A few weeks ago, the friend I was sitting next to asked "What happens to the soul when we die?" I chuckled at the million dollar question, posed just moments before the start of our home group. How much time to you have? How much faith do you have? How much do you want to believe that we go somewhere else when this life is done?

A daily reader, "Healing After Loss" by Martha Whitmore Hickman, that I wish I'd found sooner in the process of mourning my mother, brings up "the possibility that death is {merely] eternal sleep..." and asks, "is that so bad?" Hard to say. I know that sometimes I feel my mother's presence, and sometimes I feel as if she is in me, like I am seeing the world through her eyes. Do I carry a part of her spirit? Is her soul somewhere other than in my memory and my longing?

Another old friend - high school classmate, and my former sister-in-law, died last week. Where is her soul? Is the essence of her watching to see what will become of the house she grew up in? Are her sons feeling any comfort in their loss? What about the part of her that was the teenage girl I rode around in her brother's Mustang with, the part of her that had that great old car we called "the nose." the part of her that mourned her own mother?  What about the part of her that went to get her hair done, just days before she passed. Did death surprise her as much as it surprised the rest of us?

Death comes in many forms. I'm thinking of another friend who seems to be undergoing a death of sorts, a death of a way of being. What will be on the other side of that journey, if indeed there is another side? How do we keep putting one foot in front of the other when it seems like all roads are blocked?

Years ago, a friend called to tell me that he'd inadvertently ingested liquor at a social event. "And I didn't die, Jeanine.The book says that 'to drink is to die' and I didn't die." My premise at the time, and still, is that there are many ways to die. I'd be lucky to die if I returned to drinking and using drugs - that would be the easy way out. It is fear of the spiritual death that helps me stay on this path. What happens to the soul when we die, but more importantly, what happens to the soul when we live and are attempting to hide from ourselves? What happens to the soul when our behavior conflicts with our values? How do we find peace internally when we've been focused on the bells and whistles of external validation? Spiritual literature would suggest that a part of us has to die in order to be reborn - whether you think of that in religious terms, or as a secular metaphor. The part of me that thought I needed a substance to survive had to die before I could step into a new life. How does that surrender, that flat-out hitting bottom, happen?

I don't know, and I truly wish that I did. I wish that I could have someone's "ah ha" moment for them. I wish that I could take a person's grief and hold it gently enough that they would know they will be OK, eventually. I wish I knew where our spirits go when we die, or if they go anywhere at all.

To end on a lighter note, what I very much appreciate are the various places where our spirits  interact. I spent time over the weekend with three women I've known since grade school, and we visited a fourth, marveling at the passage of time, transported to various basement parties, clandestine cigarettes, delinquent boyfriends -  our beginning explorations of the world. What happens to the soul while we live, should be the question. How do I nurture that part of me that remembers, with absolute clarity, long ago conversations, rain on the roof, the details of a kitchen I haven't seen in forty years? Another friend made mention of my trip down "memory lane." It isn't memory lane - it's my life, and I treasure these connections over time.

What I'm learning is that there really are no guarantees. Life, and death, are unpredictable, as much as I sometimes wish otherwise. I am reminded of a quote, author unknown to me: When death comes for me, let it find me alive. Indeed.

What have my musings on this dark November evening brought up for you? What do you do with those memories that comfort and the ones that are sad? How do you care for your soul?