I think we have become very confused about death. Part of our confusion has to do with metaphors of possession. That, for example, people or relationships are possessions that can be lost. I suspect this is only superficially true, and that this surface image hides something far more profound and beautiful.

I have come to understand that the death of one known or loved is a gift. That is to say it is the sudden and profound bestowal of abundances whose forms and aspects find no likeness in our languages. We are invited into intimacies that defy time, culture, language, blood, even species. And hidden within this invitation like a spiraline blessing whose signature is at once infinitely delicate and thunderously glorious is the actual gift: being together. Mutuality as is possible so rarely in our lives. The string of time draws tight, we notice, and reply. And in so doing are remade.

And we receive the gifts I cannot name, but whose natures are exquisite and venerable, truthful and profound. These are the myriad streams of grace bequeathed at death.

And the ‘inheritances’ we celebrate in law and culture are the replacement of this gift. We are told these are to be consolations for loss, but how can they console the entire theft of the gift of death? How can they restore to us what we must be present in our own lives, hearts and minds to receive? No human idea or law is stronger than death; and no inheritance humans may guarantee has anything to do with the gifts of death, which are, indeed, the fruits of lives loved and lived, and special gifts bestowed to faithful companions at the veil…

I think at death there is a sort of soul festival. Where all the abundances of the ancestors and the progeny are pooled and shared. The forms this may take are far beyond my meager words or metaphors to convey. They are beyond all language, and with good reason.

For who amongst us would receive the skeleton of the agreement rather than taste the living ecstasy of the kiss? Who would trade the power to dispose of a memory for the experiences that were its living body?

Almost everyone, apparently.

But maybe not forever.

Maybe not forever.