I was coming up to wakefulness when I felt the presence of my son, dead ten years. “I’m so sorry, I’m so very sorry”, I murmured to him. “Don’t be sad, Mom, I’m happy; I live on a lake in Wisconsin where I swim every day. I’m a Golden Retriever!” This has given me tremendous solace, once I tamped down an irrational urge to go yard to yard around every lake in Wisconsin. I’m aware this is my imaginative subconscious performing self-care, but I can’t eliminate a thread of magic. I, too, have lost two sons to wildly out-of-order death. Your reflections are both reassuring and; challenging.

Dear Susan,

Thank you for your letter and for succinctly summarising the spiritual position that I and many others find ourselves in. You described beautifully a meeting with your son as a mystical intuition that touches a part of you beyond the reach of reason. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing,” as Blaise Pascal put it. We humans are made up of a rational, mechanistic side, but we also possess a spiritual side, a dimension that leans towards the numinous, the mysterious, and the poetic. Sadly, the world we live in now has largely abandoned the mystical and sacred side, treating it as an unserious and unnecessary impediment to human progress. We now dwell in an essentially materialistic age, and weird experiences that disturb this rational world are often met with scepticism and derision. Unloved, this aspect of our nature can wither and die. I believe we ignore this strange and otherworldly activity at our peril.

That said, I have found that when faced with intense grief or suffering, the mystical side of our nature can be revived and even flourish, broadening our experience of the world. This is the gift of grief. It enables us to reconnect with our true nature – as both rational and spiritual beings – reasonable individuals who can feel at home in a world beyond reason.

Susan, you’ve experienced a phenomenon I often read about in The Red Hand Files – grieving people who have encountered moments of reconciliation with loved ones who have passed away. These moments are gifts that surpass understanding. Some, like yours, are vividly specific and, as you found, can be a ‘tremendous solace’. Although our rational selves may view these treasured experiences as ‘subconscious self-care’, our spiritual side, our more curious side, perceives them at face value as authentic – that the ‘thread of magic’ is, in fact, a truth. In my opinion, it is a truth more precious, fascinating, and sustaining than the pragmatic one. I believe it’s possible to recognise both things – that your mind is practising a form of self-care and that the spirit of your child exists in a Golden Retriever that swims in a lake in Wisconsin.

All this is to say, this morning after swimming in my local lake, I was shivering in the queue at the coffee shop when a lady with a Golden Retriever came in. I knelt and patted the dog. “Are you from Wisconsin?” I asked the dog. The woman shook her head, but I patted him some more anyway and hugged him because perhaps what happens to one Golden Retriever happens to all Golden Retrievers – just as the way we treat one person can echo through us all. Susan, we think it is time now for you to stop feeling sorry.

Love, Nick

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