I recently posted a poem: "Good-bye to a friend" about a good friend's death. The poem (revisiting the evening I joined a few friends to serve vigil and see this man off with stories during the night of his passing via Zoom), made me think of my own death. I find that I can't comfortably use the word "passing" because when someone dies, the person we knew is "dead" to us. That is the cruel reality, at least initially, of a loved one's passing. We experience that they are utterly gone.
I wish there was a word halfway between someone's "passing" and someone's "death". Death is what we experience from our side of it and passing is what the dying experience. But what does it mean to say someone has "passed"?
Here is where I need to say, I do know that reincarnation is real, a reality. (Ever since what I refer to as my mirror experience, [see my memoir "Finding Myself in Time"], age 19?, 20?, reincarnation stopped being hypothetical or just an esoteric concept or belief. Echoing Jung's statement, "I don't need to believe, I know.") . . . For 50 years I have known, beyond a doubt, that we are destined to encounter the same souls throughout the course of many lives. And yet there is still a kind of finality to someone's passing / death. In fact there needs to be! When someone dies we have to fully experience their death and then we have to expand our awareness of how there is something inclusive and miraculous . . . a kind of greater love - that floods in, not to overwhelm but to contain the event of a loved one's death. If we can, that is, if we are willing to let go of that person, to let them journey into that greater love, we find that they aren't really lost to us because we are held by the exact same love that receives them. There is a great mystery to this: We want to hold onto the person, but we can't. If we let the person go and concentrate our love on the essence of our loved one, we are participating in a profoundly healing mystery.
Let me unpack this mystery a little.
Let me repeat what I "know" . . . that every one of us is an incarnation of an infinitely loving or compassionate and soulful creation that has chosen to incarnate. But what happens to the signature "essence" of the person we loved when they die / pass?
Every death is an initiation, in the sense that death severs our intimate connection with the deceased, with the finality of a sword. When someone we love dies we must make a descent into grief. Our culture is not much help at this point, whereas some much older cultures are much better at spiritually preparing people to let go of the dead so they, the bereaved, can ascend from grief and prepare for the next stage of letting go of someone.
These older cultures do not claim that the person is resurrected somewhere but these wisdom cultures tell us that the essence of the person remains intact, and it is that essence that is reincarnated, the very essence that we love!
It is not helpful to imagine that a person is resurrected in an afterlife. That theology blocks us from coming around to a much more enlightened (I dare say, evolved) view, that the essence of the person we love actually does continue! We all know, in our hearts, that love is indestructible and eternal, but we need to take that one step further, planting that awareness of the immortality of love, in the compatible reality of a reincarnating soul-essence.
