Happy earthstrong to your dad IPX Ninja. I hope the I can pour some libations and maybe burn some sage or some herb in front of his picture. Anyway that's how I "feed" my ancestors, I don't know if the I do the same, or maybe have a different way?
I wonder if the I or if anyone in your family had any dreams about your dad after he passed? I mean immediately after? Or any dreams that felt especially important or true or more like a visitation than a dream?
My mom had a dream about my dad (they had already been divorced for some 15 years or so) that he came to her in a big sunny field, he ran up to her so energetically and he hugged her and he apologized for everything he had done (my dad was admittedly an angry man, their marriage was hard, he was often violent and he suffered from ptsd after vietnam war). My mom felt that he truly came to her in spirit, and that this was a real event, not simply a dream. In her mind this meant he was in heaven.
My grandmother also dreamed about my grandfather (both of them of the reformed jewish faith) after his death, that he was in the shower and he said "I just had to do it before I passed." And she took that to mean he was baptised. As my mother had been trying to convert them to christianity for years, she thought maybe my grandfather had accepted christianity before he passed. Of course the christian side of the family is sure that's what it meant.
Interesting the way people interpret these dreams from their own religious lens. I never saw the dreams as religious, more essentially spiritual. That my grandfather was cleansed from his experiences on earth. That my father was in a happy place and saw the wrongs of his actions and now truly was repentant for them.
I do think that the I is right about my father's passing and how it happened, and give thankhs for sharing the I own feelings about that too. It's a great persepctive. I too think that, once I have children, and hopefully once they are grown and I meet my own grandchildren, way later in the future, I would see no better way to go than in an act of service for my child. And I know my father was trying to make up for things, in the end, he was trying to mend bridges and repair the relationship we had missed out on when I was little and my parents were divorced. And I'm happy that he did make that effort and I know his soul was pleased too that he got to really make his best effort to be a dad to me. Through all his faults he truly loved nothing in life more than his children.
I think we can learn a lot from thinking about those who have already passed over and even from these dreams and everything. We can apply those lessons to our own lives. I think our ancestors are probably happy to know that we learn from their passing too. Whether we learn about how we need to take advantage of every moment because life is fleeting and the end could come anytime, or we learn about how their afterlife perspective is different, these are valuable lessons.
My love goes out to your wife, I know it can't be any easier now than it was when it first happened, but it's good that she still talks about him. He was real, her love for him is real, and he deserves to be talked about. I think the days of women suffering in silence when they lost pregnancies, those days have to be over. It's not a shameful thing and it doesn't need to be a secret. Everyone has their own level of comfort sharing and opening up of course but I think people who want to talk about it definitely need to talk about it and that it opens up the conversation too for people who might be holding all of that inside.
Holding everything bottled up inside, that's Not the way to grieve, can't possibly be a healthy way to grieve.
Interesting to be discussing this topic in a Rastafari forum when Rasta have typically been anti-funeral, death is for the dead and life is for the living, etc. How much of that is healthy, I don't know.
Seeing videos of Bob Marley's funeral and the grief of a whole country over his passing, that had to have been a way to process feelings for those who were close to him, for Rita, for his children.
I guess the point I'm making is that grief is a difficult thing to traverse and we all have to do it in our own ways, and not have judgement for the ways others process their own grief. Not have expectations of how long that grieving period should be, for others or even for ourselves.
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