Though I’ve lived in the death transition realm for a very long time, it was only recently that someone very close to my heart died—family—I would call Lee McChesney, even though his son and I divorced many years ago.
As I am writing this a little bird keeps flitting around the porch where I’m sitting and Hurricane Lee is whipping up all kinds of trouble in the Atlantic. Makes sense! That guy loved the Caribbean; many of our happiest days together were spent in Tortola.
Lee and Sam at Sugar Mill, Tortola, around 1998.
The signs are around us all the time because the ‘dead’ are around us all the time.
Truly I hate the word, dead, for the finality and darkness it conjures. Those who have moved on from the embodied condition are very much alive and nearby. We can seek their guidance, support and love whenever we want.
I know this conversation can get very dicey. I know skepticism abounds, but I also know that we are living in a world that is getting increasingly hard to tolerate, increasingly difficult to understand, and that for many hope is on the wane. Isn’t it worth at least a bit of curiosity? Given how alive we are when we’re here, with these magnificent minds, bodies and souls, what the heck do you think happens when the body gives out?
I’ve always thought that atheism is just another word for laziness. It takes a lot of imaginative contemplation and a lot of trust in the unseen to open one’s heart to the possibilities. But if you’ve lived long enough you’ve not only heard the stories, but you’ve experienced them, too.
My partner graduated from an Ivy League school with a major in math. When we met he made it clear he believes that nothing happens when you die, it’s just lights out, game over.
His wife died a year or so before we started spending time together. I experienced lots of signs of her presence in his house (where she died), many of which, of course, could be shrugged off as the wind or coincidence. Until one morning, very early, when the refrigerator door open and started beeping. There was no earthquake, no one else in the house. I knew what was going on, but for the first time he was faced with very real, very material evidence of spirit activity.
Still, when I asked him what he thought happened he simply answered, I don’t know.
I guess I don’t know is a start. I don’t know is at least an admission that maybe something I can’t explain is happening. Which hopefully leads to …maybe there are things happening in our lives all the time that defy my rational thinking.
Because, you know, the world is so sparkling and funny and magical. When I was heading to the Squaw Valley Chapel on Sunday to do a service there with an old friend from college, my kids with me, a bunch of other young folks we know coming, it was pouring rain and then, when we got right near the mountain, a gorgeous rainbow appeared.
To me, that has meaning.
And I think that when we tune into life this way it becomes so much more interesting and definitely more palpable. All of life is imbued with the treasure of this energy and death is no different. In fact, the condition we become after we leave here is lighter and more flexible in terms of where we can be and what we can do. We become part of everything, even as we maintain parts of our personality and our interest in the things we loved here.
I’ve kept a running log of all the people I know who have transitioned to spirit. I don’t want to lose track of them and what they meant to me, so recently I started holding something I call the Campfire Council. On those nights when I’m awake in the wee hours, I envision a gathering of some of my friends who have died: Tom and Tom and Judy and Ruthie and Karen and Sue and Camilla and Eric and Bruce and Jerry and PopPop. We sit around a campfire and I ask them questions. Sometimes others wander in, maybe an ancestor I never met or a friend I wasn’t that close with, maybe someone I spent time with in hospice care.
This is my way of staying connected to all those terrific people and it’s how I gain insights into what’s happening in the world today.
I think that we would all be much better off if we understood more about what happens in death. If we were less rational and more mystical, less skeptical and more curious. Lots of folks experience a kind of transformation when they’re near the end of their life here, possibly because there’s so much spiritual activity happening then, as the soul readies for passage and as those already there prepare for their arrival. I just wish it would all happen sooner.
I know there are mediums who become entertainers, and that might actually add to the problem in our culture. The whole thing becomes a kind of showmanship, a gig and good mediums charge a fortune and often have very long waiting lists to help lesser mortals connect with the dead. It shouldn’t be this way. It should be something woven into our daily lives, an understanding that death is just a change of condition, not a change of address and certainly not any kind of great finality.
I’m keeping an eye on Hurricane Lee, he was a force in life, of course he’s a force in death! Without signs we are lost here in this weird life. Math can only get us all so far.
xo, mo
I like that a little bird came to give you comfort. My very dear friend Giuseppe Forman walked on this week too. In the last hour, a flurry of a violent storm appeared and rain came down in buckets. Then a rainbow appeared. I chanted as my heart turned to joy in realizing that I am still connected to a pal who is on the rainbow path now. I am comforted. I know you are comforted too even with such a great loss. The little bird came to tell you so. May peace and love surround us. I do love that you have a Campfire Council. I used to love having my outdoor fire pit on my property in the wilds of Wisconsin, near Lake Superior.