They Never Left - You Just Stopped Listening
Marguerite noticed the smell first. Gardenias, faint but unmistakable, filling her kitchen every morning at exactly the same time, though there were no flowers in the house and no candle burning anywhere near it. Her mother had loved gardenias enough that friends brought them to the funeral by the armful. Six weeks after the burial, Marguerite mentioned the scent to me the way people mention things they’ve already decided not to be taken seriously about, quickly, almost apologetically, with a small laugh built in to soften the admission. I knew what this was and she waited - almost expecting her experience to be dismissed, but the dismissal never happened.
By the third week of spring she’d stopped mentioning it to others. Not because she was not experiencing the phenomena or that it had stopped. Because when she did, it was almost brushed asside as a fogment of her over active imagination. She’d gone back to work, and there wasn’t room in the mornings to bring it up or to talk to any of her work colleagues about what she was experiencing every day. She was frightened that she would be laughed at or that she would be forced to forget.
I hear some version of this constantly. The early weeks after a death produce an attention so raw it borders on unbearable. Every song on the radio seems aimed at the griever specifically. Every bird at the window holds still a beat too long. People notice everything in those first weeks because grief has stripped away the filter that ordinarily lets a person function, and what’s underneath the filter is attention itself, wide open and unguarded. Some signs are real and others are forced because of the need for connection. We want to continue those bonds that we think are gone. It’s like looking through a filter on a camera lens.
Then the filter changes. It has to. Nobody can sustain that kind of attention and hold down a job, or feed a family, or answer emails. So the sensitivity narrows, the way it’s supposed to, and the griever returns to something resembling normal function. What almost nobody tells them is that the narrowing isn’t neutral. It doesn’t just filter out noise. It filters out the very thing they’d started, however briefly, to notice. We need to choose when to add the right filters and what light we want to filter.
Patterns Beyond The Science
I’m careful about what I’ll claim here. I don’t know, in any way I could defend under cross-examination, what a gardenia scent with no source means scientifically. What I do know, because I’ve watched it in enough rooms to trust the pattern, is that the noticing itself changes nothing about whether the thing being noticed is real. I will go one stage further, to mention from my own point of view and experiences, that loved ones can manipulate the very fabric of our reality to make us aware. Nevertheless, It only changes whether the person is paying enough attention to catch it, but even that has to be in balance. Whatever presence is, or isn’t, in the six weeks or longer after a death, it is not more active in week one than week six or week 12. Only the attention is different. It is only the filter you have taken off the lens.
That’s the part worth sitting with, separate from any argument about what is or isn’t out there. Grief asks something rare of a person: total, undefended presence, at the exact moment life is demanding the opposite. The demand to return to function arrives almost immediately, usually from other people, sometimes from the griever’s own fear of appearing stuck. And the thing that quietly loses in that trade is not the dead. It’s the living person’s capacity to keep noticing. We have to take time to get out there with our cameras and lenses and our filters and notice that it does not change what you see, but how you see it and how you become aware of it. The signs are there, but there is a pattern in the way they are presented and how you become aware of the patterns.
I think about this less as a metaphysical question and more as a practical one. If a person spends the first weeks of grief in a state of attention they will likely never occupy again in quite the same way, what would it look like to protect a sliver of that state on purpose, instead of letting the calendar dissolve it for them? Not permanently. Not at the cost of function. Just enough to keep the door from closing all the way.
She still smells gardenias sometimes. She told me recently, almost as an afterthought, that she’d started keeping a small notebook by the kettle, not to prove anything to anyone, just so she’d stop being the one who forgot. Then there is another woman who lost her son, and whose grief was shattered as he made himself known in the kitchen and it’s not how she expected it, but she put on the lens and filter to learn to embrace the bond. That’s for another time in Compass and Signal!
What have you stopped mentioning, because there was nowhere left to file it, and what have you stopped noticing because you were afraid to change the lens? Let me know!
Thank you for reading Compass & Signal.
Watch this snippet for more insight!
Here is a video i recorded on my channel discussing our signs from our loved ones.