linger for months. (Nine months to form up, nine months, generally, to leave.) He was about our alley, in the neighborhood. She went to the funeral and memorial service. The next day Johan was cremated. Instantly, my wife said—he is gone. No more Johan.
Anecdotes, which help to flesh out one’s suspicions or sensings (there is no need to assume, one can take up the research)! are helpful. The basic rules or laws of the game, the premise here, will remain.
This is hard-hitting. I’ve rows of binders of writing and research, not to impress, but to try to make sense of it all.
Having been in an accident in 2020, it’s even more on this reader’s and writer’s mind.
My brother was cremated and I still have contact with him. So I don’t believe your rigid rules and certainties are correct. On the other hand we create our realities through our beliefs so whatever you are certain about will be proved true to you.
This is wonderful, Valerie. I've read that this is just as it happens. That the same crew cycles together, sometimes playing different roles. I think you and I are a part of the same squad!
My mother had Alzheimer's for over ten years before her death. The day she died, I drove to be with my father and some others at their house in the woods. While I was sitting at a table, people talking, feeling mostly just tired and sad, I sensed a powerful joy move through the room, and through me, like a wind. And it wasn't just any joy, it was very specifically my mother's joy--she was an enormously joyful person--which I would recognize anywhere, though it had been so long since she could even speak.
I later learned some people call this a passing-by, and the feeling is not always joy but might be gratitude, or peace, but always specifically the dead loved one's feeling that blows beautifully through you. One of the strangest and most beautiful things that I've ever experienced.
Another: I'd lived with a man in grad school, loved him deeply, hoped to marry him, but it ended. We remained in distant contact over the years. While we were together he brought me pair of blue pearl earrings from a trip to Japan, and years after we broke up I lost one of them, which broke my heart. Fast forward a couple of decades (I am now happily married): he died suddenly, and I was surprisingly devastated. Because I am interested in Tibetan Buddhism and the concept of the bardo, I often mark the 49th day after someone's death to remember them. On the 49th day after his death, I opened a little box in my bathroom I'd opened a hundred times before, and their was the lost pearl. What a gift.
One more! My high school boyfriend died my senior year. A couple of months earlier we'd been driving around and Bach's Air on a G String came on the radio. He said "This piece always reminds me of you"--then, semi-jokingly—"I give it to you. It is now your song." He died a couple of months later, spring of my senior year. That fall, in college, I was in the study lounge, studying with friends and listening to our college radio station. A guy I barely knew--I had met him briefly twice--was DJing. He said, "This next piece reminds me so much of Kathy Catmull, it's like it's her song, so I'm sending it out to her." My friends started to laugh and tease me but I was in shock, because the piece was Bach's Air on a G String.
so I don't know what this means about life after death, except that I do feel there is an intermingling between life and death. As if the material of the universe forms into creatures like us, and then the forms dissolve, but they are not so bound in time that they cannot return in these small, brilliant (in the sense of brilliant light) ways.
yes, the passing by. I didn't know there was a name for it. Thank you. I think at certain times we are open to other dimensions that might be hard to discern when we're in the thick of daily life.
In 2008 I was in the hospital with very advanced blood cancer. As sick as I was, there was no pain and I was only on antibiotics and fluids, which is to say, I was lucid. A few weeks after I was admitted, at the depth of my emotional and physical trauma, I awoke in the middle of the night. Sitting in the chair in my hospital room was a presence I couldn't identify as anyone specific. A feeling of comfort and relief flooded through me. I stopped worrying. The next morning I asked the nurse who was sitting in my room last night, and a little startled, she said "Nobody," and pointed out that I didn't have a chair, none of the rooms in the ICU have chairs. I don't have any idea how I saw what I saw, but it was real, and a few days later one of the interns I'd become friends with told me I was unbelievably cheerful for someone so sick. I still am. Cheerful, not sick (knock on wood).
I've also had an ICU experience of invisible to others visitors. I can attribute it to the morphine-based meds but I can also attribute it to the thin veil between realms in moments where life is very much in the pocket of death. In a semi-lucid post-surgery state in the few first hours, I saw a person in a chair near the end of my bed who looked at me and I immediately knew that he was invisible to others and was there for me. Still, sentinel, and without characteristics that I could identify. Later another person entered the visible to me area of the ICU with an air and appearance of importance (which I can't describe at all) and every one of the nurses in the room sat down in their chairs next to their patients as soon as he entered the room. My feeling was this was the person who dispensed the strong opioids being administered. What struck me as so strange was how the nurses immediately stopped what they were doing and sat down during his visit. I'm not convinced he wasn't also a manifestation of my mind at that time.
I've had other experiences in my life but these were felt at a time when I was acutely present to the relationship of my possible death to my vibrant and fleeting life and I was tuned to so much of what was happening during this health experience that related to that understanding.
I was also a regular meditator at the time. Not so much now.
All I feel with any certainty is that a good death is the most important gift we can receive for our next life and that the bardo is that transition between the two where the weight of our life and death is presented to us.
'Next Life' and 'The Bardo' are conceptually elegant projections, and that's what both are: projections.
Or maybe, outside of strolling the dreamtime streets of Dream Land, others reading this thread will have empirical data they may care to share?
As it happens I've worked - way back in the day - as a garden labourer, occasional grave digger, in a cemetery-cum-crematorium setting. It was a period of employment that was driven by one tickets: never saw or heard tell of anyone making a visit back on a return ticket.
How can a story be truthful if it is written beyond the pale of verifiable human experience?
I've been moved to posit the question, having done so I'll be interested in any responses that peer Storu Clubbers may care to post.
It may be that these experiences can’t be measured empirically. I’m not saying that makes them “true” or “false”- rather that they are experiences of a kind outside of how we process the everyday of our lives.
"How can a story be truthful if it is written beyond the pale of verifiable human experience?"
Here I go, trying to answer this riddle, O Great Sphinx!
A story, precisely, is a story, not an account of verifiable facts (though it may contain them). Answering your question then comes down to "what does 'truthful' mean?", and that's a hard one. Let's say we experience stories mostly alone (as readers, certainly, but even in the community of feeling in an audience or a congregation, where each individual is limited by, and will return to, their own experience and consciousness). The truth(fulness) of a story is something powerfully suggested by the story and received as enlightening by as many individuals as possible. That is, it sheds light on questions or difficulties experienced by individuals in such a way as to appear universal, applicable to everyone.
I'm saying "appear" because different individuals, or entire groups, may have differing sensitivities. So I'm saying the truth of stories is relative. An absolute statement like "we will all die" is a universal truth but doesn't shed much light.
A lot of stuff (like, a LOT) may happen in stories that is "beyond the pale of verifiable human experience". This stuff may be enlightening, may shed light on our lives, our problems. I'd suggest that, to be enlightening, it has to be so -- shed light, effect change -- within the terms of the story. Hamlet's father as a real ghost sets off the action by ordering his son to avenge him. At a deeper level, he is a symbol of authoritarian paternalism, the military father of an intellectual son, and that takes us to the heart of the play.
(That was hard to write and is probably full of holes. Thinking on my feet.)
Absolutely, go at it scientifically. This is healthy and prevents fantasy. At the same time, instinct and feeling enter into experience, it’s not all empirical evidence. The research will inform the writing, our reason for coming together here.
The gravedigger position must have been illuminating. People will hang around, but mostly because of unfinished business. Nice way of putting it—one-way tickets. Those with development can choose where they go.
Beautiful! My girlfriend has been at the bedside of her mother and sister who both died and witnessed them talking about the relatives who were spiritually in the room.
What an unexpected question! But you are the author of a novel that takes place in that in-between place, and you are a Buddhist, and so I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised. We are our stories, after all, and the way we each view our impending death (the stories we tell ourselves about that moment) can’t help but make a difference in the way we live.
I’m a firm believer in the inarguable fact that we cannot know what comes after death. It’s also true that we have only our own bodies to rely on in order to access reality—and so, we are missing levels upon levels of other realities which we cannot access. There are worlds out there that we cannot know, though humans have tried to journey to such places for as long as human history has been recorded and before.
To know that we do not know is the ticket—and so we decide what to believe. We have no other choice, really.
I am no philosopher. I’ve had no personal experience with near-death. (Sebastian Junger has a new book out on his own near-death experience, which may interest you.) My feelings on death are rooted in my culture, the religion in which I was raised, the family I grew up in, the people I’ve known, the deaths I’ve witnessed (I’ve been with five people at the moment of death), and my own ponderings. As I’ve grown older and feel deeply my own mortality, I’ve thought of death more than ever.
So here, briefly, are my thoughts: I do not fear death itself. The only trepidations I have concern the moments before death. I hope that I am not faced with a bad death—one that happens in a moment of fear. I hope for a peaceful death, surrounded by those who love me. I hope that when death comes, I will be ready and that I will feel I have lived a full and beautiful life. I’m working on that now.
As for death itself, I do not see any reason to think about what happens to a person when death arrives. It seems a waste of time and energy. We cannot know! All we know is life here, today and in this moment. Our purpose is to live, here and now. Live fully, live joyfully, if possible. I don’t know for certain why we are here—is this a cosmic joke? But I’ve decided (despite moments of darkness) that we are all here to live together. To be good people, doing good work, seeking awe and wonder. Gratitude! Life is amazing and terrible, beautiful and ugly, tender and rough, and we are here for all of it.
I don’t think about a judgment that comes in death. I’m doing the best I can here on earth, and if there is a cosmic entity out there who is judging my actions, well, then so be it. (I don’t believe in such a thing.) Death will come for all of us and we will find out then what awaits. We really don’t have another choice. (But what a joy it will be to find out what happens!) My life’s journey does not have death as its destination. Instead, my life’s journey is all about life.
Having said all of this, I do talk to the dead. I talk to my mother the most. Do I think she is somewhere listening? No, but I talk to her anyway. I feel about dead people the same way I feel about God. I don’t believe, but I pray anyway. Who knows? It can’t hurt, right?
Be here now. Love your life. Love everyone. Forgive everyone. Enjoy what you can. Feel all of it, all of the time. Do your best. Death will come. We each will do a perfect job at dying. All will be fine.
Well, maybe not forgive everyone... :) But seriously, on the life after death topic, I wonder if people who live for an afterlife, like they really put all eggs in the afterlife basket, I wonder if they care as much about climate change, the problems here on earth, and how we can do things to help others in our brief time here. That has crossed my mind.
Yes, I see what you are saying. I think that for some belief systems, you are correct. What's funny, really, is that here we are talking about death when, in fact, we have already experienced it--and we continue to experience it all of the time. Everything in our past is gone forever. It is as dead to us as our ancestors. At the same time, there is no guarantee of any future. All we have is the eternal now.
This has to be one of the more mature assessments of life here, and potential life after, I’ve read in a discussion. There are definite rules, Mary, and a cosmic law, and they are knowable. ‘We decide what to believe. We have no other choice, really.’ Brutal honesty, as well as the notes on family, the religion of one’s environment, one’s experience… How one dies, in which circumstance, does matter, terribly. That in-between of the bardo (although I would avoid Eastern terms imported like that) is actually missing the point. It’s like losing, when we, especially those in open countries such as the USA, have every opportunity to win.
Your wisdom… no, one does not want to die in fear.
I don’t want to sound too know-it-all, it may be an effect of an accident, 2020. Words, written expression, can sound a little dogmatic. Yet… a cosmic entity, as you write, does exist, and we did know this before, and will know it after. Awe, wonder, gratitude, doing good, building rather than destroying—in that alone something in you does believe, and knows.
It’s not judgement (perhaps a Christian turn to the truth of it), but right, suitable, fitting, appropriate, or not.
This is just one of many lives, if we get it right.
Firmly in your camp. This is the life we have. Make the most of what we know/experience. I think it's fine for people to 'research' what happens post death. Questions, and the seeking of the answers, is how human knowledge has grown. Maybe one day there will be some way of knowing. For the rest of us not researching it (or maybe writing creatively about it), it's not worth spending too much time on.... as that may distract us from making the most of now.
Thank you Mary oh yes forgive all. I consult with my husband Bob who died 5 years ago and I always make the right decision for me now. ''and my mother well her favorite saying everytime I talk to her always says THIS TO SHALL PASS. So true in my life now.
Thanks, Elizabeth. (Though the only people I would ever guide would be my children as they grew up, as that was my job. Beyond that, I'm just doing my best.)
Well done Mary....I was going to say something about Junger's book too.....remember too our life is also one big complex contained chemical reaction, plus altered states from drugs such as ayahuasca can also shift us to other places and then half our living time, is in ever changing dreams^^
I've not read the Junger yet--but a friend has given me a copy, so I hope to get to it soon. Yes, mind-altering drugs may have the effect of showing us parts of our consciousness that we can't otherwise access. Which leads me to believe that there is so much more out there....
My father would have turned 82 today. He died at 76, of metastatic cancer. While he was dying I began to sense … all I can think of to call them is teensy-weensy tears in the veil between this world and the next.
“Tears,” even, is too big a word. Think of a giant window covered by a curtain so seamless and so massive you can't see its edges, and so sheer you'd swear there's no curtain there at all, if your view of what's outside weren't maddeningly blurry. You decide the window's just dirty, and make a mental note to wash it sometime in the next year or five, and then you notice a snag in the curtain that admits just the tiniest bit of light. You see that bit of light and yes! There *is* a curtain there, and yes! There’s bright light on the other side of it.
Each snag in the curtain has given me a story I cherish. I’m hoarding those, mostly, to tell at other times and in other venues, but here’s one.
Labor Day weekend, five months before Dad died, I flew to visit my parents with my son, who was two and a half. Dad knew he was dying, as did I, but neither of us knew that the other knew, and we each kept this secret for the sake of my mother, since she seemed not to know. All weekend long she showered my son with airplanes and firetrucks, which were his thing back then, and hugs and kisses, which weren’t, especially.
Meanwhile, Dad went to radiation every day. As I said, the cancer was metastatic, so it wasn’t his first rodeo. It had been eight years since he’d called with the news that he was going to have targeted radiation therapy to treat a melanoma in his eye, and when I’d finished sobbing, I went to cafepress or somesuch and bought him a lime green tee-shirt screen-printed with the international warning symbol for radioactivity (☢️). I knew he would love it, and he did love it, which for the purposes of this story tells you everything you need to know about him, me, and the sense of humor we shared. He wore it to every appointment, delighting the nurses, one of whom snapped a photo — lime green ☢️ shirt, size 2x, crowned with a radioactive eye patch and a smirk — that to this day remains his Facebook profile picture.
But anyway, each day of our visit, Dad goes to radiation and my son luxuriates in airplanes and firetrucks and spurns hugs and kisses, and on the day we fly home the weather forecast is just as crappy as you please. I pack the car under a sky that's gray and thick and humid and all-around shitty, and when I finish there’s Dad, a vision in fluorescent green cotton and flannel pajama pants. He's come to say goodbye before he heads to the cancer center, and wearing this getup so as to leave me laughing.
I do laugh, and then I ask him to sit for a picture. (-Where? -In that chair. -What chair? -The one by the front walk. -There's a chair by the front walk? - Yeah. That’s a weird place for a chair, isn't it? Is it new? -Could be, yeah. I'll sit there. -Yes, sit there. ) He sits down and while I’m fiddling with my phone, trying to frame a halfway decent shot of my dying dad in shitty light against a shitty gray sky, a seam bursts (or so it *seems,* ha, ha!) in that very sky, and sunlight pours through it onto that very dad.
In that burst of light I snap a bunch of pictures of Dad without really seeing him. Hours later, on the plane, I’ll look at them and observe that Dad’s at least sixty pounds lighter in them than in the picture the nurse took way back when. He’s swimming in the shirt, and instead of smirking he’s... smiling*, sort of, to the extent he ever does in pictures. It’s smirks or nothing, usually, and bunny ears for the poor sap next to him, when applicable. But now he's a solo subject, and he makes a good faith effort to be a good one. Now he *tries* to smile, and that effort slams head-on into the tears he's fighting. They make a mangled mess that's neither and both.
And years later, (i.e., now), I’ll look at these pictures and suppose Dad was fighting tears because here we were, at the end of four of the last days we’d have together — he knew it, and I knew it, but he didn’t know I knew it, and all weekend he knew he should tell me but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Now I was hugging him goodbye and he was hugging me back. He didn’t want to let go, and I didn’t want to let go, but neither of us let on to the other, and let go we did. And when we did, that secret and the other one — the big one that each of us thought s/he was keeping from the other — rushed out into the space that opened up between us, and sunlight spilled on them through that ruptured seam in the shitty sky.
There was a lot to say, and we got around to saying most of it in the minutes and months after, but not just then. What happened just then was the sky mended itself, the sunlight vanished (*now you see me, now you don’t, suckers, ha, ha!*) and took our no-longer-secrets with it. The vacuum it left sucked us back into another — longer, squeezier — hug. We hugged as if we meant to squish death itself.
And then Dad went to radiation. I fastened my son in his carseat and we drove to the airport in a thunderstorm. Late that evening, back in our ancient, persnickety apartment in a Boston ‘burb, I rocked him in the glider. He giggled when tears dripped from my chin and wet his face, then suddenly sat bolt upright and stared, rapt, at something over my left shoulder. He looked for a long time at a corner of the ceiling, and then at me. Then at the ceiling again, as if entreating something up there to repeat itself.
Light from the neighbors’ porch, or maybe the moon, streams onto his little face so I’ll always remember how it glows when he announces: “I need to give you a kiss!” Then he plants a wet one on me and passes out in my lap, while an ancient light fixture with a persnickety dimmer switch flicks and buzzes overhead.
Those were the first snags in the veil, which haven’t stopped appearing. The longer Dad’s gone, the more of them I notice. To wit: as often as not, on days that were special to us — my birthday, or his** — I receive what I think of as little gifts from Dad: i.e., the invitation to tell this story in a forum tended by as paternal a presence as my life has these days.
So: thanks, Dad. And thank you, George.
*Autocorrect autocorrected my initial misspelling of "smiling" to "smelling," which Dad would have loved.
**I banged out this epic and posted it with minutes of Dad's birthday remaining (EDT), then revisited it this morning, because I couldn't help myself. Never can. So this version's been edited for (I hope) clarity, but the content (I hope) is the same.
Your story moved me. Maybe it's these moments when we are open, when we look at life, when we are vulnerable and sad, that we can see the tears that are always there. I think life is often like this psychological experiment when we are tasked to count the balls that are bouncing through the picture and miss the elephant that's crossing the room. But in those moments when we shift our attention (like a loved one dying, or our own sickness) we start to see the tears in the veil -- the elefant, the beams of sun rays, and the flickering light that are always there. Thank you for sharing your story. It's a reminder to stop and watch...
My grandmother was a lifelong pianist. She was classically trained and a real snob about her music. Basically, any type of music invented from 1900 onward was suspect to her. After we left her funeral (she was 107!), we turned on the local classical music station for the 20 minute drive to my mother's house. My mother and my brother did the same thing in their respective cars. The station--which usually plays symphonies or concertos--featured a work by a solo pianist. It played for the entire drive, wrapping up just as we reached my mom's.
I adored my grandmother. I think that was her parting gift. Or maybe, she just wanted to reiterate, one last time, the type of music we should play on our radios!
My wife and I once flew made a fly drive road trip that was billed and branded as 'Southern States'. First morning out of Charlotte, headed for Ashville, we pressed the 'On' button on the radio console and found our Middle English Sensible Selves startled by the question which broke loud and oh so clear over the speakers: "Do you want to Shag?"
"Welcome to North Carolina, you'll find The Natives Friendly" the guys at the Immigration and Car Rental desks had both said... but Shagging not so long after a hearty breakfast?
May well be but in the case of the question blared out at us from the radio of our yet to get familiar with rental car it was referring to the ritual of what Alabama were on about when they sang of the ritual of "Shagging on the Boulevard". . . decoded readily by the cognoscenti as performing the State Dance of North Carolina but, at the moment of hearing, a gobsmacker to us :-))
In 2022, July, my 16 years old daughter passed away after battling a rare and aggressive cancer for two years. She was my only child and my heart and joy. Within a week of her passing, I began to get what I now call visitations from her. I also would dream of her, but in visitations, the idea would be to let me aware of her presence (like a shower of energy, the hug from an unseen her, her presence next to me for a second.) As soon as I become aware that it was her, she would disappear.
Since then I have begun to get a few more details in these visits. And again, the feel and weight and sense of it is different. And I am very aware that I am lying in bed and was sleeping, but am not now, unlike a dream, which is totally immersive and you are asleep through out. Initially, I had many visitations from her, but now I would get a visit once in 4 or 6 weeks. And please don’t get me started on signs!
A lot of it is also because I started meditating about 6 months after she passed. In fact, around the week of her passing, three of my friends (who don’t know each other and live in different countries) had dreams where my daughter, Sakshi, came to them and spoke to them about something related to their lives and then told all three of them in the exact same words - “tell mumma and papa, that I am happy and free. I want them to have fun and be happy.”
It has been a tough journey but we are doing our best to make our little one proud. So, yes, I do believe in the afterlife. I know we are all energy and the essence of who we are continues. This has been an easy acceptance for me because I have experienced energy once as a teenager (it protected me when I felt unsafe), and the Bhagwad Gita speaks about this, so culturally too, it was easier for me to assimilate.
Binu, we are kindred spirits, you and I. I lost my daughter Rachel on Christmas night in 2008, and grief takes so many forms. Even though a loved one is dead, grief is that gift that keeps on giving. It never lets you go, and for me at least, it's become a friend. It tells me what it needs, when it needs. I wrap my arms around it when I'm tired or missing her so much.
And then something else occurs to me today in reading this -- within a few days following her death, in the middle of the night, I felt something, some presence in my bedroom. My husband was sleeping next to me, on my left. Just next to his side of the bed, I looked over and saw her, disembodied from the shoulders up, but it was definitely Rachel. I whispered to my husband to wake up and look to his left. He did, and he saw her, too. I don't think we were experiencing some kind of mass hysterical hallucination. She wavered for a moment, then evaporated like steam. I haven't seen a definite sign since, but this is what is occurring to me today. Maybe folks here who are describing paranormal events are also people who are themselves ready for the connection. In other words, they don't have barriers, filters, or an energy of some kind that might make it impossible for those who have crossed over that River Styx to penetrate. I think of myself -- so ridden, even now, even after all these days, weeks, months, years, so ridden with guilt, with regret, with feelings of having been such a terrible mother (Queen Lear), that even if she were trying, she might not be able to get through till I myself come to a peace about it, till I can forgive myself.
Forgiving oneself is the hardest thing to do, isn't it? And yet, if I were my own best friend, I'd be wrapping my arms around her, telling her that she can't take on all the sins and wrongs of the world, and to hang on to me, while trying to let go of her pain. But I can't even do that for myself. Thank you, George. It seems we all needed this post.
Dear Nancy, first of all - a big virtual hug! You are so right! Grief is a gift that keeps giving, and the only way grief can end is for the love to end, and that is not going to happen! Grief has made me a much better person than I was - kinder and more vulnerable, and maybe more fearless.
What you said about it being harder for our loved ones to reach out to us is true. My mother, who processes her grief over Sakshi’s loss by being busy and not thinking, is yet to have a visitation or a proper dream of Sakshi. Same for my husband. When grief is stuck in us, it lowers our vibration and makes it harder for the higher dimension energies to reach us. Guilt, anger, unprocessed grief are all emotions that lower vibration. It doesn’t make these emotions wrong though. We have to go through these feelings and journeys.
As for what you said about being a terrible mother – please, no! No! You were the mother she chose to be born to for precisely the experiences she and you had. This is such a complex topic and I don’t want to treat it lightly, but please do read about soul pacts, if you have not read about them before. Rachel, you, and your husband, embarked on this special journey knowing perfectly well the way it would have turned out. I am sure you know that she has forgiven you. Maybe this is what your life’s journey is going to be about – forgiving yourself. I do hope you find peace soon, so that Rachel can reach you.
Honestly, I think our souls are a bit too ambitious for their own good, but one day, we are going to be done with this ride and we will be reunited with our girls. I am sharing my email id binusivan22@yahoo.com, in case you need any recommendations for books or articles on soul pacts and related journeys.
Yes, Binu! This is the idea I couldn't recall in my last post. This idea of lower vs. higher vibrations and energies. This is why I believe I have not been able to connect with her, assuming such a thing is possible (I'm coming to believe it is, though). I've created and maintained lower vibrations because I'm so mired in the darker feelings, despite years of trying to work this through. And this year for some reason, I seem to be having a more intense "grief relapse." Not that it isn't always present, but some days, I call them "un-days," life sort of goes on as usual, and like your mother, who distracts herself from reflecting on this horrible loss, you can get through some amount of time and be more or less functional.
Thank you for this, dear lady. I will be emailing you for those recommendations.
I wish I had something to say that would make your journey easier. I just want you to know that I heard you and I will keep your words in my heart. I'm so sorry for your loss.
Thank you Denise. ❤️. I have learnt to take life one day at a time. It has been a crash course in living in the moment, and I wish there had been a gentler way to learn this lesson, but it is what it is. Thank you for your kind words.
Thank you Christine. I was in a cab, the other day, when I read George's post and replied in a rush. Then again, I was in a cab when I read your comment and replied. Today, finally I am sitting in front of my laptop and am able to type out a decent thank you note :). Thank you for reaching out and sending light and love ❤️. Am always so so so appreciative of it.
I have not been on this journey for too long Victoria, but I have learnt to accept this loss. I just hope that I am able to use my life up the way it is meant to be and make my girl proud of her mumma.
I once dreamt I was in a concert hall where a new work I’d composed was about to have its premiere. In waking life, I write songs, and while I dabble with scored music, it will never (in this lifetime) make its way into the kind of fancy European auditorium like the one in the dream.
After the orchestra tuned, the conductor entered to a round of applause. Once it died down and after a moment of bracing silence, the piece began. It was about 20 minutes long and was a thicket of complex harmonies and rhythms I can’t fathom in waking life. I listened to the whole thing with eager, receptive, totally alive attention. It was—in every way—beyond my capacity as a musician. I woke up more or less stupefied. The dream was in my mind. Was my mind inside my brain? Or was my mind really elsewhere? Or was the action of the dream all happening in another time?
That was about 10 years ago. It expanded the range of possibilities I’m able to consider about what life and death are. It also gave me a real break, helped ease some of the pressures I subject my creativity to. It’s like…if that experience happened (it did), then what else is possible? Beats me.
I play no musical instrument, cannot read music, have no theoretical knowledge. I have a shallow awareness of music such that I am out of my depth beyond only the most famous classical or jazz, and even then only when there is a clear 'tune' do I tend to respond, and then I do not respond with anything like the force I respond to literature. But...
I have woken from dreams full of the most impossibly complex harmonic orchestral beauty, beyond anything I could ever conceive in waking, music for a thousand voices and instruments, structured and organic, intentional and free, terrible and inspiring. I am at a total loss to say where this comes from, because it exceeds my capabilities and experience and knowledge by so much. If it were just a little, then I could explain it, but the experience of the music is so specific and the sensory information so memorable that I am certain I am not simply dreaming an illusion. I can't but think something magnitudes greater than me is channeling its meaning into a gap opened up in my soul as I drift between states of consciousness.
I have no particular beliefs in anything beyond, have no religion or religious upbringing. But this music must surely not be coming from me.
Definitely relevant. Our experiences of other dimensions can be so expansive. I think being conscious of their existence is one of the great pleasures of being alive. And if we can be open to them, well, that's a good thing for humanity.
I know how that is--to know what my sleeping mind is capable of imagining--is unfathomable. A few nights ago, I saw in a dream a landscape of beautiful buildings I can't imagine drawing in real life. I mentioned that to my granddaughter's boyfriend, whose fascination is visionary architecture, and he told me the name of an 18th century architect who frequently said of one of his designs, 'I saw it in a dream.'
Dream and Reality. Like two sides of the same street? One the sunny side, one the shady? Issue is, always and ever, which is the true side of the street? And that last question isn't so easy to answer, even assuming - which is a big if - you can reliable discern, distinguish and define just what is 'sunny' and what is 'shady'.
I think it's marvellous that a net outcome of this tempering 'dream' and 'reality' is that the experience(s) left you with a firm and sustained sense of straddling an expanded range of possibilities with a grip of of some form of reins in your hands.
Bon chance Timothy, with each and every one of your ongoing creative encounters and the ventures that they seed.
My high school girlfriend, my first true love, disappeared in Colombia many years after we split. She was traveling by river with her boyfriend in a disputed rebel area. They were never found, despite both sets of parents searching in Colombia multiple times. Years later, I had the most shockingly vivid dream I've ever had, of both of us underwater, her strikingly long hair floating in thick strands around her head. She was looking fixedly at me, and I understood her to say, without words, "Tom, this is what happened. [meaning she had drowned] But I'm OK."
That felt so like truth that I can't say otherwise. But my own sense of an afterlife (after 9 years of Catholic school, and being an altar boy) is that indeed we have souls, but they aren't individuated, and that those souls are connected in vast swaths of something like energy, forever. (And no, I haven't been smoking any pot.) George, thanks for asking!
Aye Tom, vivid dreams. I wonder, due to the difficulty of souls from that other place you describe as vast swaths of something like energy, that this is more possible when we are asleep and our own souls are able to meet with those other departed souls halfway, so to speak.
I'm with you; sleep and dreams are those liminal, boundary-traveling areas, which lend themselves readily to fiction of the flavor of "We are living a dream within a dream," like those nested Slavic dolls. Though in some dreams, you can never get to the bottom of the nest.
I was raised by atheists. My mother had been raised Catholic but rejected the church and beliefs entirely, my father was raised by religious southerners, and he rejected all of that. There was no exposure to talk of the afterlife until I started school, unless they were discussing what other people bought into. I heard religious kids talking, but by then I was one of those know-it-all, asshole atheist kids. As an adult, I can't explain the strange dreams I've had, much like the dreams I've read by others here on the comments. Before I moved to Seattle, I had a series of strange dreams, one that I was flying around in an old neighborhood, all bricks, flying around with a group of vampires. Another series, that a volcano blew, an earthquake occurred, and we were all trying to save people who were buried. Back then (1989) I didn't know anything about Seattle, and hadn't visited at all before moving. The vampire dream, who knows? The wild part is I had no idea there were earthquakes here, no clue that Mount Rainer may blow it's stack one day. I just moved here without visiting first, the dreams were a few months prior to the move. When I first went to Pioneer Square, the place was exactly like the setting in my dream.
Sea such a vivid dream to remember. Our brains do amazing things when we dream and I wake and often times my dreams scare me to a point where I have to go back to sleep and hope it wasnt so. Raised as a catholic doesnt help sometimes. Anyway I am g;ad you remembered this one.
People used to talk about their dreams, then after Freud it became fraught because everything seemed to the good doctor to be about sex. Maybe we should go back to that time, when people took a deep dive into dreams. We'd probably remember them more, and I wonder if it would ease the fright of the bad dream. I also suffered from bad dreams, especially as a child and young woman. Somehow they've shifted.
I've never been into analyzing dreams, and don't remember many. But maybe in the past ten years I've had dreams in which I experience the most pleasant spiritual well being, a kind of visit to what heaven might be, ( though I don't believe in heaven ). I'm aware too, of somewhat subconsciously moving my conscious thoughts in that direction. Not sure what that means.
I'm the same, I don't think dreams can be made sense of, or at least mine don't make sense. I've heard that if you set an intention to remember your dreams, it slowly starts working. Also, booze impacts whether you can remember dreams or not, which makes sense.
On May 8,2024 I was under anesthesia for a valve replacement. I could hear everything and was so frightened. I am not sure it was a dream or real, but first I was walking holding my husbands hand toward ICloud. Then he turned and said"the whol wide world is a very narrow bridge...the point is not to be afraid"...how many times i had repeated that to him when he was alive. 3 weeks passed and I am almost my self again but I am an entirely different Gloria. Thanks everyone for reminding me how lucky we ar to be here with George and all of you.
Particles and waves. This is how the dead have come to visit, as energy punching through whatever membrane exists between here and there. My dad was the first to show after his death more than twenty years ago. It was the day after Christmas, and I was sick with a terrible stomach bug at home in Austin, 1500 miles away from the hospital where he did not go gently into the night. My kid sister called to tell me the news. I threw up and took to my bed. At 7:00 that evening, the phone on my night table rang—a land line back then. I looked at the caller ID, but the little lit screen was entirely blank. I pressed the talk button and radio static screeched from the handset. I’d never heard anything like it. I don’t remember if I said anything at all, but I remember getting out of bed thinking it was a lousy time for my phone to break. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water, and flicked the overhead light switch. Both bulbs—old school, long fluorescent bulbs, the kind that used to flicker for weeks before they’d die—burst, and glass covered the kitchen floor. I cleaned the mess and moaned about needing new bulbs in addition to a new phone. The next morning, my sister called again. Her first question to me was, “Did you get a strange phone call last night?” I told her yes and described the static; I thought it might have been her or a relative. “What time?” she asked. Seemed like a strange question, but I said 7:00 on the dot, to which she replied, “My call was at 8:00—and I’m one hour ahead of you.” Then she asked, “Did a bulb burn out in your house, too? Maybe the kitchen?” This freaked me out, and the hair on the back of my neck was at full attention when she told me how my mom and my aunt had all reported similar… interruptions, for want of a better word. I know my sister heard fear in my voice. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “He might not come back if you’re scared.” She was calm as could be (no idea how or why--this was crazy stuff!), but it was all I needed to hear to drop any trepidation and invite him back. And hoo-boy, did he like to visit. I wrote a song about him and, whenever I performed it live at gigs, something would almost always go wrong: speakers blew, guitar strings broke. Once, after a live set was recorded, the venue's sound guy sent me a CD with a note apologizing for the “glitch” during that track. For reasons he couldn’t explain, the song didn’t record at all. It was four minutes of, you guessed it, static. When I went to record the song for a studio album, my producer couldn’t find the source of a mysterious hum; I told him it was dad. Then I loudly invited dad to disappear for a spell, and he obliged. His visits finally ended, and I like to think all that energy dissipated happily, jauntily, curiously across the solar system and into the galaxy. BTW, that exceptional producer became my husband. When he died 10 years ago, he came to visit in the same phenomenal fashion. And have these experiences influenced my writing? Oh, yes. My WIP is full of ghosts, and as one character says, “Particles and waves. Look for them there.”
On June 28, 1989 on a rather balmy Wednesday afternoon all the items I was carrying went crashing to the kitchen floor, as if wrenched from my grasp by a strong and invisible pair of hands. Later that day I learned this had occurred at the exact moment of my best friend’s violent demise. (I feel her now, peering over my shoulder, though nothing is breaking.)
I was fifteen when I overheard my mother on the rotary phone in the hall getting the news of my father’s suicide. She told me he’d shot himself in the head when he’d hung himself from his belt in his bedroom at his mother’s house where he lived. Then she and her mother sent me to his funeral alone.
So, that reality slap ended any fancies about afterlife except my father transformed into a shade. He became an omnipotent unobtainable shade.
Would it have helped if my remaining parents had been religious? I don’t know. They weren’t remotely interested in anything but books and themselves. In the long run that saved me. Language. As it does still.
The closest I come to the afterlife or a feeling that something continues after all dies is in my garden. Like Persephone who returns in the spring, those plants that didn’t flourish in summer are given another chance in spring.
I plant things in the hope they will flourish. This spring I bought a bougainvillea, you know the lush flowering vine covered in colorful bracts with vicious thorns that grows all over the Mediterranean? I bought it despite knowing it can’t survive the winter’s in NY so it’ll have to overwinter it in my dry parlor. Chances of survival are slim, but I hold on to hope. Two Mandeville’s survived this past winter. They’re in the garden now. One in an urn from New Orleans from the 1860’s. She’s looking mighty lush.
If I were to reincarnate, I’d hope it would be as a plant in a gardener’s garden. I wouldn’t have to be a David Austin rose. I would be delighted to be a common geranium with its delightful flowers gently floating over a bed of green. Maybe my father would be there too as a bee buzzing about my pollen.
Reminds me of those lines from Leaves of Grass. What is the grass? ... What has become the old and the young men? They are alive and well somewhere.
I believe Whitman intuited the truth about the afterlife way back when. His "They are alive and well somewhere" always stays with me, and I just used it in a story that's making the rounds now. Fingers crossed.
OOO! Good fortunes on your story. If it's published pls let me know. Whitman was so deep & true. I've been trying to remember who wrote the poem about Rupert Brook's awful death & I'm stumped. It ends with the metaphor of a sun dimming. I loved his work. Dying in war is such a crime. 💙🌷
I will, Lucinda. Is it Brooke's "The Dead"? I didn't know it but your words encouraged me to look it up. Love these lines: "He leaves a white/Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,/A width, a shining piece, under the night."
No, this is a poem about Brooke's death written by maybe Robert Graves??? someone wrote here about a lost love that turns into the light & I thought of that poem. He waves and disappears into the sun. Something like that. What a glorious quote💞
(I thought of Flannery O'Conner's Geranium Stories at the end there. Which now I must find and read again)
Funny reincarnation story ( oh fuck re in carnation, another type of flowering plant, haha.) anyway, a few years ago a good old man of our town died. I was the last person to see him alive and hung his washing out (two holy shirts, two holy pants, two holy pairs of socks) as he couldn't move from his chaise-lounge he lay on listening to Beethoven at maximum volume. At the funeral, open casket in our wee stone lakeside church of the good shepherd, he spoke. Wella recording he'd made a year before was played. At the end, after some rather poignant remarks to his two daughters who were in attendance, he addressed the Vicar saying he didn't much go in for all that god stuff however did feel there was something about reincarnation that amused him. He said if he did come back, it would be as a domesticated cat. : They've got it sussed, he said.
Great story. Love the Beethoven blasting. He had taste. Yes, a cat but a loved cat in the home of a cat lover. I hope it happened for him. Reincarnation is so hopeful. Unless you're something horrible and had to come back as a mosquito.
The Rocks have billions of years of knowledge...so keep living that dash between two dates fully as you can pace it.....Two things come to mind one in Scotland one in China. In China I saw the ghost of an ancient warrior looking down on me in my bed. I over came my fear and extended my hand towards his silvery face. My hand never stopped and went right through him and he slowly disappeared back into the dark. In Scotland I was up high in the highlands shooting bridges for a book. Late in the day I was out in Glencoe and paused to watch the falling orange sun. I thought I was alone but in front of me were five huge elk with towering horns. We were all watching the same falling event of the day. I did not trouble their peace and turned then walked back two miles towards the road. When driving into the night I had a waking dream and a Scottish battle host marched in the evening sky and the drums and pipes were playing and I knew it was a call through time of my own Scottish roots. Graeme was home again and the battle host was coming to welcome me^^
And they remind me of an event that happened to me. I was living at the time across the street from a lake in Minneapolis. In the middle of the night, I felt someone was in my room and woke. I knew he was one of the wandering dead but at that time was unable to help him, said, 'I can't help you,' and he left. I read about the history of that lake, and realized I was living only a few hundred yards from the place where the indigenous people had placed their dead on platforms. But knowing he wanted help, continued to bother (haunt) me, and when I learned shamanic journeying techniques, I journeyed to speak with him, and he told me his story. A friend of mine was studying a Siberian shamanic memorial ritual and wanted practice, so I asked if she would like to do the ritual at my father's grave site, which was conveniently located in a cemetery facing west on the same lake, and close to the old indigenous platform site. So, two of my friends and I performed the ritual in my father's memory (I saw him as a young man) and we helped the wandering dead man transition and saw his ancestors come to greet him.
Your elk encounter reminds me of a story my husband and son told after a backpacking trip they took overnight in the mountains a few years ago. It was misty and chilly, at about 10,000 feet and also at dusk, and suddenly just ahead of them on the trail a herd of elk emerged, moving quickly, crossing ahead of them like ghosts. I often imagine I'm standing there behind them and can see their backs, packs slung over their shoulders, and antlers in the mist. I like your phrase "falling event of the day."
My husband drowned in July 2022 on our family vacation, he was 57 years old, I was 56, we had been together for 36 years. Our 3 daughters and I witnessed the attempts to resuscitate him. He has visited me in dreams many times since he died, the first time was 5 days after his death. My father (who died of a a sudden heart attack in 2016) visited me after his death, and I had told my husband about the visit, that I knew I was sleeping, that I knew it was my dad, that I could get information from him (I asked him "Dad, you're dead now, what's the deal, is there heaven?" and he said "well, there is, but it's not like what you'd think", and when I asked him "what is that supposed to mean?" he said "love binds us all"), so I knew my husband knew he could reach me. He appeared in my bedroom, I did not know I was asleep, he did not have a corporeal form, but a shape of shifting light, with his face coming into and out of focus at all the ages I've known him. He shouted at me "I'M HERE!" and I said I saw him, he said "It's really me" and I told him I understood. I told me financially we would be fine, that he was sorry it was such a mess (both things I did not know that have both turned out to be true), and then as I embraced him, I felt his despair, his agony at having to leave our girls. He said, stunned "I'll never see them grow up, I'll never walk them down the aisle". I told him he could find them here, just like he had found me. He said it was hard, really hard to get there. I said "but you're doing a great job!". Then he took a cigarette off the wall (we both used to smoke in our 20's but sadly gave it up since it's so bad for you, but we always missed it) and his form sucked into a smaller and smaller mass, like a star collapsing and he was gone. He has visited me many times, and our children, and other family members and friends. He has told me things (such as things that were in his autopsy report) that I did not know but which I later found out were true. He told our daughter that dying was like being born in reverse, being born into a new reality and that you understood everything you had done, and your affect on everyone, and that he would always be with us. But we needed to do our part and believe him when he came to see us, to believe when we felt his voice. Because it was difficult to do, to show up or give signs, but that he was beside us all the time.
For awhile he was sad during these visits, then he said he was just alone. Then, about 2 months after his death he came to see me and he was young, so young, and he was only going to be with me for a short time, and we saw friends coming up the path, so I knew he had to go. I begged him not to go, but as he climbed the stairs past me, he leaned over me and turned into a light as bright as a thousand suns, and then he was gone. Since then he comes to see me and he's happy, eating a sandwich, dancing with our children, just coming off the tennis court. In the visits I have with him, I know I am asleep, I know he is there, and I can ask him things, we can spend time together. I wake weeping from these visits sometimes, because I miss him so much. It is terrible being separated.
Like when you see a whale breach, and nobody else sees it and they think "she thinks she saw a whale" but you know what you saw...I have seen. And I know when my time in this body is finished he will be waiting for me over the threshold. I ache to be with him again, and I am not afraid.
"He said it was hard, really hard to get there. " I believe this to be true. To appear again in something like this mortal coil, to conjure up some semblance to a human form once we have shed our earthly body, (the word our is meaningless, there is no more our, no more us, we are not anymore,) to re-turn takes supreme effort and only happens when it is absolutely necessary for some kind of comfort-closure, or in the case of some examples given in this forum, to save someone A child, from untimely death.
In Wim Wenders film, 'Wings of Desire' beings from another dimension, angels we might call them, watch over us, ease our discomfort, but ultimately cannot interfere. It takes sacrifice to return.
Yes, the laws of energy and matter (which quantum physicists learn every day we do not understand) surely create limits…it isn’t magic, so there are laws that would bind, that will restrict what is possible. One of my children said “what would he have to do to tell us ‘I am still here, I am still with you’ that we would not discount as ‘only’ dreams, or ‘only’ coincidences?” These things he has done. “It takes sacrifice to return” sounds utterly true to me.
I am so sorry for your loss. My deepest condolences to you and your family. Thank you for what you shared - I am so grateful to you for telling this story.
I love that: love binds us all. Even in my day to day life in my working life as a lawyer, when I know the team is working well together I know it's a kind of love at work. I would never say such a thing even to my team, but I know it's true. And if it's true in life, it makes sense to me that it would be true after life also in some way shape or form. Love binds us all.
Thank you for sharing this.
this is extraordinary. thank you.
It feels like a gift to have these connections. I have had them too. Thanks for sharing yours so openly.
My deep condolences on your--and your daughter's--loss. Thank you for the gift of your story today. I read it twice over coffee and found it impactful and moving. The strange shimmer at the edges of things matters: I love that you can spend time looking where most of us don't take time to look.
Leah, I'm so sorry you lost your husband. Reading this is so astonishing, even reading about your dreams is so vivid.
What a beautiful experience. I do believe our loved ones connect with us in ways we may or may not see. Your ability to connect with your father and your husband are gifts you have been given. Thanks so much for sharing your stories, Leah.
This is so beautiful and amazing. Thank you for letting us read your words. I'm so sorry about your husband's death, and also very happy for you that he visits you in this way.
Thank you for sharing the experience of your loss, Leah. Yes, wise words “love binds us all”. It’s the only thing that’s important in every aspect of life and death.
Tenderest thoughts and love to you & your girls on this departing. 💙💙🌷
Leah, this is so beautiful I don’t know how to respond to it other than with gratitude. And reverence. More are more I’m reminded how close grief and joy are to one another.
Thank you for sharing this. I know it is hard to put these experiences into words. I know exactly what you are saying. When I felt my grandmother with me on two occasions, the only sense I could make of the feeling was that it was just love. Love binds us all. What an extraordinary gift to be given this message. We should all heed it.
This is beautiful. Leah. My beliefs about the afterlife can be summed up into that line, “love binds us all.” I believe our connections continue and can progress (which makes me excited for what’s to come, especially with those gone from this life too soon). Thank you for sharing those sacred experiences you’ve shared with your husband.
So beautifully expressed, Leah. And I know it to be true. You have indeed seen a whale.
I don't clearly believe anything about an afterlife but I believe in our belief. That, for me, is the love that "binds us all."
My son John. He demanded 200%love and devotion. He was mentally handicapped. Had seizures and behaviour made other parents glad he wasn’t theirs. He died suddenly when he was 11. I was gutted. My family fell apart. I struggled to survive. I would dream of John. Lots of anxiety. But then he visited me..several times over the next ten years. Yes that’s how long I grieved. He had a companion with him to tell me he was safe. The last time I saw him he talked to me with wisdom and understanding He knew I loved him. The world scared him which is why he was so misbehaved. I said “John you’re dead” the companion told me he was safe and alive. That was our final meeting. Sometimes I see him in my dreams but I know that is only my memory. I don’t tell people this because it is so precious to me I don’t want to weaken it. It was my lesson. Not anyone else’s. But you asked…
Thank you for this. And I'm so sorry you lost your precious son.
Thank you for telling us this story about your son. Tenderest thoughts and love to you🌷
My condolences on the loss of your son. Ten years of grief, and I'm sure it continues. I love that you saw him again.
That IS precious. Thank you for sharing.
thank you for sharing this.
Yes, what Quinn said, thank you for sharing.
I dreamt once I was walking up the driveway to my childhood home and my mother held open the door, and all the pets I had over a 20 year period came out the door in a line so happy to see me. My mother looked beautiful and free of her usual anxiety. I went inside and my family was sitting at a large round table along with other more casual relationships from parts of my life, my current landlord, my NYC neighbor, a teacher in college, my gallerist, coworkers, etc. Everyone was talking and laughing about the parts they played in the previous life, and imparting what they learned. People were deciding who they wanted to be in the next life and what they wanted to learn. We were all part of a close family and we could each decide if we wanted to go back. In another life my father might be my mother, my mother might be my daughter, my sister might be my neighbor, etc. This dream sticks with me into waking life. Maybe this is what happens?
I'm sure your dream was/is real Valerie. Not so sure that your dream, actually, has anything to do with any reality which may, or may not, exist beyond this life we've found ourselves born into and journeying through.
Just my POV, passing in the present moment, freely expressed.
To express a contrarian perspective, just a freely: what if your Mum. the pets, the people were, actually, your glimpse of reality from within the dream life that you're living?
Thanks for your post Valerie; valent with genial provocation; a fine post on the back of George's from deep in Red Rock Country.
This is such a rich discussion. The simple fact that everyone is fully committed to exploring thoughts and evidences of an afterlife shows care and, majorly, some responsibility. This is why we’re here, actually. It’s more than anecdotes, should one wish to take up the challenge of coming to terms with one’s own mortality, looking from this side of the mirror.
(Tapped out on iPad, I hope this message is coherent. The keyboard broke/went wonky on Thursday and the new one has not arrived yet.)
*Immortality and Reincarnation 101*
Don’t—repeat, do not—repeat, do not—do drugs. (Coffee and tea are all right.) Drugs as we currently define them disrupt and damage the fine electrical fields of the human being which you need to survive—in whatever form you have earned—beyond this life. Marijuana rips holes in the electrical fields (thus the ‘high’) and depletes the human systems of the energies they need to get one out of here, which is the whole point.
The head is the finest piece of machinery, you could say, on planet Earth. You don’t want to mess with it in this way or, say, break blocks of concrete with it. (That’s obviously a misuse of the energies, which Eastern practices such as karate, etc. have a deep, ancient knowledge of.)
So—Patrick Stewart, Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConnaughy (sp.), Willie Nelson, et al.—you are poor role models for us and future generations. Of course that is just one part of you, but your ignorance of the matter will likely erase you, extinguish you. Translation: no afterlife. Live it up now, but die forever.
Potheads are just that—potheads, for what they are doing to their head… The head, with the pineal gland activated, is meant to be radiant, not shut down, the energies diverted into ‘highs’. The Buddhists have this much right. (But much of Buddhism has gone off as well, one has to look at the monk’s or nun’s eyes, the bearing, the glow or lack of it.)
The same goes for LSD, mushrooms, etc. Don’t do them. They are shortcuts to highs rather than development. (I think George Saunders here has this right, encouraging wonder, awe, discipline, fun, writing and revising, not drugs.)
Next: don’t cremate. You’ve been told… I’ve 29 years of research, and this is a sure way of erasing you forever. That means, one life (the one you can remember), then, gone, over, finito. A person with high development might take off before the cremation, but most of us would probably be over. Gone.
The Chinese, as just one example, have always had a strong aversion to cremation. They knew that, if one got it right, one’s destiny was in the stars. The Communists undid this, however. Only certain religious minorities in China are permitted burial.
We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, but the reverse. That is, spiritual, or electrical, beings first.
Our close neighbor, two doors down, had pains five weeks ago. The diagnosis: lung cancer, with metastases throughout. Three weeks later, legs and arms bloated to double their size, doctors applying radiation treatments randomly, he died. One week before the diagnosis he had been skiing in the Alps.
My wife, who studies Buddhism, which can tend to heighten clairvoyance and sensitivity, felt Johan’s presence. Again, without the development, most will linger for months. (Nine months to form up, nine months, generally, to leave.) He was about our alley, in the neighborhood. She went to the funeral and memorial service. The next day Johan was cremated. Instantly, my wife said—he is gone. No more Johan.
Anecdotes, which help to flesh out one’s suspicions or sensings (there is no need to assume, one can take up the research)! are helpful. The basic rules or laws of the game, the premise here, will remain.
This is hard-hitting. I’ve rows of binders of writing and research, not to impress, but to try to make sense of it all.
Having been in an accident in 2020, it’s even more on this reader’s and writer’s mind.
Best to you all, wherever you are on the journey.
My brother was cremated and I still have contact with him. So I don’t believe your rigid rules and certainties are correct. On the other hand we create our realities through our beliefs so whatever you are certain about will be proved true to you.
Yes, wouldn't it be lovely to see the pets/people we loved deeply. This is such a tender dream. I hope it finds its way into story. 🌷
This is wonderful, Valerie. I've read that this is just as it happens. That the same crew cycles together, sometimes playing different roles. I think you and I are a part of the same squad!
What a lovely dream
Wow! I love this!!
My mother had Alzheimer's for over ten years before her death. The day she died, I drove to be with my father and some others at their house in the woods. While I was sitting at a table, people talking, feeling mostly just tired and sad, I sensed a powerful joy move through the room, and through me, like a wind. And it wasn't just any joy, it was very specifically my mother's joy--she was an enormously joyful person--which I would recognize anywhere, though it had been so long since she could even speak.
I later learned some people call this a passing-by, and the feeling is not always joy but might be gratitude, or peace, but always specifically the dead loved one's feeling that blows beautifully through you. One of the strangest and most beautiful things that I've ever experienced.
Another: I'd lived with a man in grad school, loved him deeply, hoped to marry him, but it ended. We remained in distant contact over the years. While we were together he brought me pair of blue pearl earrings from a trip to Japan, and years after we broke up I lost one of them, which broke my heart. Fast forward a couple of decades (I am now happily married): he died suddenly, and I was surprisingly devastated. Because I am interested in Tibetan Buddhism and the concept of the bardo, I often mark the 49th day after someone's death to remember them. On the 49th day after his death, I opened a little box in my bathroom I'd opened a hundred times before, and their was the lost pearl. What a gift.
One more! My high school boyfriend died my senior year. A couple of months earlier we'd been driving around and Bach's Air on a G String came on the radio. He said "This piece always reminds me of you"--then, semi-jokingly—"I give it to you. It is now your song." He died a couple of months later, spring of my senior year. That fall, in college, I was in the study lounge, studying with friends and listening to our college radio station. A guy I barely knew--I had met him briefly twice--was DJing. He said, "This next piece reminds me so much of Kathy Catmull, it's like it's her song, so I'm sending it out to her." My friends started to laugh and tease me but I was in shock, because the piece was Bach's Air on a G String.
“What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
A dream token.
so I don't know what this means about life after death, except that I do feel there is an intermingling between life and death. As if the material of the universe forms into creatures like us, and then the forms dissolve, but they are not so bound in time that they cannot return in these small, brilliant (in the sense of brilliant light) ways.
Oh what beautiful insight. I love this.
Oh, all three are beautiful experiences. I'm happy for you that you've had them, accepted them, and I'm happy for us that you've shared them with us.
I love this idea of a passing-by.
All three of these are beautiful gifts: first to you and now to us. Thank you.
yes, the passing by. I didn't know there was a name for it. Thank you. I think at certain times we are open to other dimensions that might be hard to discern when we're in the thick of daily life.
Your mother's joyful passing was truly a blessing. Thank you for telling it so beautifully.
❤️
In 2008 I was in the hospital with very advanced blood cancer. As sick as I was, there was no pain and I was only on antibiotics and fluids, which is to say, I was lucid. A few weeks after I was admitted, at the depth of my emotional and physical trauma, I awoke in the middle of the night. Sitting in the chair in my hospital room was a presence I couldn't identify as anyone specific. A feeling of comfort and relief flooded through me. I stopped worrying. The next morning I asked the nurse who was sitting in my room last night, and a little startled, she said "Nobody," and pointed out that I didn't have a chair, none of the rooms in the ICU have chairs. I don't have any idea how I saw what I saw, but it was real, and a few days later one of the interns I'd become friends with told me I was unbelievably cheerful for someone so sick. I still am. Cheerful, not sick (knock on wood).
I've also had an ICU experience of invisible to others visitors. I can attribute it to the morphine-based meds but I can also attribute it to the thin veil between realms in moments where life is very much in the pocket of death. In a semi-lucid post-surgery state in the few first hours, I saw a person in a chair near the end of my bed who looked at me and I immediately knew that he was invisible to others and was there for me. Still, sentinel, and without characteristics that I could identify. Later another person entered the visible to me area of the ICU with an air and appearance of importance (which I can't describe at all) and every one of the nurses in the room sat down in their chairs next to their patients as soon as he entered the room. My feeling was this was the person who dispensed the strong opioids being administered. What struck me as so strange was how the nurses immediately stopped what they were doing and sat down during his visit. I'm not convinced he wasn't also a manifestation of my mind at that time.
I've had other experiences in my life but these were felt at a time when I was acutely present to the relationship of my possible death to my vibrant and fleeting life and I was tuned to so much of what was happening during this health experience that related to that understanding.
I was also a regular meditator at the time. Not so much now.
All I feel with any certainty is that a good death is the most important gift we can receive for our next life and that the bardo is that transition between the two where the weight of our life and death is presented to us.
'Next Life' and 'The Bardo' are conceptually elegant projections, and that's what both are: projections.
Or maybe, outside of strolling the dreamtime streets of Dream Land, others reading this thread will have empirical data they may care to share?
As it happens I've worked - way back in the day - as a garden labourer, occasional grave digger, in a cemetery-cum-crematorium setting. It was a period of employment that was driven by one tickets: never saw or heard tell of anyone making a visit back on a return ticket.
How can a story be truthful if it is written beyond the pale of verifiable human experience?
I've been moved to posit the question, having done so I'll be interested in any responses that peer Storu Clubbers may care to post.
It may be that these experiences can’t be measured empirically. I’m not saying that makes them “true” or “false”- rather that they are experiences of a kind outside of how we process the everyday of our lives.
"How can a story be truthful if it is written beyond the pale of verifiable human experience?"
Here I go, trying to answer this riddle, O Great Sphinx!
A story, precisely, is a story, not an account of verifiable facts (though it may contain them). Answering your question then comes down to "what does 'truthful' mean?", and that's a hard one. Let's say we experience stories mostly alone (as readers, certainly, but even in the community of feeling in an audience or a congregation, where each individual is limited by, and will return to, their own experience and consciousness). The truth(fulness) of a story is something powerfully suggested by the story and received as enlightening by as many individuals as possible. That is, it sheds light on questions or difficulties experienced by individuals in such a way as to appear universal, applicable to everyone.
I'm saying "appear" because different individuals, or entire groups, may have differing sensitivities. So I'm saying the truth of stories is relative. An absolute statement like "we will all die" is a universal truth but doesn't shed much light.
A lot of stuff (like, a LOT) may happen in stories that is "beyond the pale of verifiable human experience". This stuff may be enlightening, may shed light on our lives, our problems. I'd suggest that, to be enlightening, it has to be so -- shed light, effect change -- within the terms of the story. Hamlet's father as a real ghost sets off the action by ordering his son to avenge him. At a deeper level, he is a symbol of authoritarian paternalism, the military father of an intellectual son, and that takes us to the heart of the play.
(That was hard to write and is probably full of holes. Thinking on my feet.)
There, you've got two Evans replies ;)
Absolutely, go at it scientifically. This is healthy and prevents fantasy. At the same time, instinct and feeling enter into experience, it’s not all empirical evidence. The research will inform the writing, our reason for coming together here.
The gravedigger position must have been illuminating. People will hang around, but mostly because of unfinished business. Nice way of putting it—one-way tickets. Those with development can choose where they go.
Beautiful! My girlfriend has been at the bedside of her mother and sister who both died and witnessed them talking about the relatives who were spiritually in the room.
Yes. My father laying abed in hospital, looked at the door and said, "I'm not ready yet."
What an unexpected question! But you are the author of a novel that takes place in that in-between place, and you are a Buddhist, and so I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised. We are our stories, after all, and the way we each view our impending death (the stories we tell ourselves about that moment) can’t help but make a difference in the way we live.
I’m a firm believer in the inarguable fact that we cannot know what comes after death. It’s also true that we have only our own bodies to rely on in order to access reality—and so, we are missing levels upon levels of other realities which we cannot access. There are worlds out there that we cannot know, though humans have tried to journey to such places for as long as human history has been recorded and before.
To know that we do not know is the ticket—and so we decide what to believe. We have no other choice, really.
I am no philosopher. I’ve had no personal experience with near-death. (Sebastian Junger has a new book out on his own near-death experience, which may interest you.) My feelings on death are rooted in my culture, the religion in which I was raised, the family I grew up in, the people I’ve known, the deaths I’ve witnessed (I’ve been with five people at the moment of death), and my own ponderings. As I’ve grown older and feel deeply my own mortality, I’ve thought of death more than ever.
So here, briefly, are my thoughts: I do not fear death itself. The only trepidations I have concern the moments before death. I hope that I am not faced with a bad death—one that happens in a moment of fear. I hope for a peaceful death, surrounded by those who love me. I hope that when death comes, I will be ready and that I will feel I have lived a full and beautiful life. I’m working on that now.
As for death itself, I do not see any reason to think about what happens to a person when death arrives. It seems a waste of time and energy. We cannot know! All we know is life here, today and in this moment. Our purpose is to live, here and now. Live fully, live joyfully, if possible. I don’t know for certain why we are here—is this a cosmic joke? But I’ve decided (despite moments of darkness) that we are all here to live together. To be good people, doing good work, seeking awe and wonder. Gratitude! Life is amazing and terrible, beautiful and ugly, tender and rough, and we are here for all of it.
I don’t think about a judgment that comes in death. I’m doing the best I can here on earth, and if there is a cosmic entity out there who is judging my actions, well, then so be it. (I don’t believe in such a thing.) Death will come for all of us and we will find out then what awaits. We really don’t have another choice. (But what a joy it will be to find out what happens!) My life’s journey does not have death as its destination. Instead, my life’s journey is all about life.
Having said all of this, I do talk to the dead. I talk to my mother the most. Do I think she is somewhere listening? No, but I talk to her anyway. I feel about dead people the same way I feel about God. I don’t believe, but I pray anyway. Who knows? It can’t hurt, right?
Be here now. Love your life. Love everyone. Forgive everyone. Enjoy what you can. Feel all of it, all of the time. Do your best. Death will come. We each will do a perfect job at dying. All will be fine.
Well said.
The older I get, the more aware I am and more I commune with the community of the dead.
Well, maybe not forgive everyone... :) But seriously, on the life after death topic, I wonder if people who live for an afterlife, like they really put all eggs in the afterlife basket, I wonder if they care as much about climate change, the problems here on earth, and how we can do things to help others in our brief time here. That has crossed my mind.
Yes, I see what you are saying. I think that for some belief systems, you are correct. What's funny, really, is that here we are talking about death when, in fact, we have already experienced it--and we continue to experience it all of the time. Everything in our past is gone forever. It is as dead to us as our ancestors. At the same time, there is no guarantee of any future. All we have is the eternal now.
I think this is the “yangsi.” G mentions in his post.
Yes, I just listened. I think it is the same, said in different words. I love the way he explains it, though!
It’s so intense and so true.
This has to be one of the more mature assessments of life here, and potential life after, I’ve read in a discussion. There are definite rules, Mary, and a cosmic law, and they are knowable. ‘We decide what to believe. We have no other choice, really.’ Brutal honesty, as well as the notes on family, the religion of one’s environment, one’s experience… How one dies, in which circumstance, does matter, terribly. That in-between of the bardo (although I would avoid Eastern terms imported like that) is actually missing the point. It’s like losing, when we, especially those in open countries such as the USA, have every opportunity to win.
Your wisdom… no, one does not want to die in fear.
I don’t want to sound too know-it-all, it may be an effect of an accident, 2020. Words, written expression, can sound a little dogmatic. Yet… a cosmic entity, as you write, does exist, and we did know this before, and will know it after. Awe, wonder, gratitude, doing good, building rather than destroying—in that alone something in you does believe, and knows.
It’s not judgement (perhaps a Christian turn to the truth of it), but right, suitable, fitting, appropriate, or not.
This is just one of many lives, if we get it right.
Firmly in your camp. This is the life we have. Make the most of what we know/experience. I think it's fine for people to 'research' what happens post death. Questions, and the seeking of the answers, is how human knowledge has grown. Maybe one day there will be some way of knowing. For the rest of us not researching it (or maybe writing creatively about it), it's not worth spending too much time on.... as that may distract us from making the most of now.
Thank you Mary oh yes forgive all. I consult with my husband Bob who died 5 years ago and I always make the right decision for me now. ''and my mother well her favorite saying everytime I talk to her always says THIS TO SHALL PASS. So true in my life now.
Those are rich words. Live. Forgive. Help. Guide.
Thanks, Elizabeth. (Though the only people I would ever guide would be my children as they grew up, as that was my job. Beyond that, I'm just doing my best.)
Guiding can be as much as a thank you-you are doing a good job. You do it in your Substack all the time. It matters
that was your love
Well done Mary....I was going to say something about Junger's book too.....remember too our life is also one big complex contained chemical reaction, plus altered states from drugs such as ayahuasca can also shift us to other places and then half our living time, is in ever changing dreams^^
I've not read the Junger yet--but a friend has given me a copy, so I hope to get to it soon. Yes, mind-altering drugs may have the effect of showing us parts of our consciousness that we can't otherwise access. Which leads me to believe that there is so much more out there....
I read the review in the Guardian^^
My father would have turned 82 today. He died at 76, of metastatic cancer. While he was dying I began to sense … all I can think of to call them is teensy-weensy tears in the veil between this world and the next.
“Tears,” even, is too big a word. Think of a giant window covered by a curtain so seamless and so massive you can't see its edges, and so sheer you'd swear there's no curtain there at all, if your view of what's outside weren't maddeningly blurry. You decide the window's just dirty, and make a mental note to wash it sometime in the next year or five, and then you notice a snag in the curtain that admits just the tiniest bit of light. You see that bit of light and yes! There *is* a curtain there, and yes! There’s bright light on the other side of it.
Each snag in the curtain has given me a story I cherish. I’m hoarding those, mostly, to tell at other times and in other venues, but here’s one.
Labor Day weekend, five months before Dad died, I flew to visit my parents with my son, who was two and a half. Dad knew he was dying, as did I, but neither of us knew that the other knew, and we each kept this secret for the sake of my mother, since she seemed not to know. All weekend long she showered my son with airplanes and firetrucks, which were his thing back then, and hugs and kisses, which weren’t, especially.
Meanwhile, Dad went to radiation every day. As I said, the cancer was metastatic, so it wasn’t his first rodeo. It had been eight years since he’d called with the news that he was going to have targeted radiation therapy to treat a melanoma in his eye, and when I’d finished sobbing, I went to cafepress or somesuch and bought him a lime green tee-shirt screen-printed with the international warning symbol for radioactivity (☢️). I knew he would love it, and he did love it, which for the purposes of this story tells you everything you need to know about him, me, and the sense of humor we shared. He wore it to every appointment, delighting the nurses, one of whom snapped a photo — lime green ☢️ shirt, size 2x, crowned with a radioactive eye patch and a smirk — that to this day remains his Facebook profile picture.
But anyway, each day of our visit, Dad goes to radiation and my son luxuriates in airplanes and firetrucks and spurns hugs and kisses, and on the day we fly home the weather forecast is just as crappy as you please. I pack the car under a sky that's gray and thick and humid and all-around shitty, and when I finish there’s Dad, a vision in fluorescent green cotton and flannel pajama pants. He's come to say goodbye before he heads to the cancer center, and wearing this getup so as to leave me laughing.
I do laugh, and then I ask him to sit for a picture. (-Where? -In that chair. -What chair? -The one by the front walk. -There's a chair by the front walk? - Yeah. That’s a weird place for a chair, isn't it? Is it new? -Could be, yeah. I'll sit there. -Yes, sit there. ) He sits down and while I’m fiddling with my phone, trying to frame a halfway decent shot of my dying dad in shitty light against a shitty gray sky, a seam bursts (or so it *seems,* ha, ha!) in that very sky, and sunlight pours through it onto that very dad.
In that burst of light I snap a bunch of pictures of Dad without really seeing him. Hours later, on the plane, I’ll look at them and observe that Dad’s at least sixty pounds lighter in them than in the picture the nurse took way back when. He’s swimming in the shirt, and instead of smirking he’s... smiling*, sort of, to the extent he ever does in pictures. It’s smirks or nothing, usually, and bunny ears for the poor sap next to him, when applicable. But now he's a solo subject, and he makes a good faith effort to be a good one. Now he *tries* to smile, and that effort slams head-on into the tears he's fighting. They make a mangled mess that's neither and both.
And years later, (i.e., now), I’ll look at these pictures and suppose Dad was fighting tears because here we were, at the end of four of the last days we’d have together — he knew it, and I knew it, but he didn’t know I knew it, and all weekend he knew he should tell me but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Now I was hugging him goodbye and he was hugging me back. He didn’t want to let go, and I didn’t want to let go, but neither of us let on to the other, and let go we did. And when we did, that secret and the other one — the big one that each of us thought s/he was keeping from the other — rushed out into the space that opened up between us, and sunlight spilled on them through that ruptured seam in the shitty sky.
There was a lot to say, and we got around to saying most of it in the minutes and months after, but not just then. What happened just then was the sky mended itself, the sunlight vanished (*now you see me, now you don’t, suckers, ha, ha!*) and took our no-longer-secrets with it. The vacuum it left sucked us back into another — longer, squeezier — hug. We hugged as if we meant to squish death itself.
And then Dad went to radiation. I fastened my son in his carseat and we drove to the airport in a thunderstorm. Late that evening, back in our ancient, persnickety apartment in a Boston ‘burb, I rocked him in the glider. He giggled when tears dripped from my chin and wet his face, then suddenly sat bolt upright and stared, rapt, at something over my left shoulder. He looked for a long time at a corner of the ceiling, and then at me. Then at the ceiling again, as if entreating something up there to repeat itself.
Light from the neighbors’ porch, or maybe the moon, streams onto his little face so I’ll always remember how it glows when he announces: “I need to give you a kiss!” Then he plants a wet one on me and passes out in my lap, while an ancient light fixture with a persnickety dimmer switch flicks and buzzes overhead.
Those were the first snags in the veil, which haven’t stopped appearing. The longer Dad’s gone, the more of them I notice. To wit: as often as not, on days that were special to us — my birthday, or his** — I receive what I think of as little gifts from Dad: i.e., the invitation to tell this story in a forum tended by as paternal a presence as my life has these days.
So: thanks, Dad. And thank you, George.
*Autocorrect autocorrected my initial misspelling of "smiling" to "smelling," which Dad would have loved.
**I banged out this epic and posted it with minutes of Dad's birthday remaining (EDT), then revisited it this morning, because I couldn't help myself. Never can. So this version's been edited for (I hope) clarity, but the content (I hope) is the same.
Oh, my goodness. The flickering light... I'm so sorry for your loss, and thank you for sharing these memories.
Your story moved me. Maybe it's these moments when we are open, when we look at life, when we are vulnerable and sad, that we can see the tears that are always there. I think life is often like this psychological experiment when we are tasked to count the balls that are bouncing through the picture and miss the elephant that's crossing the room. But in those moments when we shift our attention (like a loved one dying, or our own sickness) we start to see the tears in the veil -- the elefant, the beams of sun rays, and the flickering light that are always there. Thank you for sharing your story. It's a reminder to stop and watch...
Beautyful.
My grandmother was a lifelong pianist. She was classically trained and a real snob about her music. Basically, any type of music invented from 1900 onward was suspect to her. After we left her funeral (she was 107!), we turned on the local classical music station for the 20 minute drive to my mother's house. My mother and my brother did the same thing in their respective cars. The station--which usually plays symphonies or concertos--featured a work by a solo pianist. It played for the entire drive, wrapping up just as we reached my mom's.
I adored my grandmother. I think that was her parting gift. Or maybe, she just wanted to reiterate, one last time, the type of music we should play on our radios!
Oh that’s beautiful
My wife and I once flew made a fly drive road trip that was billed and branded as 'Southern States'. First morning out of Charlotte, headed for Ashville, we pressed the 'On' button on the radio console and found our Middle English Sensible Selves startled by the question which broke loud and oh so clear over the speakers: "Do you want to Shag?"
"Welcome to North Carolina, you'll find The Natives Friendly" the guys at the Immigration and Car Rental desks had both said... but Shagging not so long after a hearty breakfast?
shaggging is a ritual against death^..^
May well be but in the case of the question blared out at us from the radio of our yet to get familiar with rental car it was referring to the ritual of what Alabama were on about when they sang of the ritual of "Shagging on the Boulevard". . . decoded readily by the cognoscenti as performing the State Dance of North Carolina but, at the moment of hearing, a gobsmacker to us :-))
So cool. I love that.
Love that!
In 2022, July, my 16 years old daughter passed away after battling a rare and aggressive cancer for two years. She was my only child and my heart and joy. Within a week of her passing, I began to get what I now call visitations from her. I also would dream of her, but in visitations, the idea would be to let me aware of her presence (like a shower of energy, the hug from an unseen her, her presence next to me for a second.) As soon as I become aware that it was her, she would disappear.
Since then I have begun to get a few more details in these visits. And again, the feel and weight and sense of it is different. And I am very aware that I am lying in bed and was sleeping, but am not now, unlike a dream, which is totally immersive and you are asleep through out. Initially, I had many visitations from her, but now I would get a visit once in 4 or 6 weeks. And please don’t get me started on signs!
A lot of it is also because I started meditating about 6 months after she passed. In fact, around the week of her passing, three of my friends (who don’t know each other and live in different countries) had dreams where my daughter, Sakshi, came to them and spoke to them about something related to their lives and then told all three of them in the exact same words - “tell mumma and papa, that I am happy and free. I want them to have fun and be happy.”
It has been a tough journey but we are doing our best to make our little one proud. So, yes, I do believe in the afterlife. I know we are all energy and the essence of who we are continues. This has been an easy acceptance for me because I have experienced energy once as a teenager (it protected me when I felt unsafe), and the Bhagwad Gita speaks about this, so culturally too, it was easier for me to assimilate.
Binu, we are kindred spirits, you and I. I lost my daughter Rachel on Christmas night in 2008, and grief takes so many forms. Even though a loved one is dead, grief is that gift that keeps on giving. It never lets you go, and for me at least, it's become a friend. It tells me what it needs, when it needs. I wrap my arms around it when I'm tired or missing her so much.
And then something else occurs to me today in reading this -- within a few days following her death, in the middle of the night, I felt something, some presence in my bedroom. My husband was sleeping next to me, on my left. Just next to his side of the bed, I looked over and saw her, disembodied from the shoulders up, but it was definitely Rachel. I whispered to my husband to wake up and look to his left. He did, and he saw her, too. I don't think we were experiencing some kind of mass hysterical hallucination. She wavered for a moment, then evaporated like steam. I haven't seen a definite sign since, but this is what is occurring to me today. Maybe folks here who are describing paranormal events are also people who are themselves ready for the connection. In other words, they don't have barriers, filters, or an energy of some kind that might make it impossible for those who have crossed over that River Styx to penetrate. I think of myself -- so ridden, even now, even after all these days, weeks, months, years, so ridden with guilt, with regret, with feelings of having been such a terrible mother (Queen Lear), that even if she were trying, she might not be able to get through till I myself come to a peace about it, till I can forgive myself.
Forgiving oneself is the hardest thing to do, isn't it? And yet, if I were my own best friend, I'd be wrapping my arms around her, telling her that she can't take on all the sins and wrongs of the world, and to hang on to me, while trying to let go of her pain. But I can't even do that for myself. Thank you, George. It seems we all needed this post.
Dear Nancy, first of all - a big virtual hug! You are so right! Grief is a gift that keeps giving, and the only way grief can end is for the love to end, and that is not going to happen! Grief has made me a much better person than I was - kinder and more vulnerable, and maybe more fearless.
What you said about it being harder for our loved ones to reach out to us is true. My mother, who processes her grief over Sakshi’s loss by being busy and not thinking, is yet to have a visitation or a proper dream of Sakshi. Same for my husband. When grief is stuck in us, it lowers our vibration and makes it harder for the higher dimension energies to reach us. Guilt, anger, unprocessed grief are all emotions that lower vibration. It doesn’t make these emotions wrong though. We have to go through these feelings and journeys.
As for what you said about being a terrible mother – please, no! No! You were the mother she chose to be born to for precisely the experiences she and you had. This is such a complex topic and I don’t want to treat it lightly, but please do read about soul pacts, if you have not read about them before. Rachel, you, and your husband, embarked on this special journey knowing perfectly well the way it would have turned out. I am sure you know that she has forgiven you. Maybe this is what your life’s journey is going to be about – forgiving yourself. I do hope you find peace soon, so that Rachel can reach you.
Honestly, I think our souls are a bit too ambitious for their own good, but one day, we are going to be done with this ride and we will be reunited with our girls. I am sharing my email id binusivan22@yahoo.com, in case you need any recommendations for books or articles on soul pacts and related journeys.
Yes, Binu! This is the idea I couldn't recall in my last post. This idea of lower vs. higher vibrations and energies. This is why I believe I have not been able to connect with her, assuming such a thing is possible (I'm coming to believe it is, though). I've created and maintained lower vibrations because I'm so mired in the darker feelings, despite years of trying to work this through. And this year for some reason, I seem to be having a more intense "grief relapse." Not that it isn't always present, but some days, I call them "un-days," life sort of goes on as usual, and like your mother, who distracts herself from reflecting on this horrible loss, you can get through some amount of time and be more or less functional.
Thank you for this, dear lady. I will be emailing you for those recommendations.
Oh Nancy. I feel this post so much and I send love and light to you.
I wish I had something to say that would make your journey easier. I just want you to know that I heard you and I will keep your words in my heart. I'm so sorry for your loss.
Thank you Denise. ❤️. I have learnt to take life one day at a time. It has been a crash course in living in the moment, and I wish there had been a gentler way to learn this lesson, but it is what it is. Thank you for your kind words.
Sending love light to you, your daughter and your family.
Thank you Christine. I was in a cab, the other day, when I read George's post and replied in a rush. Then again, I was in a cab when I read your comment and replied. Today, finally I am sitting in front of my laptop and am able to type out a decent thank you note :). Thank you for reaching out and sending light and love ❤️. Am always so so so appreciative of it.
Thank you Christine ❤️
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I have not been on this journey for too long Victoria, but I have learnt to accept this loss. I just hope that I am able to use my life up the way it is meant to be and make my girl proud of her mumma.
I once dreamt I was in a concert hall where a new work I’d composed was about to have its premiere. In waking life, I write songs, and while I dabble with scored music, it will never (in this lifetime) make its way into the kind of fancy European auditorium like the one in the dream.
After the orchestra tuned, the conductor entered to a round of applause. Once it died down and after a moment of bracing silence, the piece began. It was about 20 minutes long and was a thicket of complex harmonies and rhythms I can’t fathom in waking life. I listened to the whole thing with eager, receptive, totally alive attention. It was—in every way—beyond my capacity as a musician. I woke up more or less stupefied. The dream was in my mind. Was my mind inside my brain? Or was my mind really elsewhere? Or was the action of the dream all happening in another time?
That was about 10 years ago. It expanded the range of possibilities I’m able to consider about what life and death are. It also gave me a real break, helped ease some of the pressures I subject my creativity to. It’s like…if that experience happened (it did), then what else is possible? Beats me.
Is this relevant? I hope so!
I play no musical instrument, cannot read music, have no theoretical knowledge. I have a shallow awareness of music such that I am out of my depth beyond only the most famous classical or jazz, and even then only when there is a clear 'tune' do I tend to respond, and then I do not respond with anything like the force I respond to literature. But...
I have woken from dreams full of the most impossibly complex harmonic orchestral beauty, beyond anything I could ever conceive in waking, music for a thousand voices and instruments, structured and organic, intentional and free, terrible and inspiring. I am at a total loss to say where this comes from, because it exceeds my capabilities and experience and knowledge by so much. If it were just a little, then I could explain it, but the experience of the music is so specific and the sensory information so memorable that I am certain I am not simply dreaming an illusion. I can't but think something magnitudes greater than me is channeling its meaning into a gap opened up in my soul as I drift between states of consciousness.
I have no particular beliefs in anything beyond, have no religion or religious upbringing. But this music must surely not be coming from me.
Was my mind inside my brain? Such a great question!
Definitely relevant. Our experiences of other dimensions can be so expansive. I think being conscious of their existence is one of the great pleasures of being alive. And if we can be open to them, well, that's a good thing for humanity.
I know how that is--to know what my sleeping mind is capable of imagining--is unfathomable. A few nights ago, I saw in a dream a landscape of beautiful buildings I can't imagine drawing in real life. I mentioned that to my granddaughter's boyfriend, whose fascination is visionary architecture, and he told me the name of an 18th century architect who frequently said of one of his designs, 'I saw it in a dream.'
Dream and Reality. Like two sides of the same street? One the sunny side, one the shady? Issue is, always and ever, which is the true side of the street? And that last question isn't so easy to answer, even assuming - which is a big if - you can reliable discern, distinguish and define just what is 'sunny' and what is 'shady'.
I think it's marvellous that a net outcome of this tempering 'dream' and 'reality' is that the experience(s) left you with a firm and sustained sense of straddling an expanded range of possibilities with a grip of of some form of reins in your hands.
Bon chance Timothy, with each and every one of your ongoing creative encounters and the ventures that they seed.
My high school girlfriend, my first true love, disappeared in Colombia many years after we split. She was traveling by river with her boyfriend in a disputed rebel area. They were never found, despite both sets of parents searching in Colombia multiple times. Years later, I had the most shockingly vivid dream I've ever had, of both of us underwater, her strikingly long hair floating in thick strands around her head. She was looking fixedly at me, and I understood her to say, without words, "Tom, this is what happened. [meaning she had drowned] But I'm OK."
That felt so like truth that I can't say otherwise. But my own sense of an afterlife (after 9 years of Catholic school, and being an altar boy) is that indeed we have souls, but they aren't individuated, and that those souls are connected in vast swaths of something like energy, forever. (And no, I haven't been smoking any pot.) George, thanks for asking!
Aye Tom, vivid dreams. I wonder, due to the difficulty of souls from that other place you describe as vast swaths of something like energy, that this is more possible when we are asleep and our own souls are able to meet with those other departed souls halfway, so to speak.
I'm with you; sleep and dreams are those liminal, boundary-traveling areas, which lend themselves readily to fiction of the flavor of "We are living a dream within a dream," like those nested Slavic dolls. Though in some dreams, you can never get to the bottom of the nest.
Giving me the chills thrill.
I was raised by atheists. My mother had been raised Catholic but rejected the church and beliefs entirely, my father was raised by religious southerners, and he rejected all of that. There was no exposure to talk of the afterlife until I started school, unless they were discussing what other people bought into. I heard religious kids talking, but by then I was one of those know-it-all, asshole atheist kids. As an adult, I can't explain the strange dreams I've had, much like the dreams I've read by others here on the comments. Before I moved to Seattle, I had a series of strange dreams, one that I was flying around in an old neighborhood, all bricks, flying around with a group of vampires. Another series, that a volcano blew, an earthquake occurred, and we were all trying to save people who were buried. Back then (1989) I didn't know anything about Seattle, and hadn't visited at all before moving. The vampire dream, who knows? The wild part is I had no idea there were earthquakes here, no clue that Mount Rainer may blow it's stack one day. I just moved here without visiting first, the dreams were a few months prior to the move. When I first went to Pioneer Square, the place was exactly like the setting in my dream.
Heya Sea, I to have had similar experience. Check out this book for some clarity on what may be going on here. https://archive.org/details/AnExperimentWithTimeEbook/page/n11/mode/2up?view=theater
I'll dig into this!
Sea such a vivid dream to remember. Our brains do amazing things when we dream and I wake and often times my dreams scare me to a point where I have to go back to sleep and hope it wasnt so. Raised as a catholic doesnt help sometimes. Anyway I am g;ad you remembered this one.
People used to talk about their dreams, then after Freud it became fraught because everything seemed to the good doctor to be about sex. Maybe we should go back to that time, when people took a deep dive into dreams. We'd probably remember them more, and I wonder if it would ease the fright of the bad dream. I also suffered from bad dreams, especially as a child and young woman. Somehow they've shifted.
I've never been into analyzing dreams, and don't remember many. But maybe in the past ten years I've had dreams in which I experience the most pleasant spiritual well being, a kind of visit to what heaven might be, ( though I don't believe in heaven ). I'm aware too, of somewhat subconsciously moving my conscious thoughts in that direction. Not sure what that means.
I'm the same, I don't think dreams can be made sense of, or at least mine don't make sense. I've heard that if you set an intention to remember your dreams, it slowly starts working. Also, booze impacts whether you can remember dreams or not, which makes sense.
I took a lucid dreaming course with Charley Morley—he uses dreaming from Tibetan tradition. He also has a book. Highly recommend it.
I'll look that up, thanks, Armand.
Ohh that’s amazing. Our brains are so complex.
It's crazy what our brains do when we sleep. Plus all the dreams we don't remember!
On May 8,2024 I was under anesthesia for a valve replacement. I could hear everything and was so frightened. I am not sure it was a dream or real, but first I was walking holding my husbands hand toward ICloud. Then he turned and said"the whol wide world is a very narrow bridge...the point is not to be afraid"...how many times i had repeated that to him when he was alive. 3 weeks passed and I am almost my self again but I am an entirely different Gloria. Thanks everyone for reminding me how lucky we ar to be here with George and all of you.
An outerbridge^^
thanks
Glad to “see” you here, Gloria!
Thanks Marina🎶🙂
thank you Marina.
That is what we’re all afraid of, being aware of surgery instead of knocked out. I’m glad it’s over!
Thanks sea
Particles and waves. This is how the dead have come to visit, as energy punching through whatever membrane exists between here and there. My dad was the first to show after his death more than twenty years ago. It was the day after Christmas, and I was sick with a terrible stomach bug at home in Austin, 1500 miles away from the hospital where he did not go gently into the night. My kid sister called to tell me the news. I threw up and took to my bed. At 7:00 that evening, the phone on my night table rang—a land line back then. I looked at the caller ID, but the little lit screen was entirely blank. I pressed the talk button and radio static screeched from the handset. I’d never heard anything like it. I don’t remember if I said anything at all, but I remember getting out of bed thinking it was a lousy time for my phone to break. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water, and flicked the overhead light switch. Both bulbs—old school, long fluorescent bulbs, the kind that used to flicker for weeks before they’d die—burst, and glass covered the kitchen floor. I cleaned the mess and moaned about needing new bulbs in addition to a new phone. The next morning, my sister called again. Her first question to me was, “Did you get a strange phone call last night?” I told her yes and described the static; I thought it might have been her or a relative. “What time?” she asked. Seemed like a strange question, but I said 7:00 on the dot, to which she replied, “My call was at 8:00—and I’m one hour ahead of you.” Then she asked, “Did a bulb burn out in your house, too? Maybe the kitchen?” This freaked me out, and the hair on the back of my neck was at full attention when she told me how my mom and my aunt had all reported similar… interruptions, for want of a better word. I know my sister heard fear in my voice. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “He might not come back if you’re scared.” She was calm as could be (no idea how or why--this was crazy stuff!), but it was all I needed to hear to drop any trepidation and invite him back. And hoo-boy, did he like to visit. I wrote a song about him and, whenever I performed it live at gigs, something would almost always go wrong: speakers blew, guitar strings broke. Once, after a live set was recorded, the venue's sound guy sent me a CD with a note apologizing for the “glitch” during that track. For reasons he couldn’t explain, the song didn’t record at all. It was four minutes of, you guessed it, static. When I went to record the song for a studio album, my producer couldn’t find the source of a mysterious hum; I told him it was dad. Then I loudly invited dad to disappear for a spell, and he obliged. His visits finally ended, and I like to think all that energy dissipated happily, jauntily, curiously across the solar system and into the galaxy. BTW, that exceptional producer became my husband. When he died 10 years ago, he came to visit in the same phenomenal fashion. And have these experiences influenced my writing? Oh, yes. My WIP is full of ghosts, and as one character says, “Particles and waves. Look for them there.”
"Particle and Wave" by Rosanne Cash, closing lyrics:
(She Remembers Everything, 2018) https://youtu.be/9m2RLr-iCAU
Light is particle and wave
Reflections of this place
Refractions of our grace
It reveals what we hold dear
And it's slow so I can hold you near
On June 28, 1989 on a rather balmy Wednesday afternoon all the items I was carrying went crashing to the kitchen floor, as if wrenched from my grasp by a strong and invisible pair of hands. Later that day I learned this had occurred at the exact moment of my best friend’s violent demise. (I feel her now, peering over my shoulder, though nothing is breaking.)
On Reincarnation
I was fifteen when I overheard my mother on the rotary phone in the hall getting the news of my father’s suicide. She told me he’d shot himself in the head when he’d hung himself from his belt in his bedroom at his mother’s house where he lived. Then she and her mother sent me to his funeral alone.
So, that reality slap ended any fancies about afterlife except my father transformed into a shade. He became an omnipotent unobtainable shade.
Would it have helped if my remaining parents had been religious? I don’t know. They weren’t remotely interested in anything but books and themselves. In the long run that saved me. Language. As it does still.
The closest I come to the afterlife or a feeling that something continues after all dies is in my garden. Like Persephone who returns in the spring, those plants that didn’t flourish in summer are given another chance in spring.
I plant things in the hope they will flourish. This spring I bought a bougainvillea, you know the lush flowering vine covered in colorful bracts with vicious thorns that grows all over the Mediterranean? I bought it despite knowing it can’t survive the winter’s in NY so it’ll have to overwinter it in my dry parlor. Chances of survival are slim, but I hold on to hope. Two Mandeville’s survived this past winter. They’re in the garden now. One in an urn from New Orleans from the 1860’s. She’s looking mighty lush.
If I were to reincarnate, I’d hope it would be as a plant in a gardener’s garden. I wouldn’t have to be a David Austin rose. I would be delighted to be a common geranium with its delightful flowers gently floating over a bed of green. Maybe my father would be there too as a bee buzzing about my pollen.
Reminds me of those lines from Leaves of Grass. What is the grass? ... What has become the old and the young men? They are alive and well somewhere.
I believe Whitman intuited the truth about the afterlife way back when. His "They are alive and well somewhere" always stays with me, and I just used it in a story that's making the rounds now. Fingers crossed.
All poppies^^
OOO! Good fortunes on your story. If it's published pls let me know. Whitman was so deep & true. I've been trying to remember who wrote the poem about Rupert Brook's awful death & I'm stumped. It ends with the metaphor of a sun dimming. I loved his work. Dying in war is such a crime. 💙🌷
I will, Lucinda. Is it Brooke's "The Dead"? I didn't know it but your words encouraged me to look it up. Love these lines: "He leaves a white/Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,/A width, a shining piece, under the night."
No, this is a poem about Brooke's death written by maybe Robert Graves??? someone wrote here about a lost love that turns into the light & I thought of that poem. He waves and disappears into the sun. Something like that. What a glorious quote💞
Heart wrenching yet beautifully wrought writing.
(I thought of Flannery O'Conner's Geranium Stories at the end there. Which now I must find and read again)
Funny reincarnation story ( oh fuck re in carnation, another type of flowering plant, haha.) anyway, a few years ago a good old man of our town died. I was the last person to see him alive and hung his washing out (two holy shirts, two holy pants, two holy pairs of socks) as he couldn't move from his chaise-lounge he lay on listening to Beethoven at maximum volume. At the funeral, open casket in our wee stone lakeside church of the good shepherd, he spoke. Wella recording he'd made a year before was played. At the end, after some rather poignant remarks to his two daughters who were in attendance, he addressed the Vicar saying he didn't much go in for all that god stuff however did feel there was something about reincarnation that amused him. He said if he did come back, it would be as a domesticated cat. : They've got it sussed, he said.
Great story. Love the Beethoven blasting. He had taste. Yes, a cat but a loved cat in the home of a cat lover. I hope it happened for him. Reincarnation is so hopeful. Unless you're something horrible and had to come back as a mosquito.
I love the idea of being a plant in a gardner's garden, even just a geranium. Simple, but being cared for and tended.
Yes. Cared for and tenderness are it. I'm particularly fond of geraniums. 🌷
My mother has turned into roses^^
The Rocks have billions of years of knowledge...so keep living that dash between two dates fully as you can pace it.....Two things come to mind one in Scotland one in China. In China I saw the ghost of an ancient warrior looking down on me in my bed. I over came my fear and extended my hand towards his silvery face. My hand never stopped and went right through him and he slowly disappeared back into the dark. In Scotland I was up high in the highlands shooting bridges for a book. Late in the day I was out in Glencoe and paused to watch the falling orange sun. I thought I was alone but in front of me were five huge elk with towering horns. We were all watching the same falling event of the day. I did not trouble their peace and turned then walked back two miles towards the road. When driving into the night I had a waking dream and a Scottish battle host marched in the evening sky and the drums and pipes were playing and I knew it was a call through time of my own Scottish roots. Graeme was home again and the battle host was coming to welcome me^^
I believe you have correctly interpreted your amazing visions.
And they remind me of an event that happened to me. I was living at the time across the street from a lake in Minneapolis. In the middle of the night, I felt someone was in my room and woke. I knew he was one of the wandering dead but at that time was unable to help him, said, 'I can't help you,' and he left. I read about the history of that lake, and realized I was living only a few hundred yards from the place where the indigenous people had placed their dead on platforms. But knowing he wanted help, continued to bother (haunt) me, and when I learned shamanic journeying techniques, I journeyed to speak with him, and he told me his story. A friend of mine was studying a Siberian shamanic memorial ritual and wanted practice, so I asked if she would like to do the ritual at my father's grave site, which was conveniently located in a cemetery facing west on the same lake, and close to the old indigenous platform site. So, two of my friends and I performed the ritual in my father's memory (I saw him as a young man) and we helped the wandering dead man transition and saw his ancestors come to greet him.
Beautiful.
Your elk encounter reminds me of a story my husband and son told after a backpacking trip they took overnight in the mountains a few years ago. It was misty and chilly, at about 10,000 feet and also at dusk, and suddenly just ahead of them on the trail a herd of elk emerged, moving quickly, crossing ahead of them like ghosts. I often imagine I'm standing there behind them and can see their backs, packs slung over their shoulders, and antlers in the mist. I like your phrase "falling event of the day."
The ancestors visited.
Indeed they did^^
Glorious!
TX Ian^^