LQD – AL’s personal talk
If we talk about ‘life after death’, the words that come earlier in the
sentence tend to be ‘Do you believe in…?’. But, for me, it isn’t about
belief– it’s more about how things have unfolded.
When I was a child, I had what now feels a rather odd experience of
religion. My Anglican parents were a bit remote, my mother somewhat
domineering, and I spent much of my time at a Methodist boarding
school. I absorbed the language of the Bible, and the wonderful music of
Methodism. Notions of heaven and hell came rolling in on waves of creeds
and hymns. ‘How dread are Thy eternal years / O Everlasting Lord / by
prostrate spirits day and night / incessantly adored’. That sounded pretty
uncomfortable and boring. ‘He descended into hell, and on the third day
he rose again’, or ‘he shall come again to judge both the quick and the
dead.’ I simply didn’t understand that.
So when as a young adult I found Quakers, I found the stillness quite
wonderful. No need to worry about the words. I saw that questions about
life and death aren’t there to be answered, but to be lived with. The family
I married into seemed to assumed that everything physical had a spiritual
reality as well – they’d developed this partly through being Quakers and
partly from the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. When my mother-in-law
winced with pain, she’d brush away our sympathy and say, ‘Don’t worry
about this’ – her body – ‘it’s only an old overcoat’, and I accepted it with a
kind of puzzled astonishment.
Then my first child was born, and when I first looked at her, my
immediate thought was: ‘She’s not new. She’s come from somewhere.’
Only afterwards did I realise that this was what Wordsworth described:
‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
1
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar…
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home…’
What did it mean? I had no idea. As the years went by, I believed less and
less in a ‘God Figure out there’. But that didn’t diminish the impact of
what I’d seen in my daughter’s newly born face. I didn’t argue with it, just
lived with it.
Then came death. My parents died, my father two years after my mother,
when my two children were quite young – when I was relatively young
myself. Though, as I say, I wasn’t close to either of them, and my
mother’s death was in a sense a relief, the absoluteness of their
disappearance had a profound effect on me. It helped me to know,
inwardly, fully, that death is a part of life that is both intimate and
inevitable, and not something to be fended off and prevented.
Yet I also railed at death too. When first one close friend and then another
died, suddenly and too early, and gave me no sign that they’d survive or
come back to me in spiritual form, I found it very, very difficult.
Once, I was in a local discussion group between religious people and
humanists. The humanists were quite certain that death was an absolute
end, and what impressed me was that they seemed much happier about
death, much readier to face it, than many of the religious people there.
During the period after my parents’ death and while my children were
busily growing up, a woman called Jane Sherwood joined my local Quaker
meeting. I and my in-laws and other Friends talked with her a great deal.
She was very old by this time, and profoundly deaf, but her mind was
2
undimmed and she talked about her experiences and the books she had
written about them.
During the First World War, Jane married a man she greatly loved, and he
was reported ‘missing, presumed killed.’ This uncertainty was unbearable
to her, and she went to the War Office to try and find out whether he was
actually dead. They couldn’t help her. So she went to a small cottage in a
remote part of Wales and, as she put it, ‘tried to get round the other way’.
She had paper and pen, and let her hand rest on the paper with the pen
poised. She focussed on her love for her husband, and allowed writing to
‘come through’. Various people who had died – strangers, and public
people she’d heard of – came through to her and told their stories of what
happened after they’d died. Eventually, her husband did make contact.
If this seems crazy, or extremely imaginative, I can only say that Jane
Sherwood was one of the sanest people I’ve ever met. She had remarried, raised a family, worked professionally and been an active
member of various Quaker Meetings. She wrote not only about those
experiences, but also about how to prepare for death. All her writing is
informed by the conviction that the soul continues after death and
receives guidance from more advanced spiritual beings, so as to be healed
both for its own sake and for the sake of those who are still living. Here is
a paragraph from Peter’s Gate, one of several of her books that have been
reissued in recent years:
‘If we have uneasy memories, we [can] give serious thought to
reconciliation with those [dead] friends we can still reach… Our
response should be not a useless remorse but an effort to deal with
our side of the problem. That friend is still in existence… If we can
adjust our attitude, admit our fault with sorrow, our repentance and
desire to make amends will not be wasted.’
3
Many years later, I had a key experience of this sort of healing. You’ll
remember my poor relationship with my mother, and her relatively early
death. More than twenty years after she died, when I’d been doing a piece
of work that related to some of the problems between us, I woke in the
early hours and was aware of her presence on my right hand side, and
she said, ‘Forgive me’.
These small physical details – that she was on my right hand side, and
that she said not ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I was wrong’ but ‘Forgive me’, seem
significant. On the other hand, if I’d had a tape-recorder and could have
pressed the button, I don’t think her words would have registered. You
may well say to me, ‘But Alison, that was just your imagination’. I’m
happy about that. Our imaginations may sometimes deceive us, but they
can also give us a way of seeing things that are beyond our capacity to
perceive with our physical senses. Physics shows us, via macro and micro
technology, things that are beyond the capacity of our normal senses. I’m
happy to believe, with Hamlet, that ‘there are more things in heaven and
earth than are dreamt of’ in our present philosophy.
The test may be whether these things change us. This experience changed
my attitude to my mother. I’m no longer sneery when I refer to her. My
memories of her are kinder and more gentle. I can see ‘where she was
coming from’, as they say. I think that’s the sort of healing that Jane
Sherwood was writing about, only in my case the initiative came from ‘the
other side’.
During the last fifteen years I’ve been exploring other spiritual paths. For
instance, the pagan way of seeing things. I love earth-based spirituality –
the idea that we humans are part of the natural world rather than set
above it. I especially love the physicality of its attitude to death. Death is
an integral part of the natural cycle of birth, growth, decline, death, decay
and regeneration.
‘We all come from the goddess
4
And to her we shall return
Like a drop of rain…
Flowing to the ocean – ’
… This is an image which I’ve also come across in the spiritual writings of
the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn: ‘The wave might think
that before its birth it was not there and that after its death it will not be
there, but these are notions – concepts – that cannot be applied in the
dimension of the ultimate.’
I’m particularly drawn to the shamanic world view. The way of the
shaman was originally practised in cultures that are so different from ours
that it’s difficult for us to understand it. My limited grasp of it goes like
this: a shaman is a ‘wounded healer’ for her or his community, and goes
into the world of suffering and death, imaginatively or in trance, to bring
back an increased capacity to understand and to heal. Caitlin Matthews
has run courses on the shamanic way at Woodbrooke, the Quaker Centre
in Birmingham, and her view is that we can go into the spiritual world in
our imaginations – we can speak spiritually when physical communication
isn’t possible – and if we embrace death, then it helps us to live. This
seems to me to connect with the ‘soul midwifery’ that Hazel was talking
about, and is echoed in the Quaker advice Jill has quoted: ‘Accepting the
fact of death, we are freed to live more fully.’
If some of this seems to you whacky, hippy, crazy or whatever – well, it
does to me too. But it also speaks to me, deeply. I don’t know why, but
I’m prepared to hold it in part of my consciousness while I live an
ordinary, busy life. I bring it into my Quaker way of being – being still and
quiet with it, living its questions. I don’t argue any more – I simply allow
myself to exist with it in the same space.
To return to those friends who died too early for me. Both of them, in
recent years, have returned to me and become a warm and friendly part
of my inner world. One has come through my friendship with her
5
daughters, who tell me that even though she died during their childhood,
they’ve felt her looking after them. The other is simply good fun – I can
hear his jokes, enjoy his wry look at the variety and colour and general
dottiness of so much of this world.
While I’ve been drafting this talk, I become aware that one of the
recurrent themes is healing. Each of us – our whole world – is so much in
need of healing. It may be that if we renew our faith in death as a part of
life, rather than fearing it – if we can include death in the entirety of our
consciousness, and love each other in the light of death, each of us, in
whatever way is right, individually, on our path separately and together,
in and through and out of this physical life, then we will be open to more
ways of healing than we could otherwise dream of.
Alison Leonard.
1836 words.
6