Thinning the Veil: Memorial Sunday
This is a story I very rarely tell. I don’t tell it because most people I know won’t believe me or won’t believe that this story means anything. Those who do believe me might get some thrill from the spookiness which isn’t really the point of the story either, so, I don’t usually tell it. I am, after all, a rational person, a person who loves science, who doesn’t generally bother with things that can’t be investigated and proven. But, I’m telling the story anyway, because what happened was real, even if I don’t know or can’t prove anything about what it meant if it meant anything at all.
In February of 2004, my grandmother, with whom I was quite close, collapsed. She was 87 and had a leaky valve in her heart. After a few days at the hospital, she went home where she entered hospice. For the next 6 weeks we all spent time with her. At first it was with the force of a crisis with everyone flying down at once, filling her living room with four generations of us. When it seemed clear death wasn’t actually immanent, my mother and her brother took turns living in my grandmother’s Floridian apartment with her as she moved slowly toward the end. They slept in the bed next to her, held her shrinking body, reminded her of the long life she lived and, as was normal for my grandmother, they – and we – laughed quite a lot. It was a very sad, but also sweet and beautiful time for our family.
One night, when I was asleep in my bed in New York, I awoke because I couldn’t breathe. I sat straight up, desperately gasping for air. There was none. Absolutely none. I couldn’t open my throat enough for even a wisp of air. I was terrified. I wasn’t making a sound- no air was going in or out. My head was spinning, trying to figure out what to do, knowing I didn’t have long before I’d pass out. More and more desperately, I kept trying to get some air into my lungs. Finally, something released and I could get a thin breath in. And another. And my body relaxed and opened and more air could move in. Now I was breathing. In and out. Oxygen was again available. My heart began to slow. The panic subsiding. I looked at the clock. 2:36. I went back to sleep.
At 4am the phone rang. It was my mother, sobbing. My grandmother had died. She apologized for calling so early, but said she’d waited a while and didn’t want to wait any more. I asked her how long she waited to call, when did grandma die. My mother said, “It was about 2:30 when she drew her last breath.”
I can’t explain what happened to me that night, nor am I going to try. Nothing like that has happened to me since or had it ever happened before. Were these things- my grandmother’s death and my inability to breath – were they related, or am I drawing conclusions from an odd coincidence? Was my grandmother’s final breath somehow felt by me, was I connecting to her or she to me as we were both seeking air? Was I experiencing her last breath? Was my breathing, was my life, tethered to hers? I don’t know, but I find my own rationalism to be a little limiting
sometimes. I can dismiss real experiences because I don’t think they are logical or because I can’t explain them scientifically. Were I listening to someone else tell that story, I might let my skepticism get the better of me, but I’m the one who lived it and it was very real. I try not to explain. I don’t have anything to say that would ease my rational brain.
Interestingly, though, the few times I’ve told that story, someone has replied with a parallel story. Others have had that or a similar experience when a beloved has died. I’m not the only one who may have touched the veil between life and death.
At this time of year, we start to feel the layers between worlds thinning. Samhain (sow-in) is the Celtic, pagan holiday we’re marking this week. Samhain literally means the end of summer. It is the time we shift from warmth to the cold of winter. It is the time of year the leaves fall and decompose into Earth which opens the space between dimensions. The presence of death, of so much plant matter moving between the worlds, the sudden loss of leaves that filled the space around us, conspire to thin the veil, bringing the two worlds of life and death closer. This is the pagan pre-curser to Halloween when the spirits could move more freely in and out. This is the time a breath breathed here might be felt in the next world.
Halloween is fun, but the theme is supposed to invoke fear. Horror films, blood and gore, scream-fests, chokie-rooms, haunted houses- they’re all designed with the idea that this thinning of the veil is frightening. I’m not critiquing any of that. It’s fun to be scared in that way, sort of cathartic. And dressing up in a come-as-you’re-not costume, walking through dry-ice-fog with sounds of a crazed clown laughing or a ghoul howling while you knock on strangers doors seeking candy is a great way to spend an evening.
Outside the holiday trappings, though, the presupposition is that this time of year, this thinning of the veil, this closeness of the other world is frightening. Or, maybe that it should be. I don’t experience it that way, though. The other world, the world of the dead, is home to my grandmother. My father is there, too, both people who loved me infinity. The other world feels friendly to me. There’s love there too. My people are there. People I miss terribly, people I wish I could talk with, or sit with, whose voices I want in my ears, whose hands I want to hold, whose advice I want to seek, whose food I want to eat. For me, the thinning of the veil is akin to feeling closer to someone I can’t see, because I know they are right there, on the other side, feeling my breath each time I exhale.
The walls will get thicker again. We’ll move back, away, the worlds will separate and we’ll be left here without our beloveds. Our grief will return, as it always does. We will again forget and remember we forgot and feel guilty and relieved and sad all over again. Even in this liminal space of feeling closer to those we’ve lost, we’ve still lost them. They are not here, even if we catch a whiff of their perfume or hear a laugh that brings us right back to some delightful moment. They are not here. They can’t see how we’ve grown or be proud of some accomplishment or accept our apology, or simply accompany us in our lives the way they once did.
Mourning is supposed to be temporary, but there’s a way in which it is constant or that it comes and goes in waves, washing over us and then away, even as time passes with the turning
of months to years to decades. It is no matter in the world of grief and longing. Time moves differently making the past feel very present and then so distant again.
Late October, early November offer us a gift of liminal space where the distance of death, the distance of love lost diminishes. People around the world are gathering in circles, are calling to their loved ones, are ritualizing their longing and the sharing of this space before the veil becomes a wall again.
Br. Zachary and I would like to welcome you to our own ritual of fire. During this time of the thinning of the veil, we are writing the names of the people we’ve loved and lost and we are casting those names into a flash as a way of calling them forth while also letting them go. We are bringing them into our space, remembering them, calling to them. And we are using the element of fire to send our love and our longing and our memory into this liminal time so they can hear and see us. We are remembering. The cleansing power of fire, the element of passion, of connection, will be our catalyst, bridging the space between here and there.
