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Recently my dad died.

It wasn't unexpected or sudden. 

On July 7th, at around 3:30pm, a dear friend passed the veil.  After over a year of alternative therapies, the cancer in her would not relent.  She chose death with dignity.

Jane and I met when my best friend brought me to Jane's home for a shamanic study group.  She practiced shamanism, read tarot, and had converted to Judaism as an adult. 

At a crossroads, I watched a crow had been hit by a car, laid to rest there on one side of the street. Crows descended from the trees, probably a hundred crows. In groups of maybe eight, ten, twelve, they would walk around that individual that was on the ground. And then they would fly off, and over a fifteen, twenty-minute period, eventually all the crows flew off, leaving that corpse of the crow in the road. Tony Angell, Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans

Crows have been yelling at me a lot lately.  I'd like to tell you that I can understand what they've been saying, but I don't know.  In my experience, it generally means that something is going to happen.  Sometimes good, sometimes not good, but more than daily life.  If he is feeling generous, Crow may show up in my dreams to elaborate.  But he has been silent on the matter, leaving the tiny cousins to chide me.  Or praise me?  Who knows.  I've never had a terribly strong communication connection with the goddesses, ancestors and spirits.  My logical brain is quick to tell me that I am just telling myself what I want to hear, so I try to rely on omens, portents, dreams and divination.  Sometimes that gives me a clear path, most of the time it doesn't.  Sometimes when it's particularly murky, I do as my friend JohnM, the psych guy, suggests and I assign reasons and explanation as it's as good of an answer as any.  A very Roman approach to things, but sometimes better than nothing.

Oh, yeah. The vault. That's where the stuff I can't handle goes. Kerplunk! - Finn, Adventure Time

For those of you who have been with me for long enough, you know I have an unsteady relationship with death.  I'm not one of those Witches who can see spirits, talk to ghosts and visualize the other side of the Veil.  Or really visualize very much at all, though that's improved a little over the years.  I tend to "see" things in words, song lyrics, poetry and emotions.  You can imagine how fun this was as a baby Witch where every exercise ever starts with "Visualize . . ."  My sister, the Divine Miss M, who is not a practicing Witch and not really all that Catholic, has a much more open dialogue with the other side than I do and does not spend her dreams with dead people telling them that they're dead like I do.  She catches omens, portents and prophecy at a rate that is completely annoying given that she's not into the occult.

On the recent Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete women had the option of riding up a winding road on a mountainside in the back of a farm truck singing “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” or could choose to go with the guard in his closed automobile.

That evening one of the older women who had chosen to ride in the car said, “I saw how much fun you were all having, but I have done that before. This time I was happy to let the rest of you do it.”

“That’s exactly how I feel about death,” I responded. “Some people want to live on after death, but I don’t. I am happy to let others do it. The only thing that would upset me would be if life did not go on after me.”