What happens when we die

 

The bleak beauty of a new saltmarsh on the Otter estuary in East Devon, part of a National Nature Reserve

I read on Instagram this morning that scientists have now discovered that energy leaves the body (of both humans and animals) when we die. Tibetan monks comment, ‘You need science to tell you what silence already knows?’ 
 
I agree with the monks. Science is not proof. Our own experience is what matters. As my little book of Chinese wisdom says, 'Why light a candle to see the sun?'
 
I’ve seen the soul of one of our dogs, Brindle, fly from her body like a puff of smoke and zoom northwards over our shed. It wasn’t just energy. It was a discrete entity and it was in a hurry. Brindle had nearly died a year before and I’d prayed for her to stay alive because I wasn’t in a position to deal with her death at the time. She’d waited for me, even though she’d wanted to go. I write about this, and more, in a previous post.
 
I feel annoyed when I read about things like the above because I don’t talk about most of what I experience because people mock. They need science to ‘prove’ things. Then the world catches up with me and I wish I’d had the courage to speak sooner. 
 
This blog is one of the few places where I do speak out and my time here now without either parents or Frog is for me to learn to be my whole self without shame or doubt. That’s something else I ‘know’, and I knew it as soon as Frog died.
 
I didn’t see his soul go. It vanished in a second, as we stood at a field gate and looked at the view and he dropped to the ground beside me with a cry of surprise.
 
Then the emergency services arrived and spent about an hour by the side of the road trying to revive him. Then they took him to hospital and tried some more with bigger machines. When they pronounced him dead, I was relieved. And that’s something I’ve never admitted before. He wanted to go. It was his time to go. He was removing himself for the moment so that I could learn.
 
How Frog and I have communicated since then is another story, and one I might go into another time.
 
And none of that is what I intended to write in this post. I intended to tell you about another moving film from the Right to Roam campaigners. In September I directed you to a film about their mass trespass swim at Kinder Reservoir. This new film is about looking after a neglected river in East London and about what they call ‘wild service’. And I hope to tell you more about that too when I know more myself.

Sunset last week as I walked home with Ellie