Overcoming Fear of Death by Contact with the Departed
Fear of Death
Death was a scary theme in my family. Here’s how I moved through the fear and found more connection with the afterlife than I ever could have imagined.
I loved my dad. He was a Jewish trickster who took joy in revealing the wonders of nature to everyone around him. He captivated family and friends with his enthusiasm and ingenuity. Sadly, he had a way of stretching the truth that hurt him as much as us. I was 16 when my dad died. Even though he hadn’t lived with us since I was 8, our connection was deep. When I was older, I saw that, back then, I had flown to him in spirit to try to save him. His suicide tore my psyche. I felt shredded, numb and depressed. Soon suicidal thoughts of my own haunted me and I realized I had to choose. I made an inner decision saying, “Yes” to life and stepped onto the inner path when I was 18.
Four years after my dad’s tragic death, my grandmother died of more natural causes. I dreamed of colored bones and felt at peace.
I had recently discovered the Tibetan Buddhist teachings around death and dying when my mom phoned to say she had a late stage cancer diagnosis. I was 37. Her wish was to die at home and I stayed with her in her apartment for those last 10 days. She was an avowed atheist and had raised me as such. To my mom and her circle, believing in God or the afterlife or the unity of Love with All — well, they saw it as a weakness. She had chosen the tangible solidity of scientific materialism as her paradigm. From the time I left home at 17, I had sought experiences to help me let go of that patterning which I found so soul destroying. For a few years I devoted myself to a spiritual commune and after that, in 1989 became a lifelong student of the Diamond Approach path to inner realization.
I had an inner practice and the beginnings of a map to guide me. My mom’s situation was grim and our relationship on shaky ground. Along with our history, I brought acceptance and loving kindness to her bedside. Our eyes met at one point and intuitively I sensed we both knew we couldn’t fix all that had happened between us, but we could and we did make the most of the short time we had together. I tried to help her put her affairs in order and she enjoyed a couple of meals I cooked for her, under her direction.
It looked to me like my mom died in fear, without a belief beyond material existence. I wasn’t with my dad when he died and I was grateful to be there with my mom, as scary as it was for me too. Even so, I was curious about her spirit and what she might experience if she were even a little bit aware of her journey but sensed nothing from her then.
Can we talk with the departed?
Cheryl Strayed: You feel like the dead talk to you?
Margaret Atwood: Well I feel like, if you’re a writer, they’ve been talking to you all your life…
— Sugar Calling, ‘Roll Up Your Sleeves, Girls’, podcast, April 7, 2020
Now I’m in my early 60’s, almost as old as my mom was at her death. Every so often I sense her and my dad at my back offering me support as loving light. Their presence feels clarified and light.
In January of 2016, spontaneously, I began to receive contact from individuals, recently dead. So far, all have been part of a social circle or community of which I’m part, though most of them I never met in life. Each experience has been distinct and shown me how we can give and receive support and touch each other across the Great Divide. Sometimes I’m offering, sometimes I’m receiving and sometimes there’s a reciprocal flow. All of it has been loving and generative. Communicating with souls who have died typically leaves me feeling inspired, awakened in a way and blessed.
My neighbor’s friend, who had just died, contacted me. I recognized him as an expansive gossamer presence of light descending into my field of awareness, from the top of my head down. He shared his love and his loss and asked me to pass a message to his wife. More often than asking to pass messages, in my experience, they seem to need solace, compassion and perspective — or sometimes someone offers to teach me something.
At the time and when I truly tap into that experience with my neighbor’s friend, I feel a sense of blessing. It also freaked me out. A few hours after the contact, my body sort of convulsed in a painful knot — the shock of my unconscious resistance and all our social taboos around death coming up against the reality of eternal life. Teachers and friends in my Diamond Approach community helped me explore, understand and relax about it. It’s an ongoing process. As the experiences continued, I wanted to talk about them more widely, but also felt inhibited.
What do people think?
Probably for as long as humans have been around, across cultures, some of us have reported contacts with the deceased. The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research archive offers that on average since 1944 70% of Americans believe in an afterlife, while over more recent decades approximately 20% believe in contact with the dead. According to Project Canada Surveys in Partnership with Angus Reid (2018), 66% of Canadians believe in life after death and 42% believe we can communicate with the dead. Clearly it’s more radical to claim to have had an exchange with a recently departed person than to generally believe in the afterlife.
Naturally, I felt a little shy at first and yet I did start sharing more widely. These contacts I’m having with the departed have qualities of preciousness and grace that I didn’t and don’t want to spoil. Going slow, being cautious and sensitive to others’ beliefs and responses to my experiences helped. Everyone I shared with encouraged me and I felt seen and met. It turned out some of my friends also have had such experiences and they thanked me for starting the conversation. Others said I helped them open up to having contacts with loved ones who have died. I’m glad I took the risk and now here I am sharing my story with you. It feels good.
Advice for conversations with the departed
These experiences of communication with people who have died are arising naturally, and while I’m open to them, I’m not asking for them like a medium might. They’re arising out of a lived exploration that is at the heart of my spiritual practice.
Some cautions I would like to share:
There’s a risk of getting inundated with too much emotional and psychic content. Guard against getting ungrounded. Pace yourself. For me, from the beginning, I’ve felt lucky because I feel confident about having a choice to engage or not. If I’m tired, I let the soul know and we work out another time to meet. If I need to focus more on my own personal development for awhile, I’ll take a break, even for months at a time, from having any contacts at all.
There’s no way to disprove these kinds of experiences. But there’s no way to prove them either, which makes it easy to fall into fantasizing, glamorizing or distorting. I attempt to be entirely present and attentive to the experience itself while it’s happening, without embellishing, interpreting or analyzing. The sooner I journal, the easier it is for me to maintain fidelity of description. I have learned that contacts with some souls are simply more amorphous than with others and not to add my suppositions. Sometimes, contact is so clear we are having a conversation with words.
Gratitude and transformation
I feel deep gratitude to the founder of the Diamond Approach path A.H. Almaas’s, example of openness to experiences of all kinds, including with those who have physically died; to all my teachers and guides, seen and unseen; and to how I’ve opened and integrated on my own inner journey in this lifetime. I feel a creative dynamism guiding me and opening me to experiencing the potential of continuing to awaken, even in death.
Having these experiences and increasingly so in the past few years has completely changed my feelings about death itself. I was terrified of death and I thought of physical death as a final defeat. Now I see physical death as a major transition, with the soul’s life continuing and having the possibility to continue to have insights, realizations and awakenings.
