Excerpt from BEAUTY

John O’Donohue

 

The dead are not distant or absent. They are alongside us. When we lose someone to death, we lose their physical image and presence, they slip out of visible form into invisible presence. This alteration of form is the reason we cannot see the dead. But because we cannot see them does not mean that they are not there. Transfigured into eternal form, the dead cannot reverse the journey and even for one second re-enter their old form to linger with us a while. Though they cannot reappear, they continue to be near us and part of the healing of grief is the refinement of our hearts whereby we come to sense their loving nearness. When we ourselves enter the eternal world and come to see our lives on earth in full view, we may be surprised at the immense assistance and support with which our departed loved ones have accompanied every moment of our lives. In their new, transfigured presence their compassion, understanding and love take on a divine depth, enabling them to become secret angels guiding and sheltering the unfolding of our destiny.

 

 

 

 

 

Being the rememberer

A friend recently lost her 20-year old daughter. She posted a quote, and for the life of me I can’t recall the quote, only the idea of “being the rememberer”. I think about this often especially in those middles of the night where sleep is a distant hope: someone has to bear witness.

In any given day I may bear witness to a newspaper headline, animals left on the side of the road after a sudden encounter with a car, dead or dying loved ones, a kid dropping her hotdog with ketchup in the cafeteria at work. And also to the sparks that fly at the very edge of fireworks, the first glacier lily, or the beauty of 200 voices raised together in song.

Being the rememberer in the context of my friend’s post had everything to do with being left here to cope with the death of her child. How does she carry on? How does one day pass into the other into a week month years? When do you begin to lose the immediacy of your child’s needs or the smell of his hair, the feel of her hand? How to carry on?

I think with a job: the job of bearing witness. Not my favorite but one that I’ve taken up with gusto. Look at that! Watch this! Here the world turns day by day and if we don’t pay exquisite attention to the thing of beauty like a life or a flower or the flash of sun on river, it will pass anyway and we’ll miss it.

I am being the rememberer.

“…if we don’t pay exquisite attention to the thing of beauty like a life or a flower or the flash of sun on river, it will pass anyway and we’ll miss it.