Within a number of cultural traditions, this is a liminal time of the year in which the living and the dead draw nearer together, even commingling across the expanse of time. In the natural world, this interplay abounds in this season. A single flower bursts with color as if it were mid-summer amidst the decaying and dried leaves of surrounding plants. Life and death together.
Walking through the Boston Common to reach the library where I now write, signs of life encircled me. A sea of festival tents being set up. A musician playing in the usual spot. Tourists huddled in groups beside a guide. Unseasonable warmth drawing others simply to be outside beneath the blue sky and colorful leaves.
Among all this life, I think of all those for whom death is inescapably present. I think of the families reeling in shock from a mass shooting in Maine, fearful with the shooter still at large. I think of Ukraine moving week by week into another winter of war. And I think of the immense suffering of grief and fear rooted in Israel and Gaza but with tendrils across the globe.
And last night I had dinner with my grandbaby who pursed her toddler lips to help her dad blow out the candles of his birthday cake. With a small ‘click’, the moment remains as a photo on my phone. Her abundant life remaining present even when she is absent.
So it is with so many of the dead–they remain present even in their absence. As a minister, I have counseled the newly bereaved to imagine making room for a house guest. Grief so often becomes a nearly tangible presence requiring space in our lives. In time, the presence of the dead may become less present in daily living, but still their presence remains. They remain present in us who remember them.
At times, the living and the dead flow into one another like a river into the surf of an ocean, a roiling swirl. In such times, may we allow both to be present in us. Such commingling of life and death is the world, the sacred truth, the divine mystery in which we live and move and experience our being. May we honor the presence and power of both within us.