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​After Your death, we still talk.
Relationships with Loved Ones after they Die

Dear Mom,​

I don't know whether I'm talking to your memory or to you. I don't know whether you can hear me. But after your death, we still talk. We are family. A friend of mine, a process theologian, says that my talking to you makes perfect sense; that relationships continue after death, in us and in God. She says that God may well send memories of you back to earth, in transformed form, so that I may find healing and guidance from you. And she says that you may continue in your journey, even after your death, so that you can speak to me in different ways, at least for a time. I don't know about all of this, Maybe so, maybe not. But I do know this. After your death, we still talk.

Anthony

​After Your Death

Natasha Trethewey

First, I emptied the closets of your clothes,
threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised
from your touch, left empty the jars

you bought for preserves. The next morning,
birds rustled the fruit trees, and later
when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem,

I found it half eaten, the other side
already rotting, or—like another I plucked
and split open—being taken rom the inside:

a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late,
again, another space emptied by loss.
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

Talking to the Dead
​

...It’s the same with all my lost beloveds. Reminders take every possible form — the feel of pine needles underfoot, the scent of a passing woman’s perfume, the tail end of a song on a coffee shop radio, a letter tumbling out of a long-unopened book, the taste of boiled peanuts, salty and warm. The reminders loop between past and present, between one lost loved one and another, a buzzing sweep of sensations and memories and time. I keep searching for the right metaphor to convey what I mean. Is it like a braid? A web? A shroud?

Finally the word comes to me: It’s a conversation. Every day, all day long, everyone I’ve ever loved is gathered around the same table, talking.

Ten years on, I rarely dream about my mother anymore, but in the dreams where she does appear, it’s the same as before — the ordinariness of life, the rush of relief I feel, her blithe unawareness of my suffering. I walk in the door, and there she is, there they all are, no happier to see me than they would be if I’d only walked in from another room in the same house. In my dreams, as in my waking life, the dead are still here, still talking to me.

- Margaret Renkl, More and More, I Talk to the Dead, NY Times. January 30. 2023

"oh antic God"

by Lucille Clifton

oh antic God

return to me
my mother in her thirties   
leaned across the front porch   
the huge pillow of her breasts   
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.

I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.

I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams   
at night.   return to me, oh Lord of then   
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.

​
Lucille Clifton, “ ‘oh antic God’ ” from Mercy. Copyright © 2004 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org. Source: Mercy (BOA Editions, Ltd. , 2004)

Process Theology & Relations
with Loved Ones after they Die
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Relationships with loved ones do not end with death. We still talk to them, and perhaps also they to us. Sometimes our relationships can improve after death, and also theirs with us. Forms of forgiveness and affection can emerge after death that were not possible in this life. Such is the nature of an interconnected world in process and with multiple dimensions. We live in an enchanted universe. At least so process theologians propose, influenced as they are by the organic philosophy of Whitehead.

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​I have a good friend who has just experienced the death of her three-year-old daughter. She is among the countless numbers of people in our world who have lost loved ones and are absorbed in almost unspeakable grief. From a process perspective, there is no need to think that untimely deaths are willed or caused by the living whole of the universe, by God. God, too, grieves with the bereaved and suffers the pain, all the while working within the bereaved and the deceased by providing possibilities for healing and growth. Our relationships with loved ones do not end with death. They are still family.

For some among the aggrieved, there can be slight consolation in praying for the dead. Praying for the dead is a common practice among Catholic Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, and many others who feel connected to living ancestors. This prayer can be accompanied by talking to the dead, recognizing that they are still part of the family for those who pray, even as they no longer appear in the flesh. They are present in transmuted form.

Transmutation is the activity of assuming or mutating into a different form, as when a caterpillar transmutes into a butterfly. There are many kinds of transmutation: nuclear, chemical, biological, spiritual. Whitehead uses the word to name the process by which, in the immediacy of experience, a living being (a concrescing subject, to use his language) receives a given entity or event from the past, abstracts from that entity or event certain features of its existence, and then feels (prehends) that entity in terms of that abstracted form.

Imagine something that happened to you in the past on a given day; perhaps you enjoyed ice cream with your mother at a cafe in the late afternoon, and you remember the experience in light of what you felt as you enjoyed the ice cream with your mother. You don't experience the whole of the experience, but you experience what you felt. You experience the past experience as "transmuted," and it has power in your life in this way.

Whitehead's philosophy also offers a framework by which we can understand departed loved ones as transmuted in the immediacy of our experience as we remember or encounter them. In their transmuted form, we continue to have a relationship even after they have perished, and they, in their transmuted form, may also change over time. Transmutations, too, can be in process.

From the perspective of process theology, departed loved ones can be alive in us in three ways. First, they can be alive as "objectively immortal" (Whitehead's phrase) in our memories of them. They are present to us, sometimes appearing in dreams, sometimes in our fantasies. We don't just dream them into existence; they come to us through these memories. Second, they can come to us through God's memory. From a process perspective, they are also "objectively immortal" in the life of the living, the ongoing life of God, where they also dwell, even as they are objectively immortal in our personal past. It is possible that the departed loved ones come back to us from God's memory, and not just from the personal past of our own lives. In these two ways, the deceased are not alive as subjects of their own lives; their subjective immediacy has perished. But they are alive as energetic presences who once had such immediacy. Third, they can be alive in us and to us as living subjects in their own right, who continue to have experiences of their own. Where they "exist" outside their appearances on earth is not clear, but, following Whitehead, process theologians believe that the space-time continuum contains multiple dimensions, of which three-dimensional space is but one.

A very dramatic form of the third form lies in what are called after-death communications (ADC). They can be healing and comforting for those who grieve, as multiple studies have found. These experiences occur when someone is or at least feels contacted by a deceased family member or friend. These experiences can take various forms, including sensing a presence, hearing a voice, feeling a touch, smelling a fragrance, and visual or full-body appearances of the deceased. ADCs can occur during altered states of consciousness, while asleep, or even as physical phenomena like lights flickering or objects moving. When such experiences occur, as in dreams, the deceased family member appears as transmuted.

Any one of these three ways, and any combination, makes sense. They are ways that we can pray for the dead and talk to them. In the third, they may well talk back. But they are family no matter what. After your death, we still talk.

​- Jay McDaniel