What Working With the Dead Taught Me About How to Live

The first time I sat with a soul who had not yet let go, I was in a hospital room with my dying mother. I felt something shift in the room. A pressure. A density. A presence I could not explain away as my own mind performing for itself.

I want to be careful about what I claim here. I am not going to tell you that I have proof of an afterlife, or that I can offer you evidence that would satisfy a sceptic across a table. What I can tell you is that something in that room asked to be attended to, and that attending to it changed me, and that forty years of returning to that threshold has taught me more about how to live than almost anything else I have studied, including the philosophy I have spent my life studying formally.

You would think this work would be morbid. That sitting so often with death would deepen a fear of it or wear a person down into a kind of grey resignation. It has done the opposite. Completely and absolutely the opposite.

Peeking through the veil

What the threshold actually is

Shamanic traditions across cultures speak of the psychopomp: from the Greek psyche, soul, and pompos, guide. A figure who accompanies the dead who have not fully departed, who linger for reasons that sound less strange the longer you sit with them: shock, unfinished business, fear, an unwillingness to let go of what they loved.

Whatever one makes metaphysically of this practice, it is a very old answer to a very old problem. Long before formal religion, before written language, human beings were performing rites of accompaniment for the dying and the dead. The philosopher's version of this is Socrates in the Phaedo, telling his students on the morning of his execution that philosophy itself is a preparation for death, a lifelong rehearsal for the one appointment none of us can avoid. The shaman's version is a drum, a darkened room, and the willingness to stay present at a boundary most people spend their lives trying not to look at directly.

I have come to think these are the same gesture, dressed differently.

The first thing: we haunt our own lives

One of the more disorienting patterns in this work is encountering something that does not seem to register that its time has passed. It continues, out of habit, through motions that belonged to a chapter now closed.

Heidegger built an entire philosophy around the claim that most of us live this way while still breathing. He called it inauthentic existence, a life lived in the anonymous voice of 'what one does', rather than in full acknowledgement of one's own finitude. We defer the confrontation with our own ending, and in deferring it, we defer the confrontation with our own life. We go through motions that belong to a self we have already outgrown because admitting the old self is finished would mean facing what comes next.

What the dead who cannot move on have shown me, again and again, is a mirror. Stuckness looks the same on either side of the threshold: a kind of stagnation, a grey half-presence, motion without arrival. The opposite of being alive is not death. It is this: the refusal of transition.

The second thing: love that will not let go becomes a cage

I have sat with presences who could not leave because they were afraid for the people they had left behind. The love in that refusal is real. It is also, I have come to believe, mistaken about what it is protecting.

What I find myself saying, in those encounters, sounds almost severe: the most loving thing you can do for the people you love is to complete your own journey. Lingering does not protect them. It keeps you both suspended.

I do not think this wisdom belongs only to the dead. I think about how often I have stayed inside a relationship, a role, or a version of myself out of something that called itself loyalty but was closer to fear, a way of postponing my own next chapter by insisting I was needed exactly where I already was. Attachment that refuses to loosen, whether to people, to identities, or to the past, eventually becomes a cage for everyone standing inside it.

The third thing: the relationship does not have to end

Ancestor veneration is among the oldest continuous spiritual practices we know of. Before almost anything we now call civilisation, people were in conversation with those who came before them, asking for guidance, maintaining a relationship across the membrane of death.

We have largely lost the vocabulary for this in the modern West. Death, in our culture, is treated as a full stop. You grieve, and then you are expected to file the relationship under 'over'. To speak of it as ongoing is to risk sounding, at best, sentimental, and at worst, unwell.

I no longer accept that framing, and not out of naivety. What I have found, sitting with the practice of ancestral work, is less a set of claims to defend and more a felt sense of being held by something longer than a single life. A rootedness. A place in a lineage of people who loved and struggled and endured before I existed. Whatever one believes about the metaphysics of it, that sense of continuity has made me considerably less afraid of my own death, because it suggests that death changes the form of a relationship rather than annihilating it.

Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us, since where death is, we are not. It is a tidy argument, and I understand its appeal. But I have come to think the deeper comfort is not that death is nothing. It is that the relationship is not nothing, even after death.

What our fear of death and the dead is costing us

We are a culture that has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid death. We have medicalised it, institutionalised it, and moved it almost entirely out of the home and into rooms most of us will never enter until we have to. Most people alive today will pass through an entire life without sitting beside a dying person, without touching a body after death, without any direct encounter with the single event that every human being who has ever lived has faced.

We have delegated death to professionals and left the room. I think we are paying for that in ways we do not always recognise.

Because the capacity to face death honestly and the capacity to face life honestly are not two separate capacities. They are the same one. The awareness that everything is temporary, your body, your relationships, your circumstances, the people you love, is not, in itself, a source of despair. It is the source of urgency and presence and the particular sweetness of a moment that will not come again. Strip that awareness away and what is left is a kind of sleepwalking: the conversation deferred, the repair postponed, the risk shelved for a later that never quite arrives.

What the dying regret

If I had to compress several decades of sitting at this threshold into a single lesson, it would be something like this.

Stop spending time on what does not matter. Status, appearance, the performance of having one's life in order: almost none of it survives contact with the reality of an ending. What holds up is whether you loved well. Whether you were present. Whether you let yourself be known, and let the people around you be truly known by you in return.

Stop waiting for a future point when everything will finally be settled enough to really show up. It does not settle. Unsettledness is simply the condition of being alive, and it does not resolve before you die; it resolves, if it resolves at all, because you decided to live fully inside it.

And stop assuming you have more time than you do. Not as a source of panic, but as a source of clarity. If you knew, with certainty, that you had one year left, what would you stop doing? What would you finally say, and to whom? That question tends to be more useful than most of what fills an ordinary week.

Unfinished business

One of the most common things I encounter in this work is the living who are stuck because of something left unresolved with someone who has died. A conversation that never happened. Words withheld in both directions until it was too late to offer them.

The modern assumption is that this grief has no exit, because the person is gone and the conversation can never take place. I no longer accept that assumption either. Whatever form it takes, and I hold that form with appropriate humility, I have watched people arrive carrying years of complicated grief and leave having said what needed saying, and having received something they needed to hear. Death does not have to be the end of a story. With the right kind of attention, it can be a continuation: a new chapter of a relationship too important to simply abandon.

I did not expect a shamanic practice to sharpen my philosophy or decades working with others at the threshold of death to make me more, rather than less, attached to life. But that has been the honest shape of it. The dead, in my experience, are not fearsome. They are simply unfinished. And sitting with them has taught me, more than any seminar or text ever did, what it actually means to be finished with nothing when your own time comes.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, a Cambridge researcher, and a seventh-level shaman. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.