Thursday, March 28, 2024

Funeral director ponders the afterlife: Are our ancestors still with us?

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BOOK REVIEW

You are never alone.

There's always someone running in and out, always traffic in your house. The neighbors are close, your friends are a phone call away, and it seems as though you've always got company. You're never alone, and in the new book "All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak: A Funeral Director on Life, Death, and the Hereafter" by Caleb Wilde, you'll see how that might extend beyond.

For more than 170 years, someone in Caleb Wilde's family has served their community by facilitating funerals. Wilde himself is a sixth-generation funeral director and up until a few years ago, he says that he was skeptical about the possibility of a hereafter.

"I used to believe," he says, "that terror management theory offered the only viable way to explain heaven..."

But yet, he says, he heard "so many stories" that he "began to wonder if they might hold some kind of truth." Clients through the years had told him too many "ghost" tales for him to ignore. The idea nagged at him enough that he began to study it in earnest. His urgency increased when he suffered from burn-out and sought therapy.

His therapist helped him see that his family's past was what kept him at his job. He began to think: what if our ancestors were with us at all times?

Funerals, he believes, are to death what midwives are to birth, and funerals are not just "for the living." Because boundaries are blurred, he says that the dead are able to "surround us, live in us, integrate themselves into our soil." The love they carried in life extends to their children's children, and "it creates the world" – and when we listen to what the dead have to tell us, it begins "to fill a void we may not have even noticed." This helps keep our loved ones alive in us, and we don't even have to limit the conversation to speech. We bolster each other, support and provide for one another in life – why not receive the same from the dead?

The easiest way to decide whether or not you want to read "All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak" is to know your own tolerance for New Agey-ness. Author Caleb Wilde hypothesizes at great length about ancestry and the hereafter, in conjunction with their real-time influences on current lives. Can you follow it and will you embrace it?

Will you be able not to cringe at his explanations of Black funerals versus "white funerals"? He explains his well-considered intentions for the distinction, but the lengthy discourse grows quite awkward as it progresses. Can you tease out the stories that Wilde's known for, and which are fascinating and too few, from the philosophy that creeps into the narrative sometimes?

These are questions that will separate readers into those who ponder life and death now, and those who aren't quite ready for the deep stuff. If you fall into the first category, "All the Ways Our Dead Still Speak" should be your next new read. If not, then leave it alone.