3 Truths That Will Change How You View Death
My grandfather died when I was two. The memories I have of him are from long after he’d died: I remember his smiling face in the portrait that hung in my grandmother’s hallway and I laugh at stories my aunts and uncles told as they reminisced over beers every summer. While I could recognize my grandfather’s face in a crowd, I can’t tell you the timbre of his voice, the scent of his aftershave, or the nature of his laugh. My Grandpa Kirk exists as a joyful ghost I’ve yet to meet.
I mean that literally: From the time of his death until that of his wife, roughly thirty years later, my grandpa visited my grandma at night. The last time I saw Grandma Anne alive, she told me she’d been having conversations with him for years. “When I’m troubled or trying to fix a family issue, he comes. He sits on the edge of my bed and we talk until we figure it out.”
This was the second lesson my grandma taught me about death: It doesn’t always mean the end of contact with the living.
Grandma Anne’s first lesson on death came when I was a teenager. There was a summer, right around eleventh grade, when I obsessed over old horror movies. I saw The Exorcist for the first time — alone in my dark bedroom — and was too terrified to finish the franchise. When I told my grandma about my fear of watching exorcisms alone (we were rosary-praying…
