The Living Dead, The Dead Alive
My last post was about the living dead, the brief moment when each of us is alive. We are alive, but in a way we are already among the dead, where we will certainly soon be. We are the still living dead.
But what happens when a person we love dies? You would expect us to think of them as being dead, gone, vanished. But that isn‘t the case, at least for me. For me when a person dies I still feel their presence as intensely as I did before, more intensely even.
Of course the day after they die we/I feel deep sadness, a huge hole opens up, we/I miss them unbearably, we/I feel despair. But at the same time we/I somehow feel their living presence more intensely than we/I did when they were sitting here beside us, at least I do. In a way the person we love is even more intensely alive to us than they were when alive. We know objectively they are not here. I have spread my mother‘s ashes and my brother’s ashes in the Ganges in Varanasi as well as other places. I know they are gone. But my mother‘s presence and my brother‘s presence are very much with me. Often it is a photograph that summons their presence and the intense feeling I have for them.
Susie and I just scattered Kathe‘s ashes around the church where she was baptized 80 years ago in Garssen, Germany. We dusted the funeral plot of her parents with her ashes, we placed them in the Aller River at the place where her brother died. We know from the grainy rough white ashes that Kathe no long exists. And yet she is as alive as she ever was. She is right here sitting beside me.
I didn‘t feel this as intensely when I was young. Even as a child I knew we all die. But it was old people who died when they were slowed down to stumbling along. But I am now an old person and it doesn‘t feel like that at all. I have friends who have been dead twenty years whose presence is as alive as it was then. I wouldn‘t be surprised if they walked around the corner, because they have never really been gone. They‘ve always been here beside me.
It doesn‘t seem surprising that Christ rose from the dead. His loving presence was so strong to those who followed him that it stayed with them even more intensely after he left them. He didn‘t leave them. It doesn‘t seem strange that almost all the major religions believe in some form of life after death, some form of heaven or hell, some shadowy underworld, some form of reincarnation. And this is without any physical measureable proof at all of an afterlife.
One side of me knows that we all die, ashes to ashes. The other side feels the presence of a person after death even more strongly than before. I don‘t think there is any scientific explanation and I‘m not looking for one. I know it happens.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 