Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Hamlet: Act 3: scene 1, lines 77-83
In the aftermath of Erin’s accident, our Sea-to-Sky community was rocked to the core. Our tragedy, befallen to an ordinary family on an innocent family walk, spoke to the many families that comprise the community of Lion’s Bay: ‘It could have been us’. The accident was so random, so avoidable, and yet it seemed so purposeful in the selection of Erin as the recipient; of the entire mountain, how is it that she stood on a parcel of land half a meter square that triggered her demise?
Erin and Cameron had been active members of the community even though we did not live there. They had attended the community school and the many activities offered in the village hall. Erin was an active member of the Brownie pack. So, I wondered, what were all the Lion’s Bay moms saying to their children? How were they explaining where our daughter had gone? How did they frame that their children would never again see her swinging on the monkey bars; digging in the sand; swimming to the dock on Lion’s Bay beach or bounding up one of the many Lion’s Bay trails? What words were said? What metaphors given? What images conjured?
We have been given many confident (mainly religious) assertions of where Erin is now – visual images, visions - as statements of assured fact. My favourite is: ‘’As I prayed I had a wonderful picture of Erin standing in front of God's closet trying to choose a dress to try on. Can you imagine that? Endless dresses, I'm sure’’. One of the most challenging offerings was one intended for support but provided some discomfort. ‘’Erin was frightened because she was on her own – and then Jesus was there to be with her…and then she ran in to the distance to someone she knew.’’
I remain puzzled about whom Erin saw in my friend’s vision. She had no recollection of my dad or Mike’s mom and knew of no others who have passed this way already. Maybe it was one of us, her own family, in the life-hereafter’s unfathomable compression and distortion of time. As a mother of a 7, almost 8-year-old daughter, she has always been with us or with another delegated adult. She had had 3 or 4 sleepovers but other than that had spent every night of her life with us. It is disconcerting to think of her frightened and to realize that she may be forging the way ahead of us where we as parents should be clearing her path – that she is without her parents beside her holding her monkey-bar-calloused hands or balancing on Mike’s shoulders. Or maybe she is not on a journey. Maybe she is simply in the wind; in the rustle of the trees; in the rush of the river or the mists of the mountains – a return of dust to dust.
And one evening while I was cogitating on what other parents were saying to their children, I realized that we had not asked our own remaining child what he thought. So over our evening dinner we posed the question: ‘Where is Erin now?’’ And the answer from Cameron is incisive and profound: ‘I don’t know’. We cannot better his answer. For as humans we know, we think, we believe. We can know with certainty that which we experience through our senses – through sight, sound, touch, taste. We think – based on conjecture and deduction through our knowledge. But belief…this is a challenging one! Belief is a blind faith, a hunch, an intuition or even a yearning - often based on cultural, familial and religious teachings – but it is intangible, nebulous and not provable. For while many of faith have proclaimed with utmost certainty that Erin is with God or with Jesus, or in heaven or experiencing as many remarkably different interpretations of the life hereafter as there have been people asked, actually we don’t know. We really don’t.
I have reflected deeply on belief and the life hereafter and have read widely across all disciplines. All faiths proclaim a further life of some sort, and both those with faith and those without have had near-death experiences of blinding light and idyllic peace. For me, marriage provides a good analogy in exploring belief: in making marriage vows I have faith that that they will be realized. But it is only on the completion of my life that faithfulness to our vows will be evaluated and realized. No matter what I believe or want to believe, the test of faithfulness – or my faith in faithfulness – only comes at the end of life. So it is with belief. You may believe in an afterlife, in a heaven, in a God, but there is no proof until we move to the next life. Or not. I have no fear of death myself – in fact I am deeply curious to discover if there is a ‘great beyond’ as my dear Uncle Bob used to say. If there is an after-life, I can only hope that it offers none of the pain and the suffering of this existence (Hamlet similarly wrestles with this in the quotation above).
As has been insightfully pointed out to me, being reunited with family in the next life poses all sorts of complications: what if you’re divorced or remarried, are adopted, or were surrogated, or grew up on the streets or are estranged from family? (I am sure you have family members you’d prefer not to spend extended time with in this life, let alone for all eternity!) Who counts as your family and extended family in this complex world of blended families? Is blood really thicker than water – is it really kin that come alongside and walk hand-in-hand especially in moments of tragedy and travail? And why is it that familial relationships in the afterlife seem to be valued above others when so often our closest relationships are with kith rather than kin?
If Erin lives on in another dimension, we wonder if she has presence through her physical body, or what essence of her will make her recognizable; does she sleep; does she move; does she communicate; what does she do all day or night or through eternity; does she grow; have her adult teeth come in to fill the gaps? Who is Erin in the life beyond – her character, personality, essence – for surely it cannot be age-bound to her immature 7 year persona. Is she an ethereal spirit or is she simply an embodiment of the great universe, a humming vibrating collective presence of peace and eternal serenity? I honestly do not know whether I will see or be with Erin again and actually, given that I don’t know conclusively whether there is an afterlife or its composition, it really doesn’t matter. In recognition of her life lesson ‘Live in the moment’, what matters is her profound, all-consuming, raw and tugging absence in the here and now; The beauty with which she coloured our daily lives is now vanished; it is just the glory of the clouded memories that remain. This is what counts.
So Erin has an edge on all of us – it may be that she has forged the way; she strides out beyond this life into the next or she may be reinventing herself as an intimate part of nature that claimed her. Maybe she is with us and watches us - as my intuitive healer claimed. And maybe her presence in her absence means she has never actually left us, and she lives on in our memories and dreams albeit imprisoned in her childhood body. She may be reunited with a Divine Presence – whoever and whatever that looks like. But we don’t know, however much we claim we know. And we will only know when we go to on to join her. We’ll all have to wait to find out...
May she rest in peace.
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Hamlet: Act 3: scene 1, lines 77-83
In the aftermath of Erin’s accident, our Sea-to-Sky community was rocked to the core. Our tragedy, befallen to an ordinary family on an innocent family walk, spoke to the many families that comprise the community of Lion’s Bay: ‘It could have been us’. The accident was so random, so avoidable, and yet it seemed so purposeful in the selection of Erin as the recipient; of the entire mountain, how is it that she stood on a parcel of land half a meter square that triggered her demise?
Erin and Cameron had been active members of the community even though we did not live there. They had attended the community school and the many activities offered in the village hall. Erin was an active member of the Brownie pack. So, I wondered, what were all the Lion’s Bay moms saying to their children? How were they explaining where our daughter had gone? How did they frame that their children would never again see her swinging on the monkey bars; digging in the sand; swimming to the dock on Lion’s Bay beach or bounding up one of the many Lion’s Bay trails? What words were said? What metaphors given? What images conjured?
We have been given many confident (mainly religious) assertions of where Erin is now – visual images, visions - as statements of assured fact. My favourite is: ‘’As I prayed I had a wonderful picture of Erin standing in front of God's closet trying to choose a dress to try on. Can you imagine that? Endless dresses, I'm sure’’. One of the most challenging offerings was one intended for support but provided some discomfort. ‘’Erin was frightened because she was on her own – and then Jesus was there to be with her…and then she ran in to the distance to someone she knew.’’
I remain puzzled about whom Erin saw in my friend’s vision. She had no recollection of my dad or Mike’s mom and knew of no others who have passed this way already. Maybe it was one of us, her own family, in the life-hereafter’s unfathomable compression and distortion of time. As a mother of a 7, almost 8-year-old daughter, she has always been with us or with another delegated adult. She had had 3 or 4 sleepovers but other than that had spent every night of her life with us. It is disconcerting to think of her frightened and to realize that she may be forging the way ahead of us where we as parents should be clearing her path – that she is without her parents beside her holding her monkey-bar-calloused hands or balancing on Mike’s shoulders. Or maybe she is not on a journey. Maybe she is simply in the wind; in the rustle of the trees; in the rush of the river or the mists of the mountains – a return of dust to dust.
And one evening while I was cogitating on what other parents were saying to their children, I realized that we had not asked our own remaining child what he thought. So over our evening dinner we posed the question: ‘Where is Erin now?’’ And the answer from Cameron is incisive and profound: ‘I don’t know’. We cannot better his answer. For as humans we know, we think, we believe. We can know with certainty that which we experience through our senses – through sight, sound, touch, taste. We think – based on conjecture and deduction through our knowledge. But belief…this is a challenging one! Belief is a blind faith, a hunch, an intuition or even a yearning - often based on cultural, familial and religious teachings – but it is intangible, nebulous and not provable. For while many of faith have proclaimed with utmost certainty that Erin is with God or with Jesus, or in heaven or experiencing as many remarkably different interpretations of the life hereafter as there have been people asked, actually we don’t know. We really don’t.
I have reflected deeply on belief and the life hereafter and have read widely across all disciplines. All faiths proclaim a further life of some sort, and both those with faith and those without have had near-death experiences of blinding light and idyllic peace. For me, marriage provides a good analogy in exploring belief: in making marriage vows I have faith that that they will be realized. But it is only on the completion of my life that faithfulness to our vows will be evaluated and realized. No matter what I believe or want to believe, the test of faithfulness – or my faith in faithfulness – only comes at the end of life. So it is with belief. You may believe in an afterlife, in a heaven, in a God, but there is no proof until we move to the next life. Or not. I have no fear of death myself – in fact I am deeply curious to discover if there is a ‘great beyond’ as my dear Uncle Bob used to say. If there is an after-life, I can only hope that it offers none of the pain and the suffering of this existence (Hamlet similarly wrestles with this in the quotation above).
As has been insightfully pointed out to me, being reunited with family in the next life poses all sorts of complications: what if you’re divorced or remarried, are adopted, or were surrogated, or grew up on the streets or are estranged from family? (I am sure you have family members you’d prefer not to spend extended time with in this life, let alone for all eternity!) Who counts as your family and extended family in this complex world of blended families? Is blood really thicker than water – is it really kin that come alongside and walk hand-in-hand especially in moments of tragedy and travail? And why is it that familial relationships in the afterlife seem to be valued above others when so often our closest relationships are with kith rather than kin?
If Erin lives on in another dimension, we wonder if she has presence through her physical body, or what essence of her will make her recognizable; does she sleep; does she move; does she communicate; what does she do all day or night or through eternity; does she grow; have her adult teeth come in to fill the gaps? Who is Erin in the life beyond – her character, personality, essence – for surely it cannot be age-bound to her immature 7 year persona. Is she an ethereal spirit or is she simply an embodiment of the great universe, a humming vibrating collective presence of peace and eternal serenity? I honestly do not know whether I will see or be with Erin again and actually, given that I don’t know conclusively whether there is an afterlife or its composition, it really doesn’t matter. In recognition of her life lesson ‘Live in the moment’, what matters is her profound, all-consuming, raw and tugging absence in the here and now; The beauty with which she coloured our daily lives is now vanished; it is just the glory of the clouded memories that remain. This is what counts.
So Erin has an edge on all of us – it may be that she has forged the way; she strides out beyond this life into the next or she may be reinventing herself as an intimate part of nature that claimed her. Maybe she is with us and watches us - as my intuitive healer claimed. And maybe her presence in her absence means she has never actually left us, and she lives on in our memories and dreams albeit imprisoned in her childhood body. She may be reunited with a Divine Presence – whoever and whatever that looks like. But we don’t know, however much we claim we know. And we will only know when we go to on to join her. We’ll all have to wait to find out...
May she rest in peace.