To Die is to Leave the Choir

To Die is to Leave the Choir

Sometimes I’d create sigils to the dead, carefully sewing my name into the names of the dead, the letters swirling together, a testament to our time together. Mostly, it was a way of keeping them with me. Keeping them real. The sigils were like phones, on the hook, to the other world. Other times I’d take a magical bath — something I write about in my book, Light Magic for Dark Times — not simply as an act of self-care, but as a way to welcome the freedom and fluidity of grief. In my bath, which would be filled of essential oils and lined with obsidian, I’d be permitted a designated space to cry, to transform, to clean myself of pain that no longer served me and to adorn myself — by way of the water itself or oils or perfumes — that were programmed to give me a sense of resilience, peace, and acceptance...

...I sat on white linen in the grassy corner of a mausoleum alight in a dozen white candles. Flocks of wandering strangers approached and sat before me on the ground. Some held candles, glittering in the blackness, and to them I’d recite a poetic sequence that, stanza by stanza, explored the cycle of grief. In a small ceramic jar, the visitors were invited to leave goodbye messages for their dead, for whatever it was they wanted to part with, to let go of.

To Die is to Leave the Choir

In the summer of 2004, after my wife died. I joined a berevment support group.( i was s mess) One of the exercises they assigned was to make a grief stick. 
Something that could embody ones sadness. And then to bury it in a special place. 
I found it helpful. In my my experience.Ritual, has an inportant place in finding ones way back from loss.

To Die is to Leave the Choir

If we survive to an afterlife - why all the angst?  The author describes her physical sensations - but leaves out the transcendent nature of life, imho.