We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses
Heron
Shipmate
in All Saints
It increasingly seems to me that the experience of grief and loss are universal experiences - for those who live long enough.
How do we continue to experience our loved ones who have died?
I ask partly through growing personal reflection, and partly through recent reading of Nick Cave's book 'Faith Hope and Carnage', where he speaks so movingly of how he continues to experience the presence of his dead son, Arthur (and others).
I suppose that I'm not really after a theological discussion
(up to you of course) , but I'd be thankful for any generous sharing of 'how things are for you'.
Me? I experience those I've lost through absence - a palpable absence.
What about you?
Heron
How do we continue to experience our loved ones who have died?
I ask partly through growing personal reflection, and partly through recent reading of Nick Cave's book 'Faith Hope and Carnage', where he speaks so movingly of how he continues to experience the presence of his dead son, Arthur (and others).
I suppose that I'm not really after a theological discussion
(up to you of course) , but I'd be thankful for any generous sharing of 'how things are for you'.
Me? I experience those I've lost through absence - a palpable absence.
What about you?
Heron
Comments
This is entirely subjective and non-empirical, of course.
My favourite clause in the Apostles’ Creed: Credo in sanctorum communionem, I believe in the communion of saints. Especially, of course, at Holy Communion where the building’s very walls are vibrating with unheard and unseen praises of believers both past and yet to be born before Christ comes, but in the everyday.
So yes, but in palpable if science-defying presence.
Yeah 🙄 sounds right. They’ve got no more idea than the rest of us of the purpose of their board. But while you’re here, I hope that you get replies here which straddle Keryg (how does the Bible address my question?) and Eccles (how does Tradition address it?) and Purg (how might reason address it?) Most of all, whatever prompted yr post, I 🙏 that you feel those you love and miss as they, themselves, are loved in eternity.
Thank you.
@Foaming Draught this is a violation of SoF Commandment 6. A repeat will result in two weeks shoreleave.
Doublethink, Admin
[/Admin]
Events. My brain is mush so I forget the title, but my paternal uncle was I think a flight engineer; getting on a plane makes me recall him. One of my maternal grandmothers (adoption featured) had nuts and a nutcracker on her living room coffee table. Consuming them reminds me of her, oddly perhaps.
I confess I may be loony (never been sectioned, but have had multiple extended visits to such facilities so I'm not entirely sane), but this is me.
Sometimes on my way back from the shops at the end of the road I try to pray for all the people I know in the houses I pass (even if it's just 'Buddhist Lady' and her neighbour 'Labour Party Lady') and (trying to get back on thread) I also remember those neighbours who are dead, though prayers for the dead still feels a bit 'out there' for me despite my RC connections. I often think of my late Mum. I think I've posted a link to this band before, but the thread title reminds me of this one . Some of you might remember them from Greenbelt, years ago.
I know that feels like a stretch from here in some cases, our remaining lives being of rather limited duration, but time and eternity are slippery things so I'm not entirely pessimistic
I always think of him when the "communion of saints" is mentioned, and when I was listening to the carol service from King's, I had a bit of spontaneous eye leakage in the bidding prayer when they got to "that rejoice upon another shore, and in a greater light".
Other, more lighthearted things will make me think of him and smile: a crossword clue that he would have appreciated; a hymn tune that he loved. I like to think that he's keeping an eye on me, and that if I do something like singing a solo or (as I'm going to do for the first time on Sunday) singing the office of Evensong, I hope that he's smiling from Heaven.
Sorry - I went a bit soft round the edges there ...
The mixing bowl I used today belonged to my mother in law who died 25 years ago. Notes in recipe books, converting units, handwriting from long ago, stains on recipe pages legacies of joyful gatherings.
At times the weight can seem.....overwhelming? Particularly in the kitchen for me...dunno why.
Swimming over deeper and deeper water with each year.
I see my mother every time I look in the mirror, I am the spitting image of her.
I trust that if we see our enemies, family members or not, again, and even if we don't, it will be in a redemptive, healing context. I can scarcely imagine what my own abusive parents will be like if they are redeemed--or for that matter my own self, healed of my own brokenness (including the emotional damage from them and others).
As for my loved ones, I trust that Daddy Vern and Cubby are still connected to me, and as present with me as they are allowed to be (I don't know how some of this works).
As for Purgatorial processes after death, Lewis in The Great Divorce, and George MacDonald in Lilith, show some ideas relating to that...
A scene from Lilith:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1640/1640-h/1640-h.htm#link2HCH0017
And food! There are so many foods linked to them all, whether foods they made, foods they loved or foods they introduced me to.
And both those connections come into play for me at the Lord’s Table. Some have mentioned the tug that the liturgical reference to “the communion of saints” has for them. For me, the liturgical line that has that tug is “ And so, with grateful hearts, we join our voices with the heavenly choirs and with all the faithful of every time and place, who forever sing to the glory of your name,” or whatever version of that concept appears in the Great Thanksgiving. That image of all of us gathered together, singing and feasting, is beautiful to me.
Like Piglet, the words in the Bidding Prayer of the Service of Lessons and Carols about “on another shore, in a greater light” bring tears, as indeed do so many words of liturgy and hymns, often quite unexpectedly, though there are known triggers.
A major problem I am still working through is that, when I was trying to get Mr P to declutter some of his stuff, his reply was “ You get rid of my stuff and you get rid of me”. This has made the whole process of doing just that even harder, and I haven’t finished yet. Sometimes it feels as if I am deliberately eradicating evidence of him from my house, though of course not from my thoughts.
Like others I have a few things in the kitchen and on my dressing table which belonged to my mother and hold happy memories.
I often think I am odd in having a very sanguine attitude to death, at least with regard to those who are elderly where they are now at rest eg my husband and my parents, and am fortunate in not having lost a child or a young person, which is altogether different. The words on my parents’ headstone are “ Forever with the Lord”.
From the way you've described the process so far (so much as I remember from other threads) you've been doing your best to find 'good homes'. I think I'm probably a bit like your late husband in the 'things' department, and 'finding good homes' is the best anyone like me / us can hope for. As for how many things to retain - that has to be up to you. If my wife were to decide after I'm gone that in retrospect my liking for finding and fixing stuff was a total frustration that she would rather have been without (and should we stay together that long, I would not be (posthumously) surprised by that outcome) then it would be odd for her to hang onto a few display items to confirm her in that view.
Yes, I'll sing the wondrous story
Of the Christ who died for me
Sing it with the saints in glory
Gathered by the crystal sea
"Therefore with angels and archangels,
and with all the company of heaven,
we proclaim your great and glorious name,
for ever praising you..."
Always made me think of my (at that point) recently deceased grandad
I've written in other threads about how we have an ongoing issue in the family that I would really love to talk to my mum about. Recently I revisited some of the creative writing she had done and among that was a few letters from her I'd kept (we kept in touch by letter and there were lots, and I thought I'd destroyed them all - something I deeply regret now) and they brought her close to me in a way I haven't felt in quite a while. For a long time after she died (12 years ago) she felt very close and then seemed to recede.
When the issue first started being one I was thinking about it, and her, one day and I heard her voice in my head say, "I did warn you." And I remembered that she had, decades ago, and I had not wanted to remember or believe it.
My own wedding and engagement rings don't fit me any more so I wear hers. I think of her every time I look at them. Occasionally I dream of her and it feels quite natural that she is alive in the dreams.
Over the years, as a minister I have visited many people on their death beds to give them the Lutheran equivalent of last rites. What would get to me is when they would be asking how I was doing or how the family was doing in spite of their own journey.
I didn't have a great relationship - with either of them. We were polite - and having recently been diagnosed as autistic, I can see how I learnt the rules and understood well how to mask with them. But they were the people who were intently interested in my life in a way that nobody else will ever likely to be and now that isn't there.
I have this gift of a short period of time before the house is sold in which to really max out the experience of being in the house that I grew up in, pondering the things and their lives - and the wonder as to how my mother ended up with so many pyrex dishes or cafetieres or tupperware. And the wonder of hundreds of photographs, un-named, un-dated - and nobody will ever be able to make a connection to the people in those pictures. All those memories have gone.
I don't know what I am trying to say. I know I feel utterly lost and disorientated without them even tho it was all so weird with them alive. It's the strangest of processes.
It's a big shift to become the top generation of the family. So much is lost.
Life is complicated. Relationships are complicated. Death is complicated. Sometimes we just have to let the weirdness wash over us and keep going.
Someday. But that day is not today.
AFF
🕯
Many hugs
AFF