Grief and the Afterlife II

Coming to You Live from the Other Side

Dear Readers,

Considering the urgency of current political conditions in the United States, I will be publishing a special edition 4th of July article that mostly focuses on US predictions. Meanwhile, today’s post is a continuation of Part I of History of Spirituality’s “Grief and the Afterlife” series.

Take good care, and please feel free to post questions or comments in the Q&A below.

Kyra

YouTube Communication

Today as I’m writing this it is Father’s Day, 2022. I was feeling sad about missing my dad, as many of us are on days like this. I went to YouTube to listen to some music. I noticed a recent video that had been posted by “Squirmy and Grubs”, an interabled couple who bring a lot of joy and awareness about disability rights into the world. Early in the video, Hannah mentioned that she was wearing a shirt that brings her to her “happy place”. She moved closer to the camera and revealed that it was from Peddler’s Village. Peddler’s Village is the place my dad took us to the most when I was growing up in the Philadelphia area, and we used to go there on Father’s Day.

How could it be that I found this video on Father’s Day, of all days, and just two days after I published the first part of this story about reconnecting with loved ones who have crossed over? I am a fan to the point of having watched most of their videos, yet I’ve never heard them mention Peddler’s Village before. While you might wonder if the suggestion of this video popped up due to an advertising algorithm, I hadn’t done Google searches or posted on social media about Peddler’s Village before I saw this video. Therefore, of all the days for me to see it, I wondered if this was a sign that I might be reconnecting with my father through this message. I feel I should mention that Shane is from Philadelphia which increases their chances of having visited a site in nearby Bucks County, but that doesn’t explain how I was compelled to watch this video on Father’s Day without knowing its content until after I clicked on it. Here is the video about the Peddler’s Village shirt, which is referenced from 1:58-2:36.

The day I published Part I of this article was the same day that my friend was graduating from our university. During the ceremony, one of the first speakers quoted Hamlet, saying to the graduates: “To thine own self be true”. This surprised me a little as I had just been writing about Shakespeare in the post I shared with you that day, although it isn’t uncommon or unusual to quite Shakespeare at a graduation ceremony, so I dismissed it (although took the message itself to heart).

Stichomancy for Messages from Beyond

Writers come to life again when we read their works. The book my grandmother left to me was something she described as her favourite. It was a 1920s leather-bound edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. I remember my grandparents telling me that nearly all the answers to life and what it means to be human are somewhere in there, whether directly or indirectly. If I ever needed advice, I would know to turn to those poems and plays for answers. In a way, they were leaving me with the words of Shakespeare to replace the times in the future when they knew they would not be here to continue giving me guidance and advice. Even now, I use the complete works as stichomancy and you can too. In fact, you can do this with nearly any book. Ask a question in your mind, request to be directed to the right thought or answer, open the book, and read the first sentence or phrase you see. If you need further clarity to answer your question, ask again and open the book again until the answer aligns with your question.  

How Loved Ones Show Up to Special Events

The Honourable Judge and Chancellor Marion Buller, who was appointed the first woman First Nations judge in British Columbia and chief commissioner for the 2016 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, took the stage to give opening remarks at the graduation. As she was speaking I was thinking about how just a couple of years from now, I will also be graduating. I thought about how important school was to my grandparents and thought to myself, “I wish they could be here with me on that day”. Seconds later, the commencement speaker said: “You’re walking with your ancestors”. It was a message for all the graduates, but for me in the audience, the timing of it coincided more than coincidentally with my wish to have my grandparents with me in that same auditorium two years from now. And now, thanks to the clarity of this message, I believe they will be. Apparently, love manages to stretch across the ages in unexpected ways and on unanticipated days.

When I came home from the graduation there was a package from my cousin in the U.S. After my parents passed away, she thoughtfully sent me all the photos that her mom, my grandmother’s sister, had been saving since the 1920s. I opened the package and contained inside were two items that I didn’t know existed anymore: the commencement programmes from both of my grandparents’ high school graduations in 1928 and 1930. There were the same grandparents I had been wishing could be with me when I was at my university’s graduation ceremony just hours before. And here, in a way, they were, with a graduation message from their own ceremonies nearly a century before. Could the message be much clearer? They were and would be there with me, both today and in future meaningful events of my life.

My grandfather Mayer David Oser (l): Classical Course/Greek, and Latin. At university beginning that fall, he would continue to study ancient Greek and Latin as well as architecture and law.

What Central High School may have looked like in its second location by the time my grandfather attended in the 1920s (SOURCES: Burk & McFetridge Co. Publisher - The Public Schools of Philadelphia: Historical, Biographical, Statistical by John Trevor Custis, Burk & McFetridge Co. Publisher, 1897 (https://archive.org/details/publicschoolsph00custgoog/) Central High School, Southeast corner Broad and Green Streets, Philadelphia PA (1854), from The Public Schools of Philadelphia: Historical, Biographical, Statistical by John Trevor Custis, Burk & McFetridge Co. Publisher, 1897 (https://archive.org/details/publicschoolsph00custgoog/)

My grandmother Gladys Beatrice Libanoff (r). That same year, she enrolled at university as a journalism major. That is where she would meet my grandfather.

What Germantown High School (1935) would have looked like when my grandmother attended in the 1920s

Also contained in the package were over a hundred photos of my grandparents, from their baby photos taken in 1911 and 1912 through the 1980s. I can’t think of a greater gift than this, and it was just when I was missing them so much and needed the message. If I had these photos all along I wouldn’t have gotten this message in such a powerful way, which is a reminder to me that when material items are blocked there might be a reason. Perhaps some future message is being saved for you for a moment when you will most need that wisdom, confirmation, or connection with a loved one.

Today as I’m editing this post, two days after Father’s Day, I woke up from a dream last night in which someone was repairing my apartment with smelly glue. I felt sensitive to the chemicals and moved into the other room which looked like a hotel. There I found an envelope that my father had left behind. Inside were AAA roadside assistance cards going back to 1981. I remember thinking in the dream that they didn’t mean anything without him there. What good were these items without him to use them, not to mention that they had expired and couldn’t be used by anyone? When my father got older I would give him one-year memberships for roadside assistance as a birthday gift, which is probably why I dreamt about these plastic cards. Maybe I was dreaming about something related to travel because loved ones travel on to an unknown realm following their passing, and I’m wondering where he is. But why 1981, and what was the bad-smelling home repair about?

A couple of hours after I woke up there were workers outside my building who had been hired by the owner to paint the façade. I didn’t know anything about this. I had Steely Dan music on (okay, not the original Steely Dan but a delightfully talented Steely Dan/Chicago/EW&F cover band Leonid & Friends), probably because it reconnected me to my father, and I heard one of the painters say to the other that he was born in 1981. I didn’t hear what came before in the conversation but that congruent detail stood out to me. Maybe he heard Steely Dan and it made him think about being born after the time of 1970s music? I don’t know.

Perhaps the dream was an anticipation of this morning’s events, but considering that the theme of the dream was about reconnecting with my father through what remains behind, I believe these signs in the form of a surprise home repair, music, and the mention of a related date helped to reassure me that my father is somehow still here, not only in dreams but also in the signs that are brought to us in day-to-day life. It is mystifying to me that loved ones continue to live on in our consciousness and dreams, even as the temporary form of their physical lives were apparently permanently extinguished. Yet even in the realm of physics, what is created cannot be destroyed, so we live on in another form, not only physically but also cognitively and emotionally in the minds and hearts of those who loved them. One of the dichotomies and mysteries of life is how human bodies can be so vulnerable and transitory, yet are capable of encompassing abilities and future memories that are powerful, meaningful, and potentially lasting to future generations. The cycles of life and death are potentially endlessly awe-inspiring, and I look forward to sharing more about these phenomena as we explore the spiritual side of this life together.

Please feel free to share your own stories of synchronicity, dreams, and/or encounters with the afterlife in the comments.

Choirs of Thousands of Ancestors

The sequel to this post including a short story and meditation entitled “Choirs of Thousands of Ancestors”, will be published under the title: “Grief and the Afterlife III: Coming to You Live from the Other Side”.

A message from my Pop-Pop to my Mom-Mom, sometime between 1930-1934, after my grandparents met while attending Temple University, where my grandmother later returned for graduate school in the 1950s and my father would attend in the 1970s. The message reads: “To Gladys, the sweetest girl in the world for me. With all my love, Mayer”.

Possibly Atlantic City, NJ: Mid-to-late 1930s

West Oak Lane, Philadelphia: March 13th 1944, about a year and a half after their first child, my uncle, was born

Pop-Pop was a cook in the US Navy during WWII

Mayer and Gladys Oser. Philadelphia: May 1971

Special thanks to my thoughtful cousin Bonnie Soiffer Eisenman for passing these family archives on to me. This post is in honour of the memory of my dearly loved Great-Aunt, Ruth Libanoff Soiffer, who kept these items safe and preserved for decades.

Time Travel Tarot: Posts from the Future

“This Week in Tarot: 4th of July 2022 Political Special ”

“Sleep Deeply, Dream Vividly: Altered States in Audio”

“Grief and the Afterlife III: Coming to You Live from the Other Side”

“Music as Meditation: Musicality and Spirituality”

“Psychic Time Travel: History’s Mysteries Solved”

Hypnotherapy and Psychic Readings

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