The odd coincidences that happen after loved ones die

Is the grief-struck human mind so desperate to find solace, proof, belief, that we seam meaning into tugging occurrences with no meaning? Or do the coincidences have meaning beyond us?

Humans seek comfort, which can be through a sense that our beloved is still somehow close; that they’re manifested through nature. Picture: istock

It makes us vulnerably human. It is embarrassing to talk about. Sensible, rational people do not. There’s an aversion to being judged, looked down upon, sneered at. I have this very fear – yet into the woods I go. Into the realm of strange things, odd coincidences, that happen after loved ones die. It’s a tussle with rationality, and for me, I know what side should be winning. But, but. Is the grief-struck human mind so desperate to find solace, proof, belief, that we seam meaning into tugging occurrences with no meaning? Or do the coincidences have meaning beyond us? Are humans so alert to story that we leap to create story out of random, quotidian events, freighting them with portentousness? Oh, the wiliness and beauty of the human brain. Am I incautious in even writing this?

In the eyes of others, just articulating examples of oddness after the death of a loved one reduces their strange power. Encourages the dismissive thought, “Ah, woo woo, got the measure of that one: deluded, wrong-headed.” Yet what of the storm that struck the church hall as we were preparing for my mother’s wake after her suicide; a tempest of such explosive power and magnificence that it seemed to us there that her enormous, roaring spirit was passing, in fury and tortured regret? What of my scientist friend – the most fervently rational person I know – who couldn’t explain the bird suddenly so much in her life after her parent’s passing, and was convinced, in utter bewilderment, that it meant something? What of the sense of heaviness, still, at massacre and death camp sites? What of the Indigenous elder who told me out bush that the great cleansing wind after someone momentous has died is their spirit passing to the other side? All those hungry ghosts, greedy for an imprint somehow on this Earth; or is the unease purely within us, the carelessly living suddenly brought up abrupt?

What of the storm that struck the church hall as we were preparing for my mother’s wake after her suicide? Picture: istock

The human mind is a wondrous thing; it balms, corrects, ameliorates, creates. And it is so very difficult for us to accept death. Humans seek comfort, which can be through a sense that our beloved is still somehow close; that they’re manifested through nature. An animal, a bird, an unusual weather event. How advanced yet superstitious is the human species, as we cleave to mysticism and magic amid all the momentous scientific strides into rationality. Some believe that these out-of the-ordinary occurrences are instances of the dead knocking on the door of the living; wanting in, wanting our attention. That these situations are a process forcing the open-hearted, reeling soul to take note of something beyond us. Signalling to us that we are watched over. Are not alone.

Yet even writing this, broaching this, I feel foolish. Has it ever – whisper it – happened to you? There’s such a stigma around admitting it. There’s no explanation, apart from tricks of the mind. “When we’re interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it,” Paulo Coelho wrote. “The mystics call these phenomena ‘signs’, the sceptics ‘coincidence’, and psychologists ‘concentrated focus’, although I’ve yet to find out what term historians would use.”

There is a cold and prosaic label for the situation – After Death Communications. And like Rorschach Tests, we see in them what we want to see. Some read meaning into them, others do not. Are they all in our heads? Is it merely the mind cleaving to comforting belief, signs, quackery – the mind demanding that this not be the end? For otherwise it is just the nothing, the vast nothing, like the suck of the retreating sea from the shore. Echoing, repeatedly,It is nothing, nothing, nothing; out there is nothing, nothing, nothing. But is that too terrifying for many of us to bear?

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