They're Not Gone. They're Closer Than Ever.

A reflection inspired by Andrea Gibson’s “Love Letter from the Afterlife”

I recently came across a poem that stopped me in my tracks: Love Letter from the Afterlife by Andrea Gibson. If you’ve never read it, go gently. It’s the kind of poem that rearranges your insides in the best possible way.

At its heart, it turns our usual thinking on its head. We so often speak about people "leaving us” when they die, as if they’ve vanished to some unreachable place. But this poem suggests something different, something quietly extraordinary:

“Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away.”

That line stayed with me. And recently, I thought about it a lot while preparing a ceremony for a man named Ray.

Ray and his wife Lynda once took a vegetarian boating holiday around the west coast of Scotland. They drifted through the inland lochs, moored up in quiet harbours, and watched curlews wheel overhead. One evening, they lay on their stomachs by the water in Ardfern, listening to birdsong and watching, breath held, as an otter surfaced and dived, completely unaware it was being watched. In that stillness, they both felt it: this wasn’t just a lovely holiday. This was home.

When they moved to Craignish, they didn’t come with a grand plan or a five-bedroom house. Just a caravan, and a sense that they were where they were meant to be. They built their life there slowly, surrounded by nature and community, laughter and birdsong.

Ray loved the quiet things. The shimmer on the water at dusk. A well-turned phrase. A simple, perfectly cooked meal. And he loved Lynda with the sort of calm steadiness that keeps a life anchored.

“Why did no one tell us,” Gibson writes,“that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?”

You can see Ray in the way people smile when they talk about him. In the memories Lynda holds of shared bluebells and bonfires. In the way you notice the light on the water and think, he would’ve loved that.

These aren't just echoes. They’re presence.

Love doesn’t vanish. It shifts. It folds itself into the people left behind—in the things we say, the food we make, the places we return to when we miss someone too much to stay indoors.

So if you’ve lost someone you love, know this: They’re not gone. They’re with you - in your breath, your memory, your rhythm, your laugh. And on the days when it’s hard to carry on, they’re the voice that says, “You’ve got this.”

Ray hasn’t left.

He’s just become part of the landscape he loved.

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