Mary Kulick-Almas in the arms of the Angels November 2009

Can there be communication between the living and those who have died? I mean an awareness of a sensitive if not a dramatic kind, which has nothing to do with mediums and their messages. The Oxford writer C S Lewis expressed what went on in him, unbidden and unexpected, after the death of his beloved wife, Joy. This has awakened many of his readers to a sensitivity towards the unobtrusive but solid presence of a deceased beloved. ‘The sound of a chuckle in the darkness… so business-like… yet there was a cheerful intimacy… Solid. Utterly reliable. Firm. There is no nonsense about the dead…’
The author G W Hughes SJ was aware of the presence of his two sisters who had died tragically. They were, he remarks, like shy guests at a cocktail party who turned out to be the best of company once you gently engaged with them. ‘In imagination, I speak to Marie, and to the rest of my family, who are now all dead. Margot, like Marie, is close to me, a strengthening, reassuring presence…. Somehow their good and my good are identical.’ The Irish TV broadcaster John Quinn wrote to his wife, Olive, after her death. ‘I believe in your presence totally. That’s why I talk to you all the time. You are in the light. It’s me that needs the letters…. I am at once heartbroken by your absence and consumed by your ‘presence’ – more in love with you than I ever thought possible… I know you give me little signs now and then, and I know I must be patient’.
Such intimate and humble revelations are in line with what many of us may dimly experience. Those with exceptional awareness can encourage us to tune into this new frequency. Human solidarity and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints offer an understanding, in terms of relationships, of the widespread experience of connectedness with those we cared for and who cared for us. They still care.