When Death Comes

We knew that one of us would one day lose the other

Dear Friends,

Given the natural order of things, given the natural way of love, we had said not too long ago that one of us would one day lose the other, and just this past summer, late—it was August maybe—when Helene had not yet torn through and both of us were still spry, a quite unexpected question spilled out of me in a languid pause between us, how will I know? The two of us, shaken out of downy silence, looked across the steam drifting from our cups of tea into the deep sea of one another and laughed the way long belonging laughs in the midst of what cannot and need not be spoken.

On Thursday, I received word to confirm what had come in the night, that my dearly beloved soul friend, spiritual mother these past thirty years, has passed away in the long tail wake of Helene. I am bereft.

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I had been scribbling to you some further reflections on gravity and grace from last week’s letter I wrote a year ago. She would want me to continue. It’s not fully formed.

I had been writing to say that the ‘solid-world view’ from the earliest iterations of science gave us Newton’s apple falling with a thud. Apple and Earth are dead. Nothing animated about them, acted upon by a force unseen between them. The gravitational force, too, is dead.

How can the force that pulls two bodies together be dead? How can anything vital to life be absent the very essence it begets? I was lamenting this way of seeing and somewhere iterated, too, woe be the piteous apple. First, the taste, so beguiling as to exile Adam and Eve from Eden, naked but for a fig leaf between them, fallen now from grace. Then the weight of it. If not plucked, all an apple can do is fall. I was beginning to unearth the void imbued in the word, gravity—gravid and grave, the alpha and the omega of a human life, each a holy chamber.

It came to me in this reverie those hours before, that falling from grace and falling with a thud are not two ways of falling but one way of seeing. We, the human, walked hapless out of everywhere-flickering-aliveness-Eden into a mirage-world where all that appears, appears to have its beginning in the hard rock clay of all that must be dead.

In the primordial mode of human being—whispering still from deep down inside us—this dead-world view (which is no different than the solid-world view) has not yet come to be. In the beginning of the beginning of the human, death is the strange thing in life because everywhere is flickering aliveness. When death comes, it comes as an apparition. It takes a life from this world back into the dark and formless void. But the void is no less alive. It is unseen.

In the way of seeing that followed, life is the strange thing. Death is beginning and end. It is the lifeless bedrock from which all life rises and to which it falls.¹ From dust to dust.²

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When word came that death had come to her, my heart fluttered. A beat was lost, then another. This went on for some time, and from time to time in the night and into the next day, and still now, as I write. It began to feel as if the chambers were being hollowed out, and all that was left was the pulsing. And the pulsing was between us, bleeding soul into soul, gravid and grave fleshing out the holy chambers of the eternal, the sacred inside from which the hollow yawns silent these tender hours of her eternity. I hold quiet vigil, offering prayer across the bardo

with unending love,

Renée

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in loving memory, B.

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Forthcoming

Today, Sunday: Vigil in Silence, 12–12:15 pm ET

not on Zoom, in the quiet of wherever you are

Join an intimate circle today, gathering on behalf of all beings suffering and are in sorrow or despair in these times, times that call for “Mystical Courage, a hope and strength emerging from beyond our own making.” (Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Courage). We gather in the companionate Presence of Silence.

This vigil will not be held on Zoom but as a quiet ‘gathering of soul’ across North America and Europe. If you are reading from another continent, please join us and let me know where you are: DM me here on Substack or email: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail.

I will light a candle before the hour and invite the sound of the singing bowl at noon to open our circle and again at 12:15 to close our circle.

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January 5, 2025, our next Zoom Gathering in Silence with Conversation

1. Twentieth-century philosopher, Hans Jonas, writes about this turn eloquently in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Northwestern, 1966).

2. For you who are familiar with Gebserian structures of consciousness, if you read philosophically the first two chapters of Genesis, you can see that they appear to be written from different modes of being, Genesis 1 more reflective of the Mythical mode and Genesis 2 more reflective of the Mental mode, albeit with some crossover. Hence, in Genesis 1, life comes to be from a formless void, the face of the murmuring deep. The language intimates the abyss of potentia in phrases that today would be reflective of panpsychism. And the human, like all that comes into being, comes by fiat: let there be. This is a language of allowing. Furthermore, it reflects the participation of an unseen complement (angels). God has help, needs help, asks for help. In the beginning is the beginning of conscientia—of with knowing. Moreover, the language reflects the likeness of the human in the human image of the Godhead.

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ וְיִרְדּוּ֩ בִדְגַ֨ת הַיָּ֜ם וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה֙ וּבְכׇל־הָאָ֔רֶץ וּבְכׇל־הָרֶ֖מֶשׂ הָֽרֹמֵ֥שׂ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

And G-d said: Let us make man [(G-d in His humility "asking leave" of the angels)] in our image according to our likeness [to understand and to know], and yirdu [connoting "they shall have dominion over" (if they are virtuous) or (if they are not), "they shall be humbled before"] the fish of the sea, the birds of the heaven, the beasts, and all the earth, and all the creeping things that creep on the earth (Genesis, 1:26)

In Genesis 2, the language is quite different. In Genesis 2, God “formed,” as if shaping the human with clay, itself dead matter, and God did so without help. The language is also reflective of an image of the likeness of God to the human image of human being.

וַיִּ֩יצֶר֩ יְהֹוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה וַיִּפַּ֥ח בְּאַפָּ֖יו נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים וַיְהִ֥י הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה׃

And the L-rd G-d formed (vayitzer) [two yods for two "formings," one for this world, one for the resurrection (as opposed to the creation of the beasts (19), where only one yod is written)] the man, dust from the [four corners of the] earth. And He blew into his nostrils a soul of life, and man became a vital soul, [having speech and understanding (as opposed to the beasts)] (Genesis, 2:7).