It’s 11:53 pm and I am sitting in the car on the deck of a BC Ferry, coming back from Vancouver to The Island. I have another half an hour of rocking on the high seas and then an hour and a half drive home, probably longer because of the dark stretch ahead of me, full of forest and elk, a waning moon, and a tired body. I’ll go slowly, maybe even pull over if I have to.

I got up at 3:30 am the day before yesterday to make the 6:30 ferry to Vancouver so I could spend two full days (but just one night) with Charlotte, my daughter, and my sister, Nicole. 

It was a happy, but subdued time. By now, we are accustomed to the loss of Emily’s presence, but still miss it sharply. There are other things happening, too: individual stresses and burdens that don’t revolve around grief. Even our own lives, it seems, go on. The ‘sabbatical’ is over now: visitors are rolling in, social events are being attended, jobs are being sought. Life is no longer simply beach wandering and puttering in the garden. The reality of life is interrupting grief rather than the other way around. How odd. It’s been a slow swivel that I didn’t quite recognise until I wrote about it just now.

All the while, however, I’ve had this thought that keeps growing and being affirmed: though Emily is no longer with us in body, I can continue my relationship with her and even deepen and strengthen it. 

If you’re read my previous blogs, you can see I have been ‘experimenting’ with this nearly from day one, but I am clearly committed to this now. While often sad, I am not incapacitated. I manage joy quite often. But even when I don’t, I carry Emily with me in a way I didn’t know was possible. When she was alive, she’d often only let me ‘have her’ on her terms, and as she grew sadder and sicker, her essence got muddled with her struggle. Now her essence is clear and present and I feel this ease of communication that causes me no fear. I realise I was quite often afraid of Emily; afraid because I didn’t  know how to help her; afraid because I knew her depression kept her from frequently expressing herself fully, and kept me from being able to ease her pain. This was perhaps the hardest thing. That and the constant vigilance that was present for us in her last months.

Now I feel connected to her. I feel her essence deeply. She is here for me. With every blog I write, I feel the need to justify this or be able to explain it, but I can do neither. I know it hurts other parents who do not feel this with their children who have passed; I know others might find me delusional; I know that others might wonder if I’m poking around in a nether world I have no business being in. I’m sensitive to this. But mostly, I don’t care. 

I am determined that Emily’s death not be the end of our relationship. As I’ve experienced my relationship with her finding a different, but deep level of communion, I have been reading about others who also believe that their family ties can grow and deepen, even in death.

There is not a shred of me that is glad Emily took her life. But she is somewhere on a continuum of eternity that renders her alive on another plane. As Nicole and Charlotte and I enjoyed live music and ice cream and sun and friendship and love on Granville Island today, I felt my girl. A Venezuelan man was playing guitar and singing ‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen in Spanish and whistling it also with such beauty, my heart nearly stopped. It did not bring me grief, but more of a holy moment, knowing that the throngs of people on this sun-soaked day would also die: every one of them, some sooner and some later, but we were all destined for an ending of physical life that would carry us all on to an ongoing otherness. I sensed there were so many more than just the living, breathing, laughing folks around me. I felt a heightened awareness and hope. Death will come to all of us. It came to my dear one earlier than I would have liked, but it has not ended who she is: it has enhanced her. And so it can deepen us too.

I’m not letting her go. I don’t need to. 

The ferry is docking in Nanaimo and I will soon be disembarking and beginning the journey up island in the darkness of night. But I’m not alone.