It was Halloween, I remembered as we drove the five hours back home in a kind of stunned silence for the first two hours. Just a few days before Bill had helped me make an All Saints ribbon banner with a ribbon representing each saint. Now he was one.
I've read somewhere that half of all the bereaved experience the ghostly presence of their beloved. It was All Hallow's Eve, the night when the veil between the living and the dead is supposedly at its thinnest. Just as it was the last harvest, so, too, it was the time, according to Celtic tradition, when the souls of the dead who'd been wandering the earth were harvested and crossed over into the other world.
I'm in the God biz. I know my JEDP source material and that Christianity is a tradition that has grown in its understandings over time. Ancient Jews did not believe in an afterlife; we're only alive after death as long as someone remembers us. Once we disappear from historical consciousness, we're obliterated. Some later Jews had conflated other religions' understandings of the afterlife with heaven, a place you go when you die, which Christianity continued. I know all this.
But I wondered where my husband was. Hoping I'd perhaps catch a glimpse of him through the thin veil, I watched and prayed. I wanted to say, "I'm sorry. I love you. Why didn't you take better care of yourself?" But he was gone. He was in that long line of saints being gathered up into the Light of Christ, so I waved at the moon and whispered, "Bye, Bill. I'm sorry. I'll always love you."
Then we put in some episodes of "This American Life" that Ariana had downloaded into her ipod and sped on through the night of souls.
I've read somewhere that half of all the bereaved experience the ghostly presence of their beloved. It was All Hallow's Eve, the night when the veil between the living and the dead is supposedly at its thinnest. Just as it was the last harvest, so, too, it was the time, according to Celtic tradition, when the souls of the dead who'd been wandering the earth were harvested and crossed over into the other world.
I'm in the God biz. I know my JEDP source material and that Christianity is a tradition that has grown in its understandings over time. Ancient Jews did not believe in an afterlife; we're only alive after death as long as someone remembers us. Once we disappear from historical consciousness, we're obliterated. Some later Jews had conflated other religions' understandings of the afterlife with heaven, a place you go when you die, which Christianity continued. I know all this.
But I wondered where my husband was. Hoping I'd perhaps catch a glimpse of him through the thin veil, I watched and prayed. I wanted to say, "I'm sorry. I love you. Why didn't you take better care of yourself?" But he was gone. He was in that long line of saints being gathered up into the Light of Christ, so I waved at the moon and whispered, "Bye, Bill. I'm sorry. I'll always love you."
Then we put in some episodes of "This American Life" that Ariana had downloaded into her ipod and sped on through the night of souls.
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