death is not the end of relationship nor accountability

Death is not the end of relationships nor accountability. When we do harm, our accountability is pivotal if there will be repair. And despite whether a person has been accountable or not, something changes when that responsible person dies. There is something left over, remaining unfinished, still needing words and tending to.  Different as it may be from when we’re all here in the living world, we, as the living, relate to the dead through what is unfinished. The dead don’t suddenly become perfected beings; the consequences of one’s actions carry into death and shape the way the living can and will relate to the dead. Accountability remains even in death. There is still something owed by the dead to the living. 

I participated in a victim-offender dialogue in which the responsible man had killed a young woman and was meeting with her mother. There was deep pain from years of grief, shame, anger, remorse, and the lot. In their meeting emerged profound healing through honesty, accountability, forgiveness, and understanding, healing that included speaking to, as well as of, the young woman. Mother and man became family to one another, holders of deep compassion and healing mutual support and for the daughter. I’ve been connected to both over the years since their meeting.

He just died. With tears and a kind of emotional messy wondering, the mother called me with the news. It’s not like everything is fixed now. Far from it. The gone-ness of death is surely no fixed-ness.  All that arises is more questions. Accountability and healing take on new dimensions and facets. 

What kind of conversations must now be happening between this man and the young woman?...In what ways does his accountability when alive inform accountability now amongst the dead? …What might the young woman ask of him now that he’s there? How has she changed during these years? …In what new way is the mother a participant in this new dialogue? How might mom support, speak, and request now what couldn’t be spoken or asked before? …What new dimensions of healing and accountability open? 

Much of these explorations are mysteries uncovered in the doing. Those involved - the living and the dead - form the vital relations of inquiry and transformation. This work cannot be prescribed and predicted. Each needs the other in the unfolding unfinished journey of grieving, loving, repairing and healing. Somehow, even I am participant in this ongoing work given my ongoing relationship to mother, to the responsible man, and even the daughter though I didn’t meet her while still amongst the living. I certainly feel both the permeating sorrow together with the uncommon urgency of holding relationship as so important that the conversations of healing and accountability persist. 

The key is being willing to re-cognize that death is not end and the dead are not gone. As the bookend to birth, dying is a threshold into another way of being a vital part of life in sum.  Paulo Coelho wrote, “We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.” This is also true of unfinished accountability. Accountability remains in death, and remains between and amongst the living and the dead. 

So from different rooms, the loving and the healing continue.