Winter Trees in the Western Sky
Staying connected with my late grandfather
After my grandfather passed away nine years ago, my family chose to display this painting of him at his funeral. He was an avid painter and painting teacher who taught me, my sister, and probably several of our cousins not only how to create art, but also how to notice it in the world. Perpetually ready for a mini-lesson on light and shadow, he kept a small notebook and pencil in his shirt pocket at all times.
We were close and we weren’t. I grew up next door to my grandparents and so I saw one or both of them in some capacity most days of my life. But my grandfather wasn’t really someone you “get close to” in an emotional way. He could certainly be outspoken and was often quite funny, but generally speaking he was a reserved, distant man. We are so alike in this respect, I find myself feeling connected to him even (or perhaps especially) through our shared detachment.
Both of my paternal grandparents were Irish-American. I was surrounded by this side of my family throughout my formative years — listening to my grandmother repeat her father’s most-used phrases in his Irish brogue, watching sunlight dance through the green glass of the shamrock in her kitchen window, admiring the faded old photograph of her family home in Leitrim that hung on the wood-paneled wall. As an adult, I sought to connect more deeply to my Celtic roots and so joined the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids and began to study ancient Celtic druidic tradition. In this time, my husband gifted me a book called The Celtic Spirit by Caitlín Matthews.
The Celtic Spirit contains daily meditations inspired by pagan Celtic history and custom. One such meditation (which appears on December 13th) asks the reader and practitioner to find their “true north,” or spiritual home. Following the steps, I found myself facing northwest. With my eyes closed, I pictured a landscape of fading blue hills behind a stand of bare, brown trees, the hint of winter in the air. It looked just like one of my grandfather’s paintings. Without making explicit, logical sense of it, I simply thought, “in some way, my grandfather is my true north.” It made heart sense, which was the only sort of sense I was using at the moment.
December carried on and I passed the time in my usual ways, which typically includes some type of meditation. On the day before Christmas Eve, I had just finished a yoga practice and was listening to some grounding music when I had the urge to close my eyes and speak directly to my grandfather. Immediately, I could see and hear and feel his presence in an internal way. I was glad to connect with him during the holiday season and felt that we had an entire conversation about it, as I thanked him for staying with me and wished him and my grandmother a joyful holiday in the Otherworld.
You may find this sort of thing silly or even a bit deranged, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve encountered a vivid sense of my grandfather’s spirit while in silent meditation. For better or worse, I often find him within or around me in some way — a sense, an image, a memory, a voice in my head. To me, it seems very real.
At the time of writing, it is December 28th, the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. Truthfully, he wasn’t himself for quite awhile before he passed on: he struggled with dementia during a difficult period of decline. Now that he is beyond the physical world, I see him clearly again.
I don’t pretend to know what any of it means; I don’t really want or need to.
“Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.” — Voltaire