Communing with the Dead
To truly nourish myself today, I felt called to commune with my dead. And not just my dead—but all of those who have lived this material, earthly life and moved on from this plane. Today, I needed to remember the sound of my grandfather’s voice, with all the strength, intensity, and even undertones of bravery that it held. The sense of low-level loneliness I’d felt since waking seemed only to be comforted by conjuring the image of my mother’s smiling face, surrounded by her beautiful curly hair, the warmth she always carried shining through her deep brown eyes.
And that feeling of walking this life alone softened when I remembered my faithful pound pup, Rupert—the weight of his furry head beneath my palm, the sight of him buckled into the front seat, howling along with me to Florence and the Machine while the wind whipped through our hair.
These memories—of the ones who shaped and molded me—fill me, and yet somehow leave me hollow at the same time. It can be unbearably painful to recall them all, and yet there is nothing quite like it to make me feel so deeply, fiercely alive.
Lately, I’ve found myself asking: Why does recalling what once was make me feel so alive now? Why does the grief bring me back into contact with my own pulse, my own breath, my own spirit?
And what comes to me, again and again, is this: it’s the truth of the infinite. The realness of the energy we all come from and return to. The more I sit with this knowing, the more it rearranges me. It re-teaches me how to see loss, how to feel it, and how to stay open in the middle of it.
Recently, much of my mental energy has been consumed by the grief of those still living—people who once loved me but have since chosen to step out of relationship with me. That kind of departure hurts in a different way, but it’s still a kind of death. The ache of their absence clings to my thoughts, looping through judgment and confusion, replaying all the ways it could’ve gone differently. But the more I return to the idea of the infinite, the more I realize: these are just thoughts. Stories I’ve let take up space inside me. The hurt, while real, is a visitor—not a tenant.
And perhaps that’s the lesson of grief, of memory, of communing with the unseen: we are not meant to carry it all. We are meant to be with it. To witness, to honor, to allow. And then to return, again and again, to life.
Because that’s what this practice is slowly revealing to me: the more I open the door to the unseen—to the ones I’ve lost, to the feelings I’ve buried, to the memories that ache—the more rooted in life I feel. The more connected to the current of energy that pulses through everything. The infinite isn’t some far-off place we go to when we die. It’s here, now. It’s in my breath. It’s in the wind. It’s in the sound of my grandfather’s voice echoing in my memory. It’s in Rupert’s howl and my mother’s eyes and the friends I’ve loved who no longer walk beside me.
To commune with the dead—those who have passed, and those who have simply moved in another direction—is to remember that I am never truly alone. I am always part of something greater, something whole. And that knowing, even when it breaks me open, is what brings me back to life.
From my heart,
Chelsea