Death, Ritual and the Echoes we Carry

17 Jul

At my mother's funeral I said something that, if I'm honest, I wasn't yet sure I fully believed.

Towards the end of the eulogy, after trying to describe a woman who was endlessly loving, endlessly difficult, endlessly generous and endlessly contradictory, I found myself saying that, as a father and an adult, I had come to realise she wanted me to be me; to take control of my life and live it in the best way I could. I encouraged everyone gathered there to "smell those roses and be the light to cast out the shadows."

Those words came naturally enough, but they have taken another two years to become true. That surprises me, because I thought the funeral was the end of something. Increasingly, I think it was the beginning.

My mother would not approve of me writing publicly about our relationship. For most of my life, that thought alone would have been enough to stop me. Yet here I am, writing anyway - not because I love her less or because I wish to expose anything private, but because I have slowly come to realise that becoming fully myself may be one of the deepest ways I can honour her.

There is something profoundly different about living under the imagined gaze of someone we love and living with the internal values they leave behind. I no longer feel governed by the mother I feared disappointing. Instead, I increasingly find myself guided by the mother who wanted me to live honestly, love deeply, serve others well and become the best husband and father I could be.

Choosing to sit beside my mother as she died remains one of the most intimate experiences of my life. There are moments that seem almost impossible to describe because language struggles to keep pace with them. Watching someone take their final breath is one of those moments. Time changes. The room becomes quieter than silence. I became aware that I had been holding her hand before she passed and continued to hold it after her last breath…what was the difference in what I was holding?

Then, almost immediately, life asks something of those left behind. There are phone calls to make, forms to complete, registrars to meet, funeral directors to speak with, wills to administer and endless practical decisions that seem strangely out of place alongside the enormity of what has just happened. Looking back, I wonder whether all that structure quietly carried me while my heart had not yet caught up with reality.

Perhaps that is one reason why Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's work has resonated with so many people. Whether or not grief unfolds in recognisable stages is almost beside the point. Models can provide a temporary scaffold when life has lost its shape. They don't remove grief, but they can help us keep putting one foot in front of the other until we are able to feel what has happened. Death happened. I don't think grief had yet begun. That came later.

The funeral was profoundly different. We honoured Mum's wishes, but we also found ourselves creating something we needed ourselves. There were eulogies, choral music and song, flowers, food, whisky, family and friends. There was laughter alongside tears, stories alongside silence. We were simply surrounded by people whose lives had also been touched by hers. Looking back now, I realise that funerals are not only about honouring the dead. They also protect the living. They gather a community around a loss that no individual should be expected to carry alone. Death is often intensely private. Grief, I have come to believe, needs somewhere to go.

Synchronistically, a few months before mum died, I had done some training through our Reiki community as a Soul Midwife, although at the time I had little idea how important that experience would become. The Soul Midwife approach describes dying as a gradual movement through the elements of Earth, Water, Fire and Air, each bringing its own physical, emotional and spiritual qualities and each asking something slightly different of those accompanying the dying person.

What mattered wasn't whether my mum moved neatly through those stages - she didn't - but that the model invited me to pay attention rather than panic, to accompany rather than fix, and to appreciate that dying, much like birth, is a profound transition rather than simply a medical event. It also struck me how naturally this resonated with the Elements model I already use clinically. Different traditions, different languages, yet all quietly pointing towards the same invitation: stay present, listen carefully and bear witness to what is unfolding.

Reiki formed another thread running through our relationship. We trained together and shared a community that became deeply important to both of us. Its principles have gradually become less like spiritual instructions and more like echoes of my mother's voice: Just for today, do not anger. Do not worry. Live your life honestly. Honour your parents, teachers and elders. Show gratitude to every living thing.

For many years I thought what I carried from Mum were her expectations, her criticisms and the impossible standards I imagined she held for me. Therapy - and perhaps grief itself - has gently rearranged that internal landscape. What has remained are not the fears but the values. Her generosity. Her encouragement. Her belief that life was for living fully. Her desire that I should become my own man rather than spend my life seeking her approval.

Psychotherapy had already begun changing my relationship with Mum long before she died. Margaret Mahler's work on separation and individuation, together with Gareth Hill's understanding of psychological development, had helped me appreciate that loving someone and becoming psychologically separate from them are not opposing tasks. They are often the same task. Her death did not create my freedom. It completed a process that had already begun. There is a profound difference between rejecting a parent and integrating them. I have no desire to erase my mother from my life. Quite the opposite. I simply want to carry forward those parts of her that gave life - to me, to my family and, I hope, to the people I now work with.

That is one reason why the phrase I first heard through The Unmasked Man has stayed with me. They describe grief as a gateway emotion, and I think there is considerable wisdom in that. We spend enormous energy trying not to feel grief because we imagine it will overwhelm us forever. Sometimes it does overwhelm us, at least for a time. Yet when grief is accompanied well - by family, by friends, by therapists, by ritual, by community - it also opens something.

Francis Weller reminds us that grief belongs to the village as much as the individual. Martín Prechtel writes of grief as something that nourishes life rather than opposes it. Darian Leader argues that mourning is not about letting go but about transforming our continuing relationship with those we have loved. Reading these writers has not replaced my own experience, but it has helped me recognise that my experience is not unusual. The relationship continues. Only differently.

One of the beliefs I now hold, though I recognise others may describe it differently, is that when someone dies, they leave echoes within us. We experience them in memory, certainly, but also in our bodies, in the smells that unexpectedly transport us, in Wimbledon appearing on the television, in the scent of English roses blooming in a summer garden, in the music they loved, in the values that quietly shape our decisions. Some might call these memories, others conditioning, attachment or even trauma. Whatever language we choose, something is awakened by loss. We either drown in that awakening, or we gradually learn to rise through it.

Two years after my mother's funeral, I still miss her. I still think of her often, and there are days when grief sits heavily beside me. Yet the greatest surprise has not been that the grief has disappeared. It hasn't. The surprise is that love has gradually become louder than fear. I no longer hear the mother I spent years trying not to disappoint. I hear the woman who wanted me to live honestly, laugh often, smell the roses in her beautiful garden and become the person she always believed I could be.

Perhaps that is grief's greatest gift. Not that it teaches us how to say goodbye, but that, if we are fortunate enough to be held by others along the way, it slowly teaches us how to continue living.

Books that have shaped my thinking

Rather than offering solutions, these are books that have accompanied me as I have reflected on grief, ritual, psychotherapy and continuing relationships.