Last week, my maternal grandmother, Sylvia Glenn Greene Hanley, would have turned 103 years old. My younger cousin sent a group text to family remembering her and adding, “I feel her presence through all of you.” This comment was especially poignant, for Jay lives on the west coast, and I haven’t seen my cousin in years.
I know that many Mexicans believe each of us dies three times: the first after our heart stops beating, the second when our body or ashes are buried, and the third time in the future when our name is spoken for the last time. Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, is a festival to celebrate one’s ancestors with food, drink and stories. As my cousin implied, the living keep the memory alive.
The concept of these so-called three deaths also led me to the work of David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford who’s best known for his nonfiction about the brain and consciousness. His short work of fiction, “Sum,” has a chapter that imagines a humongous lobby filled with souls awaiting this third death. Wryly, Eagleman imagines there are long tables with coffee, tea, and cookies—you can help yourself. The "Callers" are heavenly beings that, after a person’s name is last spoken on Earth, summon that soul to the next journey. No one knows where that is. The soul leaves the lobby, never to return. Some are hopeful, others fearful.
After I’d thanked my cousin for the text, I emailed our grandmother’s obituary to a few more friends and family. I guess I was in a reflective mood. My friend, April, wrote back that the middle name, Glenn, was also shared by her grandfather. She and her husband then bestowed their firstborn son with the same name. My friend wrote, “Good people, those Glenns with two n’s.”
While the afterlife is a mystery, Eagleman’s imaginative scenario makes me wonder what living connections might exist in this world just beneath our awareness. We share names and birthplaces. We share histories and hopes. We share this planet with all life, and maybe with the dead.
My wife and I named our firstborn in tribute to my grandmother; his middle name, Greene, is her maiden name. Occasionally, I call my son by his two names as a sign of affection. I think my grandmother would like that. Who knows? Maybe she is smiling even now.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church as well as a writer, pizza maker, coffee drinker and student of joy.
