Tag Archives: Grief

Lighting the Stage Beyond Death’s Scrim

Posted on by
Reply

Scrim: In the theater a scrim is a curtain that appears to the audience as an opaque backdrop at the rear of the stage. When a scene is lit behind this backdrop, the scrim becomes transparent.

After-death communication lights up the scene beyond the scrim that separates life from death. In a flash, it can dispel any illusions we have that nothing exists beyond death (or that what exists is somehow unfortunate), dispelling both our fears about death and our concerns for the welfare of our deceased beloveds.

Today’s blog begins a series on the enormous diversity of ways in which our dear dead ones can light up the scene beyond that scrim. Each experience (and I include a few that happen prior to a death) has actually occurred and has revealed meaning to those involved. In his book, The Map of Heaven, Eben Alexander calls “…meaning, the language of the spiritual world…” These
contacts speak the language of meaning and sometimes require translation to be fully understood.

Here goes…

We may receive contact as sensations in our bodies, or as goose bumps, which I like to call “truth bumps.”

If we meditate, do mantras, or pray—Our beloveds may arrive in any manner while we are engaged in our spiritual practice.

If we’re doubters—We may experience contacts so profound our worldview is transformed.

If we’ve been unable to attend a funeral, we may receive any kind of contact—a dream or an experience in nature—that reassures us the person holds no grudge.

A car may be flooded with someone’s scent when they’ve not been in it for months.

Our cell phone may flash the number of our dead beloved as though they had called.

If we’re in danger without our awareness—A verbal warning like “Slow down” or “Watch out” may come just in the nick of time.

A message may come from lyrics or the timing of a meaningful song on the radio. Music may bring on awareness of someone’s presence.

After a death, a clock may stop repeatedly at a time which, when examined, has personal meaning. Once that meaning is understand, the clock may never stop again.

I would love to hear how your dead beloveds have lit up the scene beyond the scrim. I invite you to share your experiences with me at http://www.AnnieMattingley.com. Just click “Share A Story” in the menu to write about your after-death communication. If you’d prefer to tell me your story verbally, let me know that and we can arrange a phone call.

To be continued next week…

The After Death Chronicles: True Stories of Comfort, Guidance, and Wisdom from Beyond the Veil. To be released by Hampton Roads on October 6, 2017. Pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Find out more on my Book Page.

Tiny Ways to Honor the Dead

Posted on by
2

 

Doing something to honor a person we love who is no longer in a body pleases the heart and satisfies the soul. It is a kiss through the veil. Activity is natural to us. We miss our regular acts of service and love—making a meal, sending a card, buying a gift, placing a phone call. Death stymies us. At every turn we face a detour sign that blocks our natural impulse to connect.

Of course, we honor our dead in traditional ways like headstones and crypts and arrays of flowers. We endow scholarships, fund benches in parks, start charitable foundations, dedicate books (that’s me). There are also really personal ways that can ease the sting of our thwarted impulse to connect. Here’s one that arose spontaneously for me.

As I was preparing to take down an unhealthy tree on the far edge of our land I noticed how sculptural its bare branches looked. I stood back, wondering, if I left the rest standing, how turn it into an art project. Over lunch I asked my visual artist husband what he might put on this tree. “I’ll think of something,” he said. “I’ll add it to my list.” I wanted something that could happen in the next hour.

Suddenly my deceased daughter’s sun-hats came to mind. A bag of them had been sitting on a shelf for a couple of years. I counted them. There were thirteen hats. I went out to the tree. It had thirteen branches.

That’s how Randi’s Hat Tree came to be. It has no plaque. It pleases me that her hats make passers-by laugh. You won’t count thirteen hats in the photo though. Some have been sacrificed to snow and wind. The rest are drooping and shredding and fading. One branch has broken off. Within a few years there will be no more hats. I find this temporary quality gratifying. It’s our love that lasts. I don’t need a marble monument to remind me of that.

Here are a few ideas for what you could do in the name of a dear dead one:

Plant a tree, a rose, a wildflower bed. Watch it grow, wither, and bloom again in the spring.

Give a quarter to a homeless person. Say, “This is from my mother…”

Offer up today’s practice—prayers, mantra, meditation—to honor someone beloved.

Balance a pebble on a fencepost as you walk by.

Put up a birdhouse.

Spend ten minutes weeding the library’s flower bed

Walk to the corner and back again as a gift to your beloved.

In what tiny ways have you honored someone? If you try some of my ways, what was it like when you saw that pebble on the fencepost the next week? Or when bluebirds nested in the birdhouse? Or the next time you saw a homeless person? Did any of this ease the sting of a moment’s grief? What happened over time?  I’d love to have you share these on my website at www.anniemattingley.com.

The After Death Chronicles: True Stories of Comfort, Guidance, and Wisdom from Beyond the Veil. To be released by Hampton Roads on October 6, 2017. Pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Find out more on my Book Page.

 

 

Three Reasons Why After-Death Communication Matters

Posted on by
Reply

We humans crave meaning in our lives. Contact with our dead beloveds can fulfill that desire in several manners. The most obvious way is that it relieves grief, but this is not its sole purpose. What I’ve found through my personal experience and research and interviews is that besides offering the bereaved comfort and hope, after-death contact can reduce fear of our own deaths and demonstrate that consciousness continues beyond the grave.

Hearing my daughter’s voice a few weeks after her suicide instantly released the hundred pound sack of worry for her that hung from my heart. She didn’t have to tell me she was okay. The very sound of her voice let me know she was all right.

Me and My Family at Park Guell in Barcelona

During the three fabulous weeks I just spent in Spain with my family I saw how often my great-granddaughter cried like she’d lost her forever when her mom left the room. She’s the one in the stroller in the photo taken at Gaudi’s Park Guell in Barcelona.

This is exactly how we react when beloveds die, convinced we will never see them again. Our bodies ache, our hearts break, our minds dull. If we hear or see or feel their presence again, this process is not halted. But if we have some contact through the veil, the edges of our grief can be muted and softened once we grasp that on a non-material basis this person is still available to us.

This realization helps us to deal with a profound mystery: what will happen to us when we die? Most of us range along a continuum from nervous to terrified about that question. Do we simply fall into an abyss of nothingness? Is there a heaven or a hell? Are we worried that our flaws and mistakes will be judged? Will we be “sent” to that heaven or that hell?

Despite all the words of praise spoken in eulogies, our dead beloveds are most likely as imperfect as we are. When they return to tell us they’re okay, sometimes surrounded by a light so transcendent earthly words are inadequate to describe it, it helps us to understand that death is neither an empty abyss nor some horrific place to be feared.

Once we open ourselves to the possibility of death as a continuation, as another kind of existence, we are brought face to face with another large question: Who am I? Because we are so bound to our bodies, we are challenged to understand that we are more than physical beings.

I like to use the word consciousness to describe our essential nature, that part of us that does not die, that cannot die, that existed before birth and will exist after death, that part of us that does not require a physical body in order to be. You may be more comfortable using other words like soul or spirit to describe that essence.

Because I have seen these results manifest so profoundly in those who have had contact with dead beloveds, I view these moments as packed with possibilities. Whether we experience a single instance or, as I have, innumerable contacts, if we are willing to examine and explore the deeper meaning that underlies these experiences, we open ourselves to the mystical realms.

This can add a dimension of satisfaction and joy and relief from anxiety that frees us up to live life more fully. In these three ways—grief relief, less fear of death, and awareness of our essential nature—after-death communication can evolve into one of life’s great gifts.

The After Death Chronicles: True Stories of Comfort, Guidance, and Wisdom from Beyond the Veil. To be released October 6, 2017. Pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Find out more on my Book Page.

Grief Poem #5

Posted on by
1

(inspired by Canto de Obsidiana by Gerardo Suter, MACO exhibit, 2013)

Obsidian Shard

In the length of a phone call
it entered my flesh
pierced my chest through and through
my world torn off its axis
skin, muscle, ventricle, auricle, tissue, vein
penetrated by needle-thin volcanic glass.
I do not make peace with it.
I do not accept it.
There is no resolution, no closure.
I allow. No thing more.
By now its presence is not felt
until the sound of violin, tenor, or harp
splinters its strange reality
and fills me with old shadows.

Afterward, as if melted by memory’s furnace
it re-forms into the most slender of slivers.
In the night, I caress it for comfort.
Like a genie in a bottle
rubbed the right way
it brings the precious history
restores the unbroken umbilical cord.

I begin and begin again
and in her ending my beginning
grows fiercely forward
like the saguaro grows taller, stronger from lack.
I shed my black mourning, receive the sun. 

© creativecommonsstockphotos / Dreamstime Stock Photos

The After Death Chronicles: True Stories of Comfort, Guidance, and Wisdom from Beyond the Veil. To be released October 6, 2017. Pre-order on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Indiebound. Find out more on my Book page at www.anniemattingley.com/books

Can We Say the Right Thing?

Posted on by
2

Someone has died. Perhaps the hardest words to get right are the ones that must be said or written to their beloveds. In fact, we can never get these words right, because they won’t make the pain go away.

After my daughter’s death, going to the grocery store was no easier than standing naked on a pedestal on the plaza would have been. The eyes of strangers drew blood. I was hyper-aware of everyone and it seemed that most everyone—if they already knew—was hyper-aware of me. Mothers, especially, zipped around corners out of sight too often to be coincidental, as if my daughter’s death were contagious.

© creativecommonsstockphotos / Dreamstime Stock Photos

No one knew what to say, least of all me. The first few times I was asked, “Annie, how are you?” and blurted out that my daughter had taken her own life, it was as if I had punched the person in the belly. I learned to soften my words—“She was depressed. She became suicidal.” I watched people guess what I was about to say and prepare themselves.

I felt like a pariah when someone said absolutely nothing when told or, literally, backed away. If someone responded with a flat, “Sorry for your loss,” I felt closed out.

Yet when a woman I knew slightly leaned back against a shelf with a sense that she had all afternoon to listen and asked me, “How are you doing?” I closed her out with a curt, “Pretty well, thanks, and you?” I was impossible to please in those early months, because the wound always remained.

One day I ran into the friend of a friend. We small-talked until that challenging moment when she asked what was happening in my life. I told her gradually. Her eyes widened and welled. Looking shocked, she whispered, “I don’t know what to say.” And—this was key—she did not look away. She was so authentic my heart sprang open. I watched her processing before she continued. Her words, “I am so sorry. How are you doing with it?” were not special, but they were embedded with a level of presence that bathed me like warm oil. We spoke for a long time. I neither pretended to be all right nor broke down.

Our words can be simple if we allow them to arise without censorship. This woman was not afraid to express her natural response or to give herself time to deal with her own emotions. Because she was present with herself, she could be present with me and we could connect. Of course, there was timing too; I was in the right place to be authentic with her.

The timing of nearly all deaths disturbs, with the young, even more so. But our current cultural practices teach us that death is the enemy. We struggle to extend life at nearly any cost. We whisk bodies away to funeral homes as if they were too ugly to look upon until coiffed and made up. We are tongue-tied in the presence of grief and the bereaved. I respect words beyond measure, but I understand their limitations.

Perhaps the most significant action in the face of a person in grief is to feel our own pain and fears and to let this shine through our eyes and to allow our words to be the feeble and limited expressions they are. It is our body language, the looks on our faces and in our eyes that matter.

Saying the wrong thing may be less important than trying too hard to say the right thing.

The After Death Chronicles: True Stories of Comfort, Guidance, and Wisdom from Beyond the Veil. To be released October 6, 2017. Watch for pre-ordering in July.
www.anniemattingley.com