#Talking To The Dead

[gaytobymeres]

Love how Jones literally falls out a tree and Tom does not care at all

[upthelagan]

Midsomer Murders. Talking to the Dead.

[corpsegoddessresurrected]

You are very pretty

careful, sweetie. you're dangerously close to getting tackled and cuddled.

[with-our-hearts-in-it]

Out-of-context quotes from TWM

[blabbershere]

If you knew how quickly people forget the dead, you will stop living to impress people.

— Christopher Walken

[oldbutnotyetwise]

Talking to the Dead

     So recently my wife and I were walking our dog Kiwi through an area cemetery.  It is a nice part of this particular walk as it is quiet, peaceful and away from the traffic.  It also allows us to be beside each other so we can talk more easily.  City sidewalks are not conducive to my wife, my wheelchair and our dog Kiwi walking side by side.  This means any conversation must be had over the shoulder competing with the noise of passing traffic.  To be honest, that was hard at the best of times, and these aren’t the best of times.  Combine my mumbling with my dear wife’s denial of any hearing loss, our conversations could involve a lot of smiling and nodding with minimal comprehension.  The comment about my wife’s hearing loss, can we just keep that between us?  She’s a little sensitive about it.

     We were walking through the cemetery, chatting about different things enjoying the sunshine and fresh air when  Robin then turned to me and asked; “Where should I go to talk to you after?”  Meaning after I’m dead, it is one of the many things I love about Robin, we can talk about the hard things and it’s okay.  Deny it all we want, but we both know what’s coming so why not talk about it while we can.  If I do this last part of my life right, hopefully I will leave no unanswered questions and perhaps that will bring peace to those I am leaving behind.

     So where does one go to speak to those who have died?  Do we all do it?  This got me thinking about those times I spoke to those who had died.  I will clarify that these conversations can be held aloud, or as most of mine are, held totally in my head.  Although I may not be getting actual responses, sometimes in my heart I feel a connection to the person I am speaking with, I suspect because they still reside there in my heart.

     My Mom has been gone some 21 years and I speak to her from time to time.  Mostly I have been telling her about life  events and telling her that I am sorry that she is missing them.  I say that I wish she could have seen her granddaughter Elizabeth grow up into the amazing person she is.  I wish that she could have met my sweet Robin, I just know that they would have gotten along so well as they have so many things in common.  I tell her that the brave way she faced her cancer and left this earth inspires me daily as I walk a similar path.  My Dad has been gone ten years next month, I talk to him telling him that at the end of his life when I was making his healthcare decisions that I hope I got it right because it still haunts me.  I apologize to him that I wasn’t more patient with him and for feeling the need to correct his many tales.  My Dad was never one to let facts get in the way of a good story, I should have allowed him that.  I have lost some well loved friends along the way, I speak to them telling them how much I loved them and that I hope I was a good friend to them.  Sometimes I talk to them about how screwed up this world is getting, and I wonder what they would say about it.  I don’t hear their response but I take comfort as it feels like they are sitting there beside me.

     In Tom Hanks’ recent movie, A Man Called Otto, it shows Otto going to the cemetery with his lawn chair and thermos of coffee.  He sits there by his wife’s gravestone talking to Sonya like she is sitting there across the kitchen table, and not six feet under him.  It is poignantly heartwarming and devastatingly sad at the same time. In the movie An Unfinished Life, Robert Redford’s character Einar walks up the hill behind his house to his son’s grave almost daily where he sits on a bench and talks to his son updating him on mundane daily life.  Both characters seem to take comfort in the practice.  It makes me ponder what is more important, to speak or to be heard?

    Now I should confess that I have a love/hate relationship with cemeteries.  One part of me finds them to be of amazing historical significance.  Names of those long past, dates of their births and deaths, connecting them to a spouse or child.  Sometimes some snippet of information giving you a minute detail about a life lived.  There are the tombstones with lambs on them for the death of a loved child.  There are sections with row upon row of crosses for the Veterans who gave their lives In a foreign land at the whim of the politicians at the time.  Mostly cemeteries are peaceful, well maintained green space, with little to no traffic.  They have places to sit, sometimes under a tree, or perhaps just on a patch of grass.  Now I am a story teller who is always in search of a new story and it occurs to me that these places contain thousands of stories, most of them destined to remain untold forever, and I think that is sad.  

     One of my old running routes used to include the road that circled through a cemetery near my workplace, it added the extra distance to stretch my run on my lunch break to five kilometres.  It was a newer cemetery, not like the massive old ones that have thousands of graves, many over one hundred years old.  I would only occasionally see someone visiting a grave there, sometimes it was a fresh grave, more often than not it was an older person who I suspect was visiting their lost partner.  

     I don’t like the idea of being buried after I die.  The idea of burying my body in the ground to slowly rot and decay has no appeal to me. I have already arranged and paid for my cremation.  The whole dust to dust thing just makes sense to me. 

     So where should Robin go to talk with me after?  

     Well the best place would be to walk the trails I cut on our property up in Nipissing, but that is problematic because someone else owns that property now and I doubt he has maintained the trails that I built up over the four years of living there.  I did also hike the trails behind our property that cut through a hunt camp and then led to Crown Land, so that could work, although that’s a pretty long hike.

     She could go to the Lowville Bistro where we had our first date and subsequent wedding exactly one hundred and fifty months later.  Next to our property up north I would think that would be the next most significant spot.

     When I lived in Hamilton Robin and I would go with my dog Buddy to the Arboretum at the Royal Botanical Gardens where we would often hike the trails.  I had a yearly membership there but avoided it during the summer.  We would visit there often in the fall, winter and spring when less people were about.  There are a few places to sit, or lookouts we used to visit that would be a good place to sit and chat with me.

     Realistically I would tell her that any place, inside or outside, where she could sit in the quiet, and perhaps sip on a hot cup of tea would be a good place to talk to me.  I would encourage her to talk to me about what’s going on in her life, just like we did when we laid together in bed, wrapped in each others arms on our lazy mornings.  Those times when life was as perfect as life could be.

     Will I send messages back from the other side, and if so what would those messages look like?  

     I don’t know but I suspect the postal service and wifi won’t be up to par over there.  Some believe messages from the other side look like butterflies who might land on you, rainbows, birds (usually red cardinals), flowers, or finding coins, particularly dimes for some reason.  

     I have, or should say had a friend named Margot who also travelled on the ALS Highway with me for a bit.  She chose to exit this life on her birthday last December, but since then her Facebook page is still being updated. Did I mention she was a bit of a character?  Maybe she got the upgraded WiFi package on the other side.  The day after her death her Facebook page advised she had arrived safely at the Pearly Gates and that it was cocktail hour.  She advised us that she would still be around, “Just keep your eyes open for blue herons and ghosts with red lipstick”.  The Grand River is close to where I live, rest assured that when I see a Blue Heron I will smile and give a nod to Margot who is now flying free.

     Robin will know what my sign to her from the other side is, there is only really one thing it could be.  It will be the full moon, what we have always referred to as “our moon” because it was watching over us as we drove to our homes after our first date.  It was the moon we would point out to each other over our near fourteen years together, the moon we would stare at while wrapped in each others arms looking out our bedroom window on the farm.  It is the moon I will want her to gaze at, smiling as she remembers all the days we shared our moon together.  Most importantly I will be reminding her that there is always light in the darkness, and that is what I need her to always remember.

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light”

Aristotle

[aenbyveryverygayperson]

Warlock Luffy Au time!

Talking with the dead; Part 1.

- Post marineford and post time skip.

Luffy looked at the ritual in the book

‘Don’t do it. Don’t do it.’

As he thought this he was preparing the items

He looked at the items.

“Damn it.”

Suddenly the ritual was ready on the deck

“What’s this for?”

“Talking with the dead.”

Usopp looked at Brook and back at Luffy confused

“I don’t mean Brook, I mean…”

Luffy gave a scary evil smile

“GHOSTS!”

“AAAAAH!”

“Usopp. It’s not even night! How did he scare you!?”

“HEEEE CAN BE SCARYYYYY!”

“SHISHISHISHI!”

Nami rolled her eyes at Usopp

“Are you really going to talk with ghosts Lu?”

“Yep!”

“Fufu~ Really? You can do that?”

“Apparently from the ritual in this book”

“Really?!”

“Like a zombie or something? Because I don’t want a repeat of last time.”

“Whoa! That’s so superrr!”

“Shishishi!”

Everyone gathered around

Luffy’s eyes slightly glowed red as the ritual started happening and some ghosts came out.

Doing the ritual tired Luffy as he leaned against his arm a bit.

A ghost went around Luffy and hugged him.

He was the same. Everything except with a wound on his chest.

“Luffy!”

Luffy looked at the ghost and smiled with specks of tears near his eyes while the ghost and him hugged.

“It’s worked… ACE!”

[taggedlamb]

i will never be a watered down version of myself again.

[ohthisisgonnasuck]

I do a thing 2-3x a year and one of my favourite days for it is Feb 15.

I start my day by loading a broom and rake into my vehicle... then, go to local businesses, offering to buy their leftover flowers in bulk. The rest of my day is spent at local cemeteries / mausoleums.

I usually bring some biodegradable tissue paper for writing notes, or folding flowers, if I can't get any from the shops. Morbid as it may be, it's one of the few days I look forward to.

If you have any words for the dead, feel free to share them. I usually spend time on those with a living partner, children, unknowns, and the ultra cheap markers.... everyone deserves to be remembered.

[thatnerduknow98]

“Did you hear that your sister is pregnant?”

I was having a relaxing afternoon, laying down on a picnic blanket on my great grandma’s grave like I do every year after spring finally arrives. Then I shot up.

There was no one around. Just a bunch of headstones, some in wonderful, fresh condition, others cracked and barely readable.

“Yes, darling, I am talking to you. My great grandchild. The only one of your sibling group I never met.”

I turned around and looked at her headstone. It read “Margaret Amelia Williams, 1902-1995.” Grandma died of old age, they told me. I was born in ‘97.

“Quit freaking out and let me gossip. It’s been quite a long while since anybody has listened to what I’ve had to say.”

“You speak?” I responded.

“All the dead do. It’s just never quiet enough for you to hear us.”

Her voice did sound kind of weak. I guess that makes sense since her vocal cords have been decomposing for 30 years.

“What do the dead have to speak about?” I asked after some thought.

“Mostly what tomfoolery our descendants get into. Those of us in this graveyard like to compete to see whose grandchildren are the stupidest. Lorraine, who’s buried a few rows back, is winning that competition right now.”

“What did Lorraine’s grandchild do?”

“He did two shots of everclear back to back, stole a semi truck with a full load, crashed it, then lied to state police about being drunk when it was obvious. At least, that’s what the kids’ father sad when he visited the graveyard last weekend.”

“Oh.”

It was quiet for a minute, the way cemeteries should be quiet. I had to break the silence: “So my sister is pregnant?”

“Yeah. Her one night stand guy apparently doesn’t know how to wear a condom properly and your sister didn’t catch the mistake until after the deed was done. Quite frankly, I’m appalled she didn’t think to take a morning after pill but to each their own I guess. She wanted to drop out of college anyway so now she has a good reason to.”

“Do you talk to her too?”

“I tried to but she wasn’t listening. No one ever does.”

“Sis doesn’t have good hearing anyway,” I said, recalling the time I accidentally blew her left eardrum out with my trombone. It never healed. “What else do you know?”

“Girl, what don’t I know?”

They say that “Two can only keep a secret if one of them is dead”. You find out that’s not entirely true, for the dead are quite happy to gossip to any who will listen

[marypsue]

Keep seeing that post where OP starts like 'Thinking about...grieving the undead' and then adds on about like. Real life situations where people have not died but have left your life and you would have reason to grieve them.

All respect, that's an important concept, but that is not what I am thinking about when I read 'grieving the undead'.

[upthelagan]

Midsomer Murders. Talking to the Dead.

[corpsegoddessresurrected]

TRICK OR TREAT :O

:O-kay, give me a sec...

Ah! You get

This cute little Gunter tin with some pretty dice inside!

Unfortunately it looks like you rolled a 1...

[with-our-hearts-in-it]

[Banner made by Teen_Fix on Wattpad]

Quotes

Hestia Nightingale is your usual high school senior, trying to get through her last year off high school with 4 hours of sleep daily, worrying about college applications, and juggling her weekend job at her mom's shop. Her nightmares are the only thing that keeps her apart from others her age. Other than that, she's pretty mundane.

When she comes to the Other World after her mother is taken, she learns she's a lot more special, or cursed, than she thought she was. Stuck in the middle of a war, a prophecy in her name causes her to hunt down the person who started it. As she recovers memories of her life in this world, 𝘩𝘦𝘳 world, every step she takes, she realizes there is still a lot she wasn't told, coupled with the fact that she sees literal ghosts that no one else can't, well, Hestia's just about to go insane.

The Whispering Mist is a fantasy with little romance, following Hestia Nightingale when she discovers she is a lot more important than she thought she was...just not in the world she knows. Sent to Earth for protection, Hestia is taken back to The Other World, Opaos(o-pa-o-se), after it proves to not be safe.

However, it turns out that she is not meant to be safe, she is meant to be an unwilling hero fighting a war for a world, for people, she doesn't quite remember, despite it being her birthplace.

With her childhood best friend who was forced to come with her from Earth, Jonathan Meyer, and two knights from the Kingdom of those from the Light, Lvsna, Cassandra Rivers and Sebastian Lillian, she goes on a quest to find the enemy who calls herself Nemesis and destroy her. For she has taken over an entire kingdom and laid it to ruin.

In her travels, she meets the ghost of a young king, someone she feels too much of a connection to have not known in her short childhood in Opaos. The First Who Failed to keep Nemesis at bay.

----------------------------------------

I have been working on this WIP for years. I plan to finish the first draft by mid- or late next year and post it on Wattpad to gauge reader interest and gather feedback.

My main goal, however, is to publish it as a proper book.

The idea of holding a physical copy of my work, knowing that readers will be able to experience my characters and their journeys, is incredible. So I will be sharing my writing process here, and hopefully hype it up enough for the release on Wattpad and then for when it is published as a traditional book.