Not Here, Still Here
On presence, absence, and the people we cannot touch
When you feel someone is here, present, an entity—but that person is dead, gone, clearly not here, what does that mean?
Where is here?
I’ve been thinking about this, for reasons obvious to anyone who has read Everything Changes Everything.
Maybe their soul is here, and that’s what we feel. But when the body is opened, examined, named part by part, no soul is found. If we can’t see it, does that mean it isn’t there? I don’t know.
Most people, it turns out, believe the dead are somewhere. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe in heaven. Just over half believe in hell. Globally, about a third of adults believe in reincarnation—another version of elsewhere, another way of saying not gone.
We seem to need a place to put the dead. Up there. Down below. Back again.
I don’t believe any of that.
And still, I feel the presence of my husband.
Not as a ghost. Not as a voice in my head. Not as memory rising up in some predictable swell of sorrow. Something else. Ineffable. There but not there. Always there but out of reach. Palpable, but not touchable.
And that, I think, is the sadness. Not that I have lost him (I have not) but that he is here—perhaps even more fully, energetically here than he was when he walked the earth—but that we cannot touch.
Although once, we did.
It happened at the end of the second day of my walk across northern Spain, the Camino Frances journey I undertook a year after his death. This is the scene from my book, Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk.
That night I had a dream so real, so palpable, that when I awoke, I was convinced it had actually happened. In the dream Tom knelt beside the bunkbed, reached in, and touched my shoulder. I felt that touch. In the dream, I got out of bed. I stood up. And we embraced, the kind of full-body embrace that lasts long enough for you to feel the other person’s body heat. I felt that embrace. I felt that heat. Then we stood apart.
“Go,” he said.
When you dream, your subconscious is trying to tell you something. When you dream of people who have died, you pay close attention. My dreams are often embarrassingly obvious. Once I dreamt I hit my father over the head with a frying pan. Like that.
“Go,” said Tom, who was for three decades my husband.
It was a command, both forceful and loving. But it was also, or so it seemed to me when I awoke in the dark the next morning, him giving me permission. Not permission to do this thing—I didn’t need that from him, dead or alive—but permission to walk into a future that did not include him. Permission to become who I was going to become.
I just finished your most recent book, Love, Loss, And A Really Long Walk everything changes everything, and it moved through me like a weather system, stirring open chambers in the long inner corridor I travel each day. I have a feeling I will be returning to those once-abandoned rooms for years. Today’s Substack post, Not Here, Still Here, left a light burning in one of them as well. So here I am.
After my father’s violent death, his face vanished from me. When I looked at family photographs, I felt as though I were studying the features of a stranger. I could not summon him in memory, nor did he come to me in dreams. To think of him was like that terrible moment deep in the woods when you realize you no longer know the way: a quickening sickness, a low fear that the path home has been erased for good. For years, from twenty-one to twenty-five, I had the same recurring dream. I wandered through a country of rolling green hills and oak trees, and each time I reached a crest, I searched for running water, hoping to follow it downhill toward some human shore. It was an old piece of woods wisdom my father had once given me, back when I was finally old enough to roam the forest alone.
Sometimes the anguish in that dream would break the surface and wake me. Then, at last, the landscape shifted. Far in the distance, I caught the glimmer of what looked like water. Night after night, I walked toward it until waking pulled me away. And then, one night, I arrived: lush grass, a wide river, and a great oak standing at the water’s edge. Beneath it sat a figure, shadowed by shade and posture, fishing in stillness. I lowered myself beside him. Then he turned and smiled, and I was looking into my father’s face. He slipped an arm around me and whispered, “Slow down, son, the fishing is fine.” After that, I could remember him again.
I did not know then what that dream meant, or even whether it helped shape my beliefs and the way I move through the world. I am not sure I know even now. But when I came to the passage in your book where Tom told you to “go,” I was struck silent by the force of it, and by the courage it must have taken to place such a moment in the hands of strangers. I hope your devoted readers are given many more stories from you. And I cannot help but imagine that those beyond the veil wait for Wednesday too, for the next installment of Life after All!, when you reach for another unseen string and set the whole world trembling.
Perhaps it’s a bit delusive, but I wonder if our bodies are merely the Lilliputian piece that we use, much like a keyboard, to interact with other energetic beings, whether the visibly animate form, or sensed. We’re great at detecting things with our eyes. The rest of the ‘sensing’ part, not so much.
Let me say a bit more - the traditional medicine in India, particularly Ayurvedic medicine holds that Prana is the animating force that both creates and animates the body. Energy precedes matter. Give that a minute…
So when our bodies come and go, what becomes of our energies? Physics 2nd law of Thermodynamics says it best. Energy does not disappear, but it becomes distributed. (In the end, the entropy of the universe will all be uniformly distributed).
So yes, he is still here.
Or perhaps, form Kahil Gibran -
When the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance"