The Dead Are Real, the Grief Endures

another installment in my resurrection revival series

God is change wrote Octavia Butler in The Parable of the Sower, but I’m not particularly concerned with deities of any kind. Nature is change is for me a more precise articulation of the dynamic mutability of the cosmos. Everything is always becoming, everything is always becoming something else—probably even gods. The Zen teacher Soen Nakagaw once wrote,

all beings are blossoms

blossoming

in a blossoming universe

But blossoming is first sprouting, cracking open and budding and is eventually fading and falling and rotting. Bodies are always changing, even the bodies of stones and rivers, planets and galaxies. The very idea of a still point of perfection, an Eden to return to or heaven to arrive at, sets itself against the cosmic dance. Bodies don’t go anywhere…the tree dies and becomes dirt out of which more forests grow…but bodies don’t stay the same either. Bodies are change.

As a parent I feel this acutely. Each of my children was so utterly themselves at the very moment of birth and yet each day they have become someone else. I sometimes imagine being able to time travel to rock the infant in my arms, to walk through the woods slowly hand in hand with the toddler, giggle with the six year old about jokes that never grow old, gossip with the tween about crushes and hair styles. But those bodies are gone even as my intimacy with these souls grows every deeper.

I woke up missing my best friend from college who. a few years after we graduated, died from AIDS. Justin was a gorgeous man, over six feet, a dancer’s long limbed elegence, Jamaican but sent to horrific British boarding schools where he acquired a posh veneer and real trauma. I can’t remember how we met but we were best friends instantly. I was a star actress on campus, he was an art critic for the school newspaper and wrote a wicked underground gossip column that everyone loved to read. I cast him in a play I directed, I became a recurring character in his writings. We made merciless fun of each other while simultaneously honoring each other’s ambitions. We both knew we really wanted to be writers. We both wanted wild romantic love. We went out dancing together every weekend, we set each other up again and again, we cuddled and watched old movies together on Sundays. He typed up a paper of mine and rewrote it and I was furious but got the point and rewrote it myself better. I got him to yoga class with me but we both giggled so much we were always getting in trouble.

I am writing about Justin because I loved him and he is gone and I woke up missing him, 36 years after his death, with such ferocity. That’s how it feels isn’t it? There is nothing we can do. This person is gone. How often have I felt this? We don’t stop missing the ones we love….that loss grows more precise, drilling itself ever deeper into our hearts.

After graduation I got married to the wrong person and moved to Washington D.C. where Justin’s mother lived and where he arrived just after his diagnosis. He’d spent a year flying around the world as a Pan Am steward, a terrible job, mostly stuck in the terrifying hull of the plane warming up crappy food in a microwave, that nevertheless gave him great material for the novel he was working on. But now, he had to be honest that he couldn’t write that book anymore. It no longer mattered. He had to admit that he hadn’t found love and never would. That year I got so used to his dying that I forgot that one day he would be dead. We were supposed to go see Joan Armatrading together but he was adnitted to the hospital again with pneumonia this time. I tried to get him her autograph, watiing at the stage door for hours, and failed. I felt like I’d failed him as a friend. I couldn’t heal him. I couldn’t give him what he wanted. He died that night. I left my husband and Washington soon after, serious about becoming a writer at last. I only have this one photo of him, taken by a college artist. It breaks my heart.

But I met Justin again, in another body, an unfamiliar body and a very familiar soul. But all so different, so strange that when I tell you this story you will hardly believe it. I hardly believe it. But then the dead don’t need us to believe in them; they only need us to ask for their help.

I moved to New York, got married to my beloved, had kids, wrote books, rescued too many animals, and lived my life. My daughter, after college, came home because she was very sick and uncertain how to make her way in the world. As parents we were very worried. One summer day after graduation we walked up our long driveway headed to the mountain for a hike. Unexpectedly we noticed one of our cats following us and I went to shoo him back towards the house.

Sabushi, a sleek gray cat, had originally been named Sebastian but as cat lovers know, cats have many names that are always mutating. Sabushi was a big personality, a dandy even, with a little white ascot, and a particularly dramatic feline grace. We joked that he was always modeling on a runway, but he was exceptionally sweet and would hurl himself into your arms any moment you sat down. He was also a traveler who would go on long walkabouts that terrified us because, of course, the traffic on the road.

I will never forget the moment on the driveway when Sabushi’s eyes met mine defiantly. He wasn’t going to head back towards the house like he usually did when I told him to. He was unexpectedly defiant. After this instant of strange hard staring, in which I saw a consciousness bigger and stranger than I knew, he darted past me and my daughter into the road whereupon a car instantly hit him and flung his body into the air.

We screamed and my daughter raced to him, cradling him in her arms as he seized, bled all over her, and died. She howled and howled, rocking back and forth in the center of the road, his heart against her heart. The expression on her face when she at last stood up was bottomless with sorrow. Some days later, after we had filled the house with flowers, endured the keening of Sabushi’s sister who walked around our property yowling for 24 hours, and buried him at the edge of the forest, only then did Sophie tell me what she had experienced in the middle of the road holding this cat’s body.

She had witnessed a whole universe of sorrow that she knew had never been adequately represented or understood. She knew that no one knew what they were looking at when they saw the Pieta. They felt the truth of some vast and mysterious anguish but the story was all wrong. She was going to rewrite that story, tell it right, and she began almost instantly to work on what would become her extraordinary novel The Madonna Secret, a book that put romantic sexual love back into the gospels.

She pays tribute to Sabushi in her acknowledgements who she felt gave his life to crack her open, envision her book, and start her career.

The flowers wilted and I brought them out into the woods. The dirt above Sabushi’s grave settled and weeds took root. I was missing something and I knew it, and as I do I asked the dead, Sabushi particularly, for help. What was I missing? Check the day, I heard him say. The days we die and are born are so often tells. So are names, of course, and all manner of intimate personal details. I can’t tell you how I really knew at that moment but I did. I hadn’t seen it until he was gone.

Sabushi sacrificed himself on the same exact day that Justin did. Sabushi originally called Sebastian, St. Sebastian a gay icon who became especially recognized as an lgbtq martyr during the AIDS crisis.

Justin and Sebastian, two wildly different bodies and incarnational beings, one umwelt, one soul sensation. And I miss them both. Justin never got to be, in those lives at least, the writer he dreamed of being. But so often with the dead, our disappointments and failures, fuel our gifts and our treasures. One saw me as I really was and helped me become the writer I wanted to be. One helped Sophie step into her full power as an author.

We all come back. Again and again. But we come back different. Often recognizable. But different. One body becomes another body. An infant, a toddler, a teen, an old man with no hair. Bodies become different bodies. A human, a cat, a tree, a galaxy, a star. Our hearts ache for all that we have lost, and they never stop aching, but that ache guides us towars love and all kinds of unexpected reunions.

We do get to hold our toddlers as toddlers again. We do get to gossip with old friends again at the end of a long boozy night. We do get to say the things we never got to say. In other lives. In other lives. There is always enough time for love.

Last night at a rosary circle I was thinking about the mysteries of love and how risky it is to dare to love because we know just how much our hearts will ache one day. We will all lose everyone we love. Everyone without exception will die.

But if we love, we have what we need to find each other again. Love is the magnet that draws us back to each other.

Risk love and the long story of our souls will become real. But the long story never protects us from grief. Behind us are ten thousand times ten thousand Edens to which we will never return. Before us are ten thousand more that we can step into the moment we open our hearts.

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mother Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of The Way of the Rose and the co-author of the book of the same name.

She teaches popular workshops on collaborating with the other side. She’ll be teaching online with the Shift Network this summer (Holy Helpers: How an Ancestral Team Can Transform Our Lives), in person (at last!) at Omega in August (Ancestral Magic) and at Kripalu in November (Mother Magic.) She’ll be offering a full slate of online workshops in 2026.