With fall definitely in the air and “spooky season” upon us, I thought it would be a good time to tell you all that I talk to dead people.
No, I don’t profess to be a psychic medium (truth be told I’m more of an intuitive empath), but nevertheless, I’ll have a conversation with my dead other half the same way I’ll have a conversation with one of my cats. And why not, right?
A refreshing bit of info I stumbled on recently is that grief experts now agree that talking to your spouse who has passed (or anyone else you cared about who’s moved on from this earthly realm, for that matter) can actually be a healthy coping mechanism and can be a way to process grief.
In Japan, there is a telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Iwate Prefecture originally created by garden designer Itaru Sasaki. Inside the booth is a disconnected, old rotary phone he named, The Wind Phone. Sasaki created this to help cope with his grief after his cousin died from cancer. But in 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami took the lives of over 15,000 people, Sasaki opened up his private phone booth to the public, to help them speak to their lost love ones. You bet if I ever make it to Japan, and if the the Wind Phone is still there, I’m making a special side-trip. It would be especially appropriate since Mario loved Japan.
In the months following his earthly departure, I had real trouble finding the words to talk to Mario without getting buried under an avalanche of emotions.
As he was facing his own death, he chose to do so silently, not really talking about how he felt or of death itself. We actually talked a lot about what we both thought lies “on the other side” over the years. I knew that because of his own beliefs that there is something after death, it might have led to his apparent calmness of his upcoming ferry ride over that proverbial river Styx. And I just stayed present. I wasn’t about to force anyone to conform to what I thought someone facing death should do or talk about. That’s a very personal thing with no one way to go about it. But as such, I felt like there were so many things left unsaid. I’m sure many of you can relate. It was those type of topics I found so hard to talk about and it was naturally what I wanted to talk about most right after he passed, just for me to process through it.
In hindsight, after he was gone, I probably should have started talking to him about more mundane things first, because it took me almost a full year to really get out some of the things I wanted to say, but couldn’t at the time.
Another fun Pandora’s Box of grief is knowing that you’ll never physically see or talk to a person again. Mario and I basically spent the better part of 20 years together and we used to talk so much about other things. We had a lot in common and we liked a lot of the same stuff. It was one of those small, daily life type of things that I miss. So I’ll continue what I started and keep chatting with the dead.
