This entire article is about grief

I work with people who are experiencing intense grief a lot. This may sound cavalier, but it doesn't bother me much, because I'm used to it. I spent a significant amount of time at funerals when I was a kid, and I never understood what everyone was so upset about, because I'd still be able to feel the dead person around and hanging out...while everyone else was telling me the dead person was gone (and I'd be thinking "no, they're right here!"). So grief has always had another side of it: the stuff we can't see... but can feel if we try. Even if your grief isn't about death, there's probably some behind-the-scenes stuff going on that you're unaware of that are aligning to catapult you into a new phase of life. Personally, I went through an extreme grief process for a couple of years after my life explosion, and for me, the hardest part of it was that no one had died: my way of living was dead. If someone had died, I'd have been able to make peace with it, because I'd have been able to communicate with that person or those people and get a sense of their rationale for stuff they did in life. Plus, if someone had died, I'd have been able to justify my grief a little more easily. Instead, people continued to live but vanished from my life overnight, and that was difficult.

But the two griefs that are the hardest to reconcile for most people are the senseless deaths and the suicides, which is mostly what I'm talking about now.

Let's start with senseless deaths. I'll be clear: no one dropped a manual in my lap to explain the larger reasons things happen. I'm human like everyone else: I don't have a rationale behind senseless deaths in general. But I AM able to zero in on someone's lived experience and get answers to the larger reasons why chains of events are occurring when I do readings. Senseless deaths (and pick your tragic case, surely you've heard of a few catastrophic car accidents or bizarre stories of very young people who died from something improbable) tend to wake up the survivors, as well as the people on the periphery who knew the person but not terribly well. Really anyone whose life the deceased touched is fair game. In college, the chef who worked at the omelette station (quiet dude; communicated in nods of acknowledgment and minimal eye contact) died in a hunting accident, and I remember informing a classmate, who went through a series of intense emotions before my eyes when informed (by me) that the omelette guy died. A lot of dramatic life change can occur in lives of survivors, who decide to change the courses of their lives, devote themselves to causes, or do things to remember the lost loved one. Good can come out of these...eventually...once the overwhelming grief subsides. In the meantime, I can often feel the deceased around and (when I'm working with clients) hear them (basically I can hear them when I try to listen, which I am usually not doing because I am out living my life).

With suicides, here's the way I view it: the person who kills themself is in a lot of pain, makes a choice, and that is the last choice they can make. There are no other choices available to them to influence the human plane of existence, but then their pain transfers to SO MANY OTHER PEOPLE and only after they are dead are they able to see how their choice impacted others (said another way: they feel your feelings about what they did). So they tend to feel pretty bad about all of it, and then they tend to hang out around people like me who are sensitive and try to get messages across. Basically a suicide is like a bomb going off, and there's nothing someone like me can do to help the survivors until the dust has settled and the immediate wounds are tended to and people come out of shock. Usually people want to talk to me in the shock phase, and I mean, I'll have a normal human conversation about self-care with just about anyone, but I'm not doing mediumship (passing on messages from the dead) until the dust has settled, because the deceased is usually pretty upset and the living are VERY upset, and if you've ever been in a room with multiple hysterical people (alive or otherwise), it's a lot. I don't mind crying. I've had people cry through entire sessions. Doesn't bother me. Hysterical people aren't good listeners, though. That's why the dust needs to settle. Answers to "why" are useless if you can't hear them.

Even if I'm having a normal human conversation, though, I'm more open to the ethereal than the average person, so it happens sometimes that the deceased will show up and begin to influence my mood (I'm a feelings-first type of psychic) until I realize it and demand that they step back and stay out of my space. Sometimes it takes me a few hours to realize I have a hanger-on and I'll catch myself doing compulsive behaviors (this is my tell) and realize that not all of my feelings are actually my own and it's like solving a shitty mystery of why I feel terrible. Not all dead people have good manners, but suicides are consistently the most rough.

So, what can you do to help a lost loved one? Here's the advice I give everyone, in shock or grief or otherwise (regular death or otherwise): think loving feelings toward them. Wish them well on their next adventure and make it clear that you'll be okay without them in a LOVING way, like the vibe at the end of a tearjerker movie where people part knowing it's for the best (after all, you're here and they've moved on to other adventures). If you're not ready to do that last part, then just do the first part and work on getting to the place where you can do the last part.

But here's a twist: they visit *often.* They come frequently when called, too. If you're talking about them or thinking about them, they do show up and hang out. Personally, I don't want to bother the dead, figuring that they have better things to do than watch me make questionable decisions, but my grandmothers show up very frequently. So dead really does not mean gone.

The other day, I was leaving the locker room when the woman I swim with asked me about (this) work and said she wanted to make contact with her brother, who she talks about all the time. IMMEDIATELY, and I mean IMMEDIATELY, I felt him there: this very loving presence who wanted her to know he was there and he was fine. She intimated she was concerned about him and so I just said "oh, he's fine." But I didn't say "he's right here" or try to convey how I knew, because that tends to freak out the normal people. I wished I could take the feeling I had in my heart (from him) of peace and reassurance and port it directly into her heart, but I had to go do normal-person things and live my human life, which is an odd balance to try to strike…and a constant work in progress.

Love doesn't die.