Easter Day, Ghosts and April Dawning, 2024

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Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring/vernal equinox. The 2024 equinox was March 19-20, marking the unofficial beginning of spring for the Northern Hemisphere and autumn for the Southern Hemisphere. The first full moon after the March equinox was March 24-25, and therefore today is Easter Sunday, 2024.

Etymology Easter (n.) Old English Easterdæg, "Easter day," from Eastre (Northumbrian Eostre), from Proto-Germanic *austron-, "dawn."

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Easter Day represents a day of resurrection. Death and rebirth. We witness it every year in the cycle of the seasons. And we understand that when we die, others will be born. We are making way for new life. But this is impersonal. The notion of a risen Jesus Christ, aka Yeshua/Joshua bar/ben Joseph, escaping his tomb in a literal, physical sense, is as personal as it is universally symbolic.

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He had suffered a frightful death, leaving behind a mother, utterly shattered and distraught. He had other family. He had friends. We know that life goes on in the general sense. But what about in the particular, personal sense?

Where do our loved ones go when they die? I have had many unexplained experiences, mostly benign, though not always to do with loved ones, and not always welcome.

I saw my darling mother’s ghost just once, the day after she had died in her own bedroom at home, of pneumonia, released from hospital on end of life care. We were sitting at the dining table when a movement caught my eye, and there it was. A something, a faint cloud, a movement on the turn of the stairs.

But she did not linger long. And that wouldn’t be her way, the determined, decisive lady that she was. You’re a witch, she said to me the last time we met. I told her she needed to take a tablet.

You’re in pain Mam.

You’re a witch. Nothing escapes you, does it? Bloody nuisance, you are.

If I am a witch, then so was she. My last “sighting” of her was one morning ten days after her death. I was going into the kitchen to put the kettle on when I suddenly received a powerful visual impression, like a moving bit of film. All at once I “saw” my mother, standing in front of me just a little way, smiling up at hills the other side of a valley, clouds chasing sunlight across the tops.

Photograph from my mother’s house, picture by family friend Jane Moss Luffrum

I was standing a little way behind her, close to her right shoulder. She gave no sign of knowing that I was there. But as I watched her I knew with a sudden certainty that I was being shown that she had gone through The Valley of The Shadow of Death, whatever that is. Perhaps it refers to the shock of the separation from the body. And that though she had gone, somehow she is still close to home, in her own idea of the perfect heaven. Teesdale. She was a child of the Pennines, always.

But can I summon her on command?

―William Shakespeare,King Henry IV, Part 1

Well said, Hotspur. I have seen ghosts. I have directly observed poltergeist manifestations. But I have never presumed to summon them, and I have never seen a ghost by actively seeking to see them. One sunny May evening in 2008 I saw my dear father’s ghost in broad daylight, before anyone had yet discovered that he had died, suddenly, and all alone in his hermit’s abode.

What was I doing at the time? Summoning spirits from the “vasty” deep? Was I heck. I was watching the early evening news on the box when the person shaped cloud came drifting in to stand beside me, and then, as if to make sure I was paying attention, moved to stand in front of me until I said, staring and squinting this way and that at this strange foggy manifestation said, Daddy, is that you? And then it faded away. I had acknowledged receiving the signal. His job was done. And it wasn’t long before we found out what had happened. That he had gone. But he had found a way to say goodbye. And not only to me. I learned later that one of my sisters had smelled his pipe smoke earlier that same day, up in Montrose, as she was pushing one of her children on the swings in the play park. The smell came from nowhere, nothing else to account for it.

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The dead are not there for the summoning. They must go free. We need to break free, or what is the meaning of the release of death? But if they wish to send a sign, then they will find a way. There have been occasions when the cards have reflected or revealed information or impressions to the person mourning their loved one that proves, not necessarily that there has been any spirit about the place. If the client could validate the feedback, then the cards were picking up on things already known to the client, and I was reading the living client sitting there with me. But whatever else was happening, these conversations have only served to teach me, yet again, that there are mysteries beyond our ken, and that there are not only things stranger than we know, but there are things stranger than we can know, and that we truly are interconnected.

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Life is for living. But Time is not linear, Space contains many dimensions, and the Mind is a manifestation of both. The rocks and stones are made of star dust. And so are we and so is every last thing. It is only ever a question of the meeting ground.

“We know that we are going to die, in fact it is the only thing we know of what is in store for us. All the rest is mere guesswork, and most of the time we guess wrong. Like children in the trackless forest we grope our way through our lives in blissful ignorance of what is going to happen to us from one day to another, what hardships we may have to face, what more or less thrilling adventures we may encounter before the great adventure, the Adventure of Death.

….Happiness we can only find in ourselves, it is a waste of time to seek for it from others, few have any to spare. Sorrow we have to bear alone as best we can, it is not fair to try to shift it on others, be they men or women. We have to fight our own battles and strike as hard as we can, born fighters as we are.”

― Axel Munthe, The story of San Michele

Thank you for reading.

Here is to brave new life, always and forever.

Happy Easter, beckoning the primal fire of the Aries equinox, April 8, 2024