Who would have thought that a single picture and a simple poem could open a doorway into the afterlife?
5 years ago today, when I lost the most important person in my life — my dad — in a way so sudden and shattering it felt unreal. How could his presence, his personality, his very essence, his warm, bubbling energy simply vanish into nothingness?
My mind kept wrestling with those awful words: death, died, gone. I tried to absorb this new reality without him in it, but every thought felt heavy, like moving through thick mud. Did this really happen? Is he really dead? He can't be gone...
Somewhere deep inside, my heart whispered a different truth: He is still here. We will meet again.
But my head could not reconcile it. In the world we live in, we are told what grief is supposed to look like. We’re told that holding on too long means denial, that hoping or believing that there might be something more beyond what we can see and touch is just wishful thinking or plain crazy. I felt like I was failing at everything even at grieving “the right way.”
People told me to be strong, to deal with what happened, to process it, to move on. Very few understood the impossibility of such a task when a soul connection is this deep and the grief this sharp. Only one person understood and knew from the beginning what this painful journey was going to reveal. That such a strong connection would be powerful enough to transcend the material existence as we know it.
So I stopped listening to the rules. I stopped worrying what others thought I should do with my grief. My heart and soul began searching for their own truth.
Call it divine timing - about a year before losing my dad, I saw a painting called 'First Day in Heaven' by Kerolos Safwat. I don't know why, but something urged me to screenshot it. It popped up again in my social media feed shortly after he passed and the familiar sight of it hit me like a comforting warm breeze on a winter day.
For the briefest nanosecond I felt a lifting of the crushing weight in my chest. A little sigh of relief from the gutwrenching pain and sadness.
Not long after, a poem by Henry Scott Holland found its way to me. As if it had been placed in my path for a reason.
It lit something inside me, a quiet spark into another way of thinking. A new journey, filled with stories, signs, hope and proof that life — and consciousness — does not end. Proof that death is not a wall, but a doorway. Proof that energy changes, but it does not fully disappear.
The poem reminded me to keep speaking my dad's name as I always had, to laugh at his silly jokes, to talk to him in the same tone. Not to wrap his memory in sorrow, but to let it live in light. Because he is nearby. Death is not a cliff’s edge, but rather a bend in the path, a momentary separation. And that he's just “around the corner.”
And he hasn't left my side ever since.
Death is nothing at all (Henry Scott Holland)
Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner.
All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!