one day this week, i found two ladybugs on my nightstand right before i fell asleep. TWO!!!! ladybugs are already lucky and i got *two*. then the next morning, my dead ex’s mom texted me out of the blue to send his and her love. if you try to tell me those two events are completely unrelated, i will have to (sheepishly) disagree with you.
i didn’t expect my ex’s death to solidify my belief in life after death so immediately and so firmly. before, i was like, sure i’m into the idea of ghosts and it’d be cool if we could talk to them. after, i was like, yeah i’m gonna need ghosts to be real and where is the nearest medium?
i want to acknowledge that i feel some shame about believing in life after death. i have an ivy league education, i love me some science, and i don’t believe in god, so i feel like i’m not allowed to believe in something ~woo woo~ like that.
but why do we judge people who believe in an afterlife? feels a lil colonialist if you ask me. is it really any different from believing the myth that capitalism is a meritocracy? there’s not much evidence for either, but widespread belief in one is CERTAINLY more dangerous than the other lol
and that’s the main reason why i’ve decided not to fight this urge to believe in life after death: who does it hurt if i sit in my apartment alone, talking to dead people? nobody. does it freak my neighbors out? maybe. do i care? not enough to stop.
it’s been 11 months now since my ex died. at this point, i know he’s not coming back. but during those first few weeks, my brain could not comprehend that this wasn’t just a temporary crisis. it’s like i thought we would all go through this agony for a little while, and then eventually he’d text me back and everything would go back to normal.
when i absolutely refused to accept that his death was permanent, my brain went to the next-best solution, which for me is some sort of dead-people-stick-around-as-spirits-or-something situation. i had to believe that if i talked to him he could hear it. that’s still what keeps the grief from driving me truly insane.
i’ve also really latched onto the idea that cardinals are signs from ~beyond the grave~. a few hours before i published my first blog post, i was eating lunch with some friends in the park, and a cardinal almost flew straight into us. it felt like he was saying, “i’ve been watching you waffle about this damn blog. please just do it.” intellectually, i know it doesn’t make sense to come to that specific conclusion from a set of coincidences, but it helped me do something i wanted to do anyway, so who cares?
another time, i saw a cardinal in that same park on a day when there were tons of people out on the lawn. it struck me then that that little bird carried a lot of meaning in that moment. i saw it as a hello from my ex or maybe my uncle or even my grandmother, but almost everyone else on that lawn could be thinking it was their ex or uncle or grandmother. and that kind of encapsulates the paradox of loss–it’s so personal but it’s also universal.
we’ll never know whether that cardinal was sent to that lawn at that time by a dead person, several dead people, god, or just a tiny little bird brain. sure, it’s probably the tiny little bird brain, but that’s no fun. why explain away the comfort people get when they sense communication from someone they desperately wish could un-die? don’t do that. just let the woo woo be. or even better…try it, you might like it 🙃