Dumb Supper

The call comes just as you always feared it would: a telephone shrieking in the dead of night. You were in a delta state of deep sleep. The impressions of your dreams haven’t quite dissolved. Your brain is foggy, your hands clumsy. An unwelcome adrenalin rush pumps your heart as you fumble to press the buttons that will answer the call. However they phrase it, in whatever tones it is stated from clinical detachment to empathetic caring, your blood runs cold upon hearing the words. Your loved one is no longer here, has begun the journey to the realm of the ancestors.

So started Labor Day 2023 for me, when my mother died of natural causes at the age of 91. From there, over the ensuing two years, eight people in my life have died. Some were friends from college and the early days in New York; some were friends from the move out west. One was a parent by marriage. Two were especially difficult: a brother who died violently by his own hand, and a very close friend whose deterioration was the most gut-wrenching thing I have ever witnessed. I am grateful that she was able to choose, as much as anyone gets to, her own exit, and that it was pain free. For me, these two years have been a passage of a different kind: to will myself to accept, even to comprehend, this new reality.

Digging into the grief was as difficult as my mother’s life often was. I have decided to honor her life by not glossing over its challenges, for her spirit teaches resilience. She loved openly, with the sentimentality of her generation and also its stubbornness. It was not her fault that her husband was not set up by life to handle it very well, nor were her attempts to fix him successful. As a woman of her time and place, the husband’s shortcomings were the wife’s obligation to overcome, and I know that she faced judgement from her own family. How awful, how dishonorable, to offer commiseration without any actual assistance.

My father had died years earlier, and my mother’s death was, though one hates to say this, in its way a mercy. She had not been lucid for a very long time, often lapsing into alternate lifetimes where she spoke of better circumstances, of happiness, before the ravages of time and circumstance took speech and cognition from her. But she was well cared for by those nearby who loved her deeply. She was allowed to eat whatever she wanted, which led to a diet of hamburgers, snack cakes and soda pop. Her physical pain was palliated even as her mental pain worked itself out to a happy childhood where she played with a favorite doll and ate sweets. Most importantly, she was safe.

How important safety is. It is the very reason we make homes. Our species sought shelter in caves and very soon after that, began making caves into homes. Our ancient ancestors danced in storytelling, ceremony, and simple joy, in an interconnection with the natural order of things so strong that through it, they reach for us today.

Almost a year after my mother passed, I had a Shamanic healing session whose impressions linger, still sustain me. There is so much more to share about the circumstances that brought me to that sacred space. I felt fragile, with psychic impressions pinging and constricting me in ways I had never experienced before. I was doing everything I could to normalize, but deeper truths pressed for acknowledgement, pressing more insistently as months and seasons passed.  

During our initial consultation, the healer confirmed that I was almost bound by the cords of a difficult time of illness and death, seemingly all around me. In the sacred space of ceremony, I felt the ancestors crowd around me, with the greater wisdom of centuries and the gentle love of release. Aided by animal and mineral totems, it awoke in me the ancient ceremonies of connection with and veneration for the ancestors.

As a fledgling pagan, I first learned about the practice of the dumb supper from books. It had been a part of our Samhain celebrations for most of my adult life. Every All Hallow’s Eve, we set out a formal place setting of food and wine for the spirits of the ancestors. This is the simplest version of the dumb supper, and versions of it are practiced, not under that name, across the cultural landscape. Many practices from sacred to secular set aside space in the home for ancestral shrines. And many traditions share meals with the ancestors, such as the practice of the gravesite picnic amongst celebrants of Dia de los Muertos, grandmothers on Memorial Day, and goths writing poetry on gloomy autumn days.  

The dumb supper is a ritual specific to those pagans and Witches who practice it. The supper is called dumb because it is silent, in deference to the gravity of the proceedings. Like a séance, the dumb supper is a solemn, sacred rite, not a party game. This is not the place to provide instructions for enacting the rite. However, ancestor reverence and welcome are practiced in numerous ways, so if you are moved to, leaving out a plate of food or lighting a candle in honor of the ancestors does indeed honor them, if that is your intention. Just be sure that it is your intention. If it is not, or if you are a skeptic looking to be convinced, it is best not to engage. Honoring the spirits of the ancestors is a grave occasion (though one also filled with release, even sometimes joy), and honoring them does indeed call them.

I am better now after a year off for grief and self-care. I have learned that ancestry isn’t always literal to DNA. We have ancestors by affinity, by culture, by bond – anywhere there is honor and love. And we honor them with every thought, fond memory, face in a photograph, page in a journal, favorite recipe made and shared. They send signs from hummingbirds and butterflies to visitations in a dream. Just this summer sunflowers appeared in our yard, out of nowhere, never having been planted. I was going through a rough patch where I wished, painfully, that Melanie was here to talk it through. How I yearned to hear what she would have said. With the appearance of those sunflowers, which as I write this have begun their own sad decline, she spoke, using the language of flowers to exhort me, as she always did, to work it out through words. Sunflowers grow amongst weeds but they always face the sun. Their season is brief but glorious, sad for it is annual but hopeful in that it is perennial.

The veil between the worlds thins on Samhain night, not proverbially. The spirits move easily between the worlds on this holiest of nights. Jack o’lanterns light their way as the delicious shivers of October become the chill winds of November. All Saints Day dawns clear and cold to usher in the first whispers of winter to come and the final whispers of another sacred season of Samhain. The portals between worlds begin to close inexorably, like the stone that seals the tomb. Ancestors must return to the otherworld, but they are ever behind the veil, reaching for us as we reach for them. Grief is the heaviest emotion there is, but it can also be the most reverent. Remembrance during time on earth is a sacred act, and, with time shared across the mists, profound and profoundly healing.