Take Back the Magic

July 17, 2023
Finn (coauthor of The Way of the Rose), cofounder of the Way of the Rose ecofeminist community, explains in this fine-grained account how she repaired her fraught relationship with her brilliant and sullen father after his death. While the bond between the two had never been easy (“I learned early on not to ask my father for anything”), when the author received an enigmatic bequest after his death—a rock “girded by twisted iron rods”—she embarked on a quest to understand the man he’d been. But it soon became clear to Finn that defining “a single life without a glimpse of the long story of our souls would be like trying to decipher a sentence from a single word.” As she meditated on the fate of the soul after death, she began to view her father not as a “failed parent, a frustrated artist, a capable doctor, a cruel commander,” and told his spirit, “You hold within you so much more.” Mixing vivid memories of her own spiritual journey, open letters to her father, and advice to help readers commune with their ancestors’ spirits (such as creating an altar dedicated to the dead), Finn weaves a spellbinding meditation on how time never runs out for the deceased in prose that alternately enchants and haunts (“Were all of us, the living and the dead, hungry ghosts, prowling the Earth with mouths too small to ever fill our hearts with enough?”). It’s an affecting ode to the power of the unseen.