My family lost someone beloved at the end of March. Some losses have a sweetness to them—like the snow that fell as I played the harp and the last breath slipped from my grandpa’s lips, many years ago now. Some losses are so harsh, so unexpected, that it feels as if your heart has splintered. Our recent loss was one of the latter.
It doesn’t matter who you lose—a human relation, a pet, a beloved tree. Grief doesn’t hold a hierarchy. The heart doesn’t stop aching because you tell it enough time has passed and you should be done.
Death appears to be the ultimate change—and yet life never stops. The grass greens; the leaves unfurl; the awakening bees dance through stalks of still-dreaming flowers. You sit on the soft, warming earth and the wind smells of spring. The world does not stop, no matter how much has changed.
And what of the dead? What becomes of those we have lost?
The dead are, I think, only a breath away. That is why sometimes we hear them; sometimes we catch a whiff of their scent. That’s why sometimes they can help us, if we ask.
Eben Alexander, and other near-death experience researchers, talk about the limits of our perceptions. What is consciousness? they ask. Does our consciousness (unconsciously) select what it perceives through human senses? And do we, thus, in effect “edit out” aspects of this wild, messy universe we live in, so that we can function more easily as humans?1 The ghosts, the spirits, the angels. The strange spiraling nautilus shell of time.
We may never be able to answer these questions, or explain how the flow of living and dying “works.” These are Mysteries, with a capital M, and they’re not meant to be explained. They are meant to be lived.
Perdita Finn writes beautifully about reincarnation in her book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World:
“What if the genealogies of the soul are instead a vast and complex archipelago of islands? … The transmigration of the soul was, before the advent of agriculture and the entrenchment of patriarchy, how we understood the natural world. The flowers died in the fall and bloomed in the spring. The tides receded and returned. The moon waxed and waned. The seasons spiraled around themselves. One person died and another was born. In some Indigenous cultures the word for great-great-grandparent is simply “child.” We have been Life. We will be Life. We are Life’s children.
“How would you have approached your life, if you had known that you had more lives than you could possibly imagine?”
When we die, I don’t believe that we go far. Or perhaps we can traverse great distances, yet we are able to return in the space of a breath, if we are needed. And we come back. We are reborn again and again.
In the weeks after our loved one passed, I dreamed that she was coming back to life. In one dream, the breath returned to her body; in another, the sickness that stole her away miraculously left her. Her eyes were bright, warm, alive.
If my memory serves, Eben Alexander raised these questions in his book Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Heart of Consciousness, but he may also address them in the NYT bestseller Proof of Heaven.
Such a beautiful and healing piece. Thank you.