Grief and the cyclical life
The sting of death and the beauty of life
I was 15 when I first set foot in a spiritualist church, but my connection with mediumship started when I was around two or three and began talking to people no one else could see, but who had the names of my great-grandparents and others who had gone before.
Consequently, even before I began to think about the concept of cyclical living, my relationship with death has always been an interesting one. I vividly remember reading something from a professional medium stating that once we have evidence of life after death, there’s nothing to be scared or sad about when it comes to the death of ourselves or someone we love, and although I’ve never fully agreed with that, it’s a sentiment that has always stuck in my mind.
Yet five weeks ago when my best friend, roommate, familiar, soul sister, and other half Kali unexpectedly and suddenly passed into the realms of spirit, my entire world shattered.
Of course, I've grieved many times before; I’ve lost grandparents, friends, and other relatives; and I’ve supported others through their own grief too, so that process of mourning is definitely something I’ve felt, held, and journeyed with. But it’s one I’ve never felt more keenly than over the past few weeks.
There are some who will raise an eyebrow at that. After all, the loss I’m talking about isn’t a human; it’s the loss of my dog. And yet, Kali is also the soul I’ve connected more deeply with than anyone over the past decade, the one who has been there catch the tears of my biggest challenges and join the celebratory dances of my good times, and who has literally seemed able to read my mind every day in between.
And so, in the immediate aftermath of Kali’s passing, I found myself entirely subsumed in pain as we so often are when we lose someone. And then, over the course of the subsequent week, I began to notice something really strange:
Just how many people either assumed I would be fine because my work is so closely linked to death, or expected me to change that work and the beliefs that underpin it now that I was experiencing grief for myself.
And while I know that none of those people were trying to be unkind or rude, their sentiments left me feeling more than a little bit… yeesh.
The Soul’s side of loss
The truth is that I still very much feel Kali with me, and did even before the moment I knew she wasn’t coming back to me physically – although perhaps the detail of that is a story for another day. For now though I’ll tell you that I have felt her with me very keenly every single day since she passed and yes, I have seen her, heard her, felt her – even smelled her, in the weeks since she left her physical body.
I will also tell you also that there is not a single doubt in my mind that when Kali passed into spirit she was – as we all are – welcomed with open arms by those who love her on the other side of life where she’ll stay until she is ready to return to Earth again. If I didn’t believe that before, it was confirmed to me in the moments before her passing when I suddenly felt my grandad draw close and was hit with a wave of all-encompassing peace and love that even now is still a balm for my heart.
Thinking about it now, that sensation reminded me of my favourite depiction of death, which comes from a Lifetime movie made about the medium James van Praagh. The scene opens with a man lying in a hospital bed surrounded by his weeping loved ones before a dog suddenly bounds into the room and jumps up to greet the man. The family members around him begin to sob, but at that moment the man himself sits up to scratch the dog’s ears joyfully. He then looks around the room, to each person in turn, before rising from the bed and walking out into the corridor where he is greeted joyfully by a crowd of people.
It's how I have always envisioned the transition from this life into the next and is very similar to what has been described time and time again by those I’ve connected with from the other side of life. And that alone gives me a great deal of hope and solace – including when I think about my favourite Soul who, after spending so many years of her life struggling with tummy problems and a health condition we didn’t even know about, is now free to bound along her very own corridor and greet those in spirit who care for her. Because really, what more could we want for those we love?
And yet, no matter how beautiful that image may be, and how grateful I am for the sense that my best friend is now free from suffering and well cared for, there is also an overwhelming sense of pain.
Why? Because I’m still human.
The sting of death as a human
Over the course of the last few weeks, I've found the words from an old spiritualist church hymn that I have sung more than a few times in my life reverberating around my brain time and time again.
“Oh grave where is thy victory, oh death, where is thy sting?”
I don’t remember the full lyrics for that song and unfortunately can’t find them online, but assume they tie very much into the overall mission of spiritualism; the idea of life after death and the suggestion that once we have evidence of that belief, there’s no need to suffer in our encounters with death.
That’s a beautiful way to look at things. But it’s also one I find hugely problematic, as I’m sure many of those who have experienced grief will agree. Because, for all of the comfort and support my beliefs and experiences give me that Kali, just like others I’ve loved and lost, is safe and very much still with me, I can assure you that death very very definitely brings a sting.
There is a sting that comes every time the postman arrives and she doesn’t race to protect me from a potential invasion.
There’s an ache that makes itself known when I roll over in the middle of the night and realise she’s not in the bed where she’s spent almost every night of the past ten and a half years.
There is a sharp cut that comes whenever I open the kitchen cupboards and see the tins of baked beans that were one of her favourite treats.
And there’s a hollow emptiness that reverberates around my soul each time I go to leave the house and realise I don’t need to pick up her lead to bring her with
Because for all the experiences I may have as a medium, and the beliefs I may carry as a soulful human, I am still – as we all are – human, and I still very keenly feel the tangible absence of someone who was such a huge part of my physical life for so long and now no longer is.
Our relationship has changed and that’s something I have no choice but to recognise and to feel. And man can I feel it.
I once heard an old counselling tutor describe grief as a wound within our hearts. As he spoke about working with grief in ourselves and our clients, he reminded us that we can never “heal” that wound in itself. Instead, we must go on, accepting more life, love, and experience into our hearts until piece by piece that wound becomes part of the tapestry of them, of ourselves, without occupying the whole of our hearts.
It’s an image that has always stuck with me, not only because of the way that grief feels so impossible to “recover from”, but also because of the powerful reminder that grief doesn’t just take from us and our lives, it adds something too.
The power of our own grief
Let’s be clear: Death is fucking hard. Even if it’s not the ending of all that there is, it is an ending in which we use someone we love. And no matter what our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, or certainties, the heartbreak of that should absolutely be felt, acknowledged, and honoured.
But perhaps, as we step out of the deepest part of our grief, there is also an opportunity for celebration there too.
After all, to quote the Marvel show WandaVision, “what is grief, if not love persevering?” And by gods isn’t a love that is so painful to say goodbye to something that also deserves to be honoured, and perhaps even celebrated?
In those early days after Kali’s passing, all I could see and feel was the pain of a life without her, but slowly that began to change. Slowly I began to see that within the sharpness of that pain was something else – the love I had always felt for Kali which now, without her to focus on, seemed trapped within me and desperate to escape. And so I began to write to her.
Every day, I would open my journal and say all the things I would have usually said only to Kali, all the things I would say out loud to her if she were still physically here, and all the things that I can say to her now it seems easier to talk soul to soul rather than dog to human and vice versa.
At first, that involved a lot of anger – anger at myself for not being able to control the events of her passing and anger at the world for taking her from me; then it moved onto reminiscing over the beautiful times we’d spent together, the wonderful things she had taught me, and the hilarious stories I had from over ten years with the most expressive dog you’ve ever met; and bit by bit I began to realise the words coming onto the page weren’t mine – or at least not only mine.
That every time I sat down to write, I was channelling a much deeper wisdom than I’d experienced before. At times that wisdom seemed to come from Kali, at others from my own Soul or from my guides, but always it came from somewhere deeper and more expansive – a place of mystery that we can perhaps only access and acknowledge when we step through our fear and step up to look death in the eye.
Research suggests that there are two things we humans naturally fear: death and falling – the latter of which is because it is so intricately connected to death.
Why is that the case? Because though we may well see, hear, or feel reports of what happens after death; while we may even deeply know that there is so much more than this one physical life, the actual experience of death is, for us living humans, something we cannot fully comprehend.
That is terrifying. It’s terrifying to acknowledge that eventually each person we love will take their last breath and move into a place of the great unknown, often without warning or preparation; and it’s terrifying to recognise that this same great unknown will seek us out one day too, with no care or consideration for the plans we have made or the dreams we’ve cultivated.
With that in mind, maybe it’s not the eventual certainty of death that so deeply scares and disturbs us all on some level, but the uncertainties of it. Maybe the most terrifying thing of all is the knowledge that we can never be wholly prepared for when death will come, for the form it will take, or for how it will come. After all, every experience of death is different, except for the fact that each one is an ending.
In the week before Kali’s passing, I had been working on notes for a podcast I was due to record, specifically on the subject of life, death, and rebirth – an important part of the Divine Feminist book, and a pretty crucial part of this work overall.
I spent an awful lot of time in the days following Kali's passing wondering how I could possibly talk about rebirth, the temporariness of death, and about the beauty and power of what comes afterwards when, at the same time, I was also deeply entrenched in the pain of grief.
How could I talk about life as cyclical when I was struggling to see outside of the linear process of life and death and could feel nothing from that but pain?
Until I spoke with a wise friend, who lost her own familiar just a couple of years ago and relayed the story of the movie scene with the dog in the hospital corridor and she let out a big sigh. “It strikes me,” she said, “That in many ways death is just as magical an experience as birth. And that we only celebrate one and mourn the other because we can’t see the other side of the cycle. Maybe if we did, we would recognise that there is beauty and pain in both of those experiences.”
Honouring our rebirths
There is a beauty in that line I think, and perhaps a truth in it too. And in considering the idea of birth and death as two transitional points of a cycle, I can’t help but come back to that old spiritualist hymn. Because while death very definitely has a sting for us mortal beings, we can’t truly say that it represents “grave’s” victory over life, any more than we can call birth a triumph over death.
To see life as a cycle is not to avoid death or to never feel grief, any more than it is to ignore birth or refuse to celebrate new beginnings, but to remember that there are times in our existence when both grief and joy will emerge temporarily victorious, each one felt so keenly that we can scarcely see past or feel outside of it, and nor should we.
To do anything other than feel and honour our way through the endings and beginnings that mark our lives is to deny ourselves, to deny the power of transition in this beautiful world, to deny the fullness of this Earthly experience.
But to live cyclically is to remember that there is also more to this Earthly experience. That just as the bare trees of the winter will blossom again in the spring, nothing we experience is ever just an ending, but a doorway to the next rebirth.
In saying that I don’t just speak about physical life and death – although as you know I am a firm believer in the concept of reincarnation (Kali has already told me what she’d like to be named next time around, again that may be a story for another day!) and believe that none of us will ever be gone from this world forever unless we choose – I talk about what comes for each of us after any ending, when we eventually allow ourselves to step consciously back into this cyclical life.
Because let me be clear, consciously moving from an ending into a new beginning is not a birth – not when we are aware of the cycle that has brought us to that point. A conscious movement through that portal will not see us bursting naked and empty into the bright lights of a new beginning as though birthed for the first time.
Instead, we emerge more slowly, clothed in the wisdom of our experiences and all that we have already come to learn about ourselves and the world; and filled with love – so much of the love that continues to live within us for all that have gone before and fuels us to keep moving forwards, carrying them within us and honouring them as we continue our own journey of life blessed with the beauty of all they have taught and shown us.
So as I speak to you from this place of my own grief, and perhaps even talk directly to the grief that is still there to be felt within you, I invite you to recognise and to honour those transitional points within you – both from a mortal, human perspective and from the viewpoint of an all-knowing, immortal soul.
I invite you to feel the painful sting of grief that comes with your endings and losses just as you also to honour the powerful rebirth that arises within you after each and every one; and to combine both parts of ourselves, and so much more besides, into the full tapestry of life that allows us to fall apart and then back together again, piece by piece by shattered piece.
Because it's only through that process that we unearth the gems of wisdom we will carry forward, and the gifts of love that those we’ve lost have left behind.
