Jenny is the name I’ll use but her actual name is not Jenny. Even when she was alive 20 years ago plus, that was not her name. But the song “Jenny of Old Stones” by Ramin Djawadi, first known to me via Game of Thrones, is an accurate theme song that has been sort of haunting me for a while. I didn’t quite know why it was haunting me. It hadn’t in the past. I’m pretty sure I figured it out now. The linked version is mostly instrumental and this version has the lyrics.
The realization came to me as I’ve continued to study the Tao and have branched out into other related but different schools of thought and opinion and legacy. I’ve been spending a lot of time reading those things and also conducting my own experiments in my ritual space for a while concerning the different ways to bolster a spirit, identifying separations, and how to repair those to some extent – based on the end goal. Which really doesn’t tell you much of anything because any one of those areas can be a topic unto themselves.
But the part of the song that got me was the Jenny was perfectly fine dancing with those spirits she loved and knew to varying degrees. She was content. That was the simple life that she wanted. I don’t think I would say in my current experience that that was the life she chose, but she was enjoying the life that she had in the state that she found herself in. In a sense, that puts her above a lot of people that I know – including me.
It was about a year ago that I went to a graveyard that I plan on returning to tomorrow, the Friday before Easter. I’ve literally been sick all week and I’m just now feeling better. I already have the time off tomorrow, because I was supposed to be visiting my family out of state before I went back to Hawaii for 3 years. That couldn’t happen. Can’t carry a medium bag 30 ft without gasping for air sort of sick for most of the week.
So last year, about this time, I went to a very specific grave in another state. It’s about 2 hour drive from where I currently live each way, but I was going to attend a class several hours further south, so this only added an hour or so to a 5+ hour drive. The cemetery had been brought to my attention because a friend of mine has several family members buried there. I wanted to pay my respects and see if there was anything that they needed from me, since I have a tendency to help the dead and feel it’s my duty to do so to honor Hecate, Hel, and the other death-leaning Goddesses and Gods that I serve.
I didn’t even get through most of the graveyard because my phone battery nearly died with all the spirit activity surrounding me within an hour of me getting there. I searched for Jenny’s grave for 45 minutes straight. Even with Google’s map location I couldn’t find it and I despaired. As I’ve stated before in forum threads in other places, I literally wept as soon as I found it.
But…as things tend to happen when you gain more knowledge and more experience and you have more of a higher viewpoint of the world and whether those effects you’ve made are genuinely warranted or not, I have questioned the wisdom of what I did there. And that’s easy to do when you’re looking back with different eyes, with different knowledge – a different time and place essentially to where you are now. And what did I do?
I brought a peacefully sleeping beautiful soul out from a slumber that she had put herself in. And as I listen to Jenny Old Stones, I really question whether that was the right thing or not.
The truth is – my sentimental hindsight is not the reality of what happened on that day. I was reminded of it – by Jenny. This Jenny who was abused who never really had a chance, whose family loved her, and who’s doctors tried to save her, but that wasn’t enough. She reminded me through pictures of seeing me of what happened. And this was tonight.
I could see her being there in the darkness resting. I don’t know what happened before. I don’t see that. All I see is darkness and a “knowing”. I can feel footsteps coming closer and then going away and then coming closer and I can feel her attention focused on those footsteps and the “thing” making them. Jenny has showed me that usually what happened with her was that when footsteps came nearby she would wake up and be attentive to them when she felt they were directed to her. The rest of the time she was almost in a sort of suspended state. Waiting but not watching the seconds go by. Disassociated and time was passing not in linear form, but between footsteps and similar. She didn’t really register the mowers, for example.
And when I came, it wasn’t just footsteps it was directed attention. I am not her relative in any way, but I had come for her. She knew, but her time on this Earth was so short that she didn’t really know how to interact with people quite the same way that some of the other spirits did in that same graveyard. So she couldn’t reach out to talk to me and I didn’t know her to reach out the talk to her. But eventually I found Jenny’s grave and I wept. I wept openly. For I had had some of Jenny’s trials but I happen to survive in the end.
And as I wept, Jenny came to comfort me. I don’t know if she had done this before but I do know that she did that then. It was incredibly moving to me.
From that point on Jenny did not go back to sleep. But where would she go and what would she do? I was responsible for her waking up and that’s a responsibility that I still feel to this day. I got her quarter with a Hecate and eventually St. Cyprian. She always has a safe place here and she knows how to get here and travel to and from. Some of Jenny’s family have taken to giving her places in their homes where she can also stay and that is who she stays primarily right now.
But that doesn’t relieve me of my responsibility for waking her up. Jenny has never not even once ever said that I’m responsible for her not going back into that dark black abyss of waiting. But I know from my experience that if she had stayed there she would have slowly degraded until she was literally nothing at all.
And so my inner Taoist comes out and I wonder would she have not have been better off content resting until the darkness finally took her? She’s playfully smacked my face for wondering this but there is some truth to the question. I think it needs reflecting upon even if it doesn’t necessarily apply to her but to others.
Jenny is stronger now than she has ever been. She has family that is thinking of her, remembering her, and looking out for her. She’s always had that or I wouldn’t have been brought to her grave. But as I expand my abilities working with the various states of the Dead, I should say spirits really – in different forms, in different modes of decay/states – I am very much aware of the responsibility that I have for her.
I’m very aware that if another, less “moral” necromancer had come across Jenny, she may have been enthralled, enslaved, and used up until she wasn’t worth anything. But that doesn’t relinquish the responsibility that I feel to help make sure that she has a fighting future ahead of her and the support and ability to do so if she should choose to. Both from mortals and from the “Gods”.
I’ve helped probably a thousand at this point. Mostly, guiding, healing, and… sometimes dissolving spirit remains that cannot be rehabilitated. Yet, I’m not talking about them. There are spirits that stick with you in memory. There are scenes they want you to see so they can move forward. It can get to you. Some are scared and you have to call family for to release their fears. Some you have to call deities for they know. Some you know need to go through and you give a little nudge to at the gate you’ve opened.
But the only one I’ve apologized to was Jenny. I’ve thought it in the past. I did it formally tonight. Which is why she showed me from her perspective what the encounter felt and looked like. Not all, just mine.
Jenny was here when I started typing this. Amused, concerned, empathetic. Which is why I got her side of things. She points to the bright, shining Spark in the center of her chest and being and points to me. She knows I did it. She was there. She wanted it. And Saint/Devil Norse900 will continue to watch over her.
