Whenever someone reflexively says about someone who has just passed, “They’ll be alive in your memory,” a shudder of panic ripples through me. My memory, these days, is not something anyone should be relying upon. The dead are going to vanish, then, with the extra car key, the name of that woman from the kids’ soccer league who just said hello to me in the supermarket, and the reason why I just walked into the kitchen again. The dead are dust to be blown away amid the living’s forgetfulness. At best we’ll end up a photograph someone printed out long ago but no one remembers our name or our story anymore, “Who was this anyway? Does anyone know?” one of our descendants will ask the assembled kin.
I’ve had reason to go to a number of funerals recently and muse on our collective inability to know what to do in such moments. Even those ceremonies that are religious—the recited psalms, the mass said—feel vaguely hollow among the gathering of those of us, who, mostly for good reason, no longer accept or even believe in heaven or hell or know what to do with outmoded punitives ideas like salvation and damnation.
There is a wall of photographs of the decesased, sometimes a video of memories. Various friends and family share their remniscences, a favorite song is played, tears are shed and everyone files out solemnly to hug the living, eat some sandwiches, and feel a cold existential dread gaping withing them about their own inevitible departure and how quickly it will all be over—life, death, memory itself.
Except that a funeral or a memorial service need not be a hollow momemt to say good-bye but a transitional ritual to welcome this person into our lives from the other side and to figure out, communely, who this soul really is. The story of the soul is long and if that story continues to unfold in the lives of the living it will never be forgotten. After all the dead don’t really go anywhere, the dead aren’t really dead.
This is what it really means to become a “saint.” It means that we, when we pass, we continue to stay involved with the living and the living continue to recognize as active presences in their lives. More than a millennia ago a little girl died in a remote French village. She was playful, a bit of a prankster even, and after her demise people began to recognize signs of her presence among them. It wasn’t just that she answered their prayers, and she died, but it was how she answered them—how those answers arrived out of left field or like practical jokes even. They treasured this little girl, Foy, and eventually built her a cathedral in Conques and celebrated her. She didn’t live in their memories, she lived in their lives. (You can read a wonderful book about ther called Little Saint by Hannah Green.)
[the reliquary of St. Foy]
What if we gathered a year or a decade after someone died to share the stories of how this soul was showing up for us? What if we told their assembled kin about the miracles this person had worked for us? What if we could feel the experiential reality that love never dies? What if a funeral was an invitation to begin asking this soul for help? I mean, when I die? Please, call on me. I will want to be a matchmaker, a fertility helper, a pet counsel, a busybody, a problem solver. One of my favorite saints, who I work with every day is St. Zita. Almost a thousand years ago she was the housekeeper for a wealthy family but she was appalled, even then in the pre-Target middle ages, at how much extraneous stuff they had and so was always giving away their cloaks and shoes, their loaves of bread and pickled onions to the local poor. The family tried to fire her but she was so beloved that they couldn’t and just had to deal. Anyway, other than her radical generosity she was a great housekeeper and kept their place really clean, and well organized. Apparently she could find anything that was lost. Zita, Zita if you please, help me find my missing keys. I call on her daily to help me find all kinds of things that are lost—especially our lost ways fo working with the dead and the secret key to real immortality.
At my own funeral I hope people will pray for me in my next incarnation, that they will know that I want to be reborn to those who can recognize me for who I’ve been, and I hope, too, that they are beginning to imagine how I might be helpful to them from the other side.
Once upon a time we did not have pantheons of gods and goddesses, saints and angels, but simple ancestors, some very remote indeed. This ancient mother was a goddess of love, and this one would get the fire going in our hearth, and this one would make the winds blow right across the sea. The stories of these ancestors, what we call myths and folktales today, have endured because these ancestors were real for the people who told their stories. The dead were real to them.
At our funerals and memorial services let us tell our stories of who these people were but let us also prepare to tell stories of who they ARE now, still, and always. Let us imagine together how we might ask for the help of the dead and how we will recognize their particular miracles and magic.
As I often say, no one living is a saint (ie perfect, pure, beyond reproach) but ALL of the living can be saints—if we ask for their help and tell their stories.
Each and every one of us can bring the dead back to life because each and every one of us can bring the dead INTO our lives.
This has been my free substack. I also offer a paid subscription which includes a montly Zoom conversationg about working with the dead. The next one is March 17.
In April I will be teaching a four-session workshop Saints Alive! How a Team of Holy Helpers Can Transform Your Life. Find out more here and about all my offerings at takebackthemagic.com
Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of The Way of the Rose.
When my husband passed last spring we decided not to have a funeral at all but a celebration of his life and acknowledgement of his continuation in the subtle realms.
Just today, I was sitting by the Mississippi River listening to what the River and my ancestors wanted to tell me. My grandfather, with whom I was not especially close in life, wrapped me in the biggest hug and gave me this really clear guidance on how he could help me trace my way back to our old ways. And I definitely need some Saint Zita in my life. It would take a load off my husband having to keep track of my stuff all the time. I wonder what I will pray to Saint Perdita for...