The Hardest Part of Working with the Dead

(is also the easiest)

I know the dead are real because I experience them showing up everyday to make a difference in my life. Sometimes it means I can get a human being on the phone instead of an automated menu, sometimes it means the cat scan is finally clear, sometimes the estimate is exactly what we can manage financially, and sometimes I realize a seemingly intractable problem has, over the past weeks, resolved and vanished.

None of these examples is particularly spectacular.

I did not take a mind altering substance and have an encounter with the Mother. I did not have a visitation, an apparition, a sun-spinning in the sky miracle. I woke up in the morning, looked at the problems the day offered me and asked someone specific on the other side for help. I asked my father’s medical secretary Ruth Nelson to get an actual person on the other end of the line. I asked my friend’s father, a pulmonologist, Dr. Kravetz to help me with my lung nodule. I asked my dad Matthew to help me with my home renovation project. I have teams of the dead managing every aspect of my life. My body, my family, my home, my pets, my community, my work, my writing, my finances…everything.

I know the dead are real not because I’ve decided to accept some tenet or creed but because I experience them, each and every one, as utterly available and profoundly helpful.

But in order to experience that help I must first ASK for that help. And asking for help is the very hardest part of working with the dead. This is the simple part that so many of us resist.

Here’s the recipe for miracles. Identify a problem, a worry, a conundrum in your life. Hand it over to somone on the other side. Ask for help. Let time work its magic. Say thank you. Rinse. Repeat.

But we have been conditioned, since we were infants crying it out, NOT to ask for help. We want to be independent, self-sufficient, and resourceful. Of course we are not and so everyone feels more and more alone and stressed and anxious and overwhelmed. We may not feel worthy of love from the other side. We are terrified of being disappointed by the dead as we so often have been by the living. So we get handed yet another drug but not the solution to our problems. The dead are the solution to all the problems of the living.

But we have to begin by acknowledging our problems.

Start with your body. What’s worrying you today? Your knees, your blood pressure, the mole under your arm? Think about work. What feels tricky, hard, onerous? What about money? It’s important to think about what we want the money FOR…not just that we wish we had money so we don’t have to worry. That’s the economy of money not the ecomomy of prayer. Do you need money for a new car, a new roof, a vacation, a child’s summer camp? Know what you need. Name a number. What about your home and garden and community? What are the concerns and annoyances? What about your kids, your spouse, your parents, your siblings, and all of your familial relationships? Any sticky issues? What about your dreams and desires? What have you always wanted but no longer think is possible? What dreams have you forsaken? What prayers would you carry from one lifetime to another? What do most people want? Health, love, connection, purpose. Every soul is worthy of all of this.

You may note that there are no prayers here about spiritual perfection, esoteric purity and sacred wholeness, or even world peace or an end to war. Big abstract prayers call forth big abstract answers that we may, or probably maybe not, understand. Such prayers are a kind of busywork of the soul keeping us from actual life-changing encounters with the dead. The same with weekend workshops where we “have,” like good little capitalists, extra-ordinary experiences that we can turn into stories to amaze our friends at dinner parties. We don’t need to have an experience, we need to have a new relationship with the dead. A real relationship with the dead. An intimate relationship. A relationship with the dead that fundamentally changes our lives.

Keep it simple. Keep it real. Keep is specific and earthy and low to the ground. And ask someone specific on the other side to get the job done. That’s it. That’s the recipe for magic.

I’ll let you in on a secret about why this is so hard to do. And so hard to make a matter of everyday routine in our lives.

Because it CHANGES our lives. It changes who we think we are, what we’ve believed was possible, our entire relationship to what my daughter Sophie calls “the animate everything.” This is not a weekend miracle to tuck in our back pockets and pull out to amaze our friends…this is an entirely new experience of reality that will cause us to question everything about the world. And it’s easy to obtain. If we are ready to obtain it. If we can summon the courage to ask for real help.

We talked about this at length at Monthly Magic yesterday. I tasked everyone with giving someone on the other side a real job and seeing what might happen in the next month. I’m giving each of you that assignment too. See what happens. Let me know what happens. See what happens when you ask the dead for help day after day and year after year. You might become imbued with a kind of faith that will be a resource to others in days of challenge and despair. Ask for help and you will become the help someone else will one day need.

When the dead are real again the world will be alive again in an entirly new way. It will change you. I promise. But first you have to ask for help.

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Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mother Spell: Summoning 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.

Monthly Magic is a feature of my Paid Substack. It’s an opportunity for community and conversation around our experiences with the other side.