The Ones Gone Before Us Are Not Lost

Today’s reflection is from Bondings 2.0 contributor Ariell Watson Simon, whose brief bio and previous posts can be found here.

Today’s liturgical readings for the All Souls’ Day can be found here.

“Lost.” 

“Passed away.” 

“Gone.” 

“No longer with us.”

If you have ever tried to put words to grief, you have probably come up against the limitations of these euphemisms. As a professional healthcare chaplain, I have had countless conversations notifying loved ones of a death, or helping them mourn. Those conversations have made me acutely aware of the limitations of language to capture the enormity of death. “Lost” has always struck me as a particularly poor word, implying that a loved one has somehow wandered off or been misplaced. 

The writers of scripture seem to struggle with finding the right words, too. Today’s liturgical reading from the Book of Wisdom grapples with how to talk about death. It starts by clarifying that the faithful departed are not “lost”, but right where they belong, in God’s hand:

The souls of the just are in the hand of God,

    and no torment shall touch them.

They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead;

    and their passing away was thought an affliction

    and their going forth from us, utter destruction.

The Book of Wisdom is emphatic that those we grieve are not lost, dead, afflicted, or destroyed, despite everything that our senses – and our fears – tell us. Is fearing for the dead “foolish,” as Wisdom suggests?

Or perhaps it is a sort of “farsightedness” that keeps us from seeing clearly the people closest to us, as the queer poet Andrea Gibson suggests? Gibson introduces the “farsightedness” concept in the essay, “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” written before their death from ovarian cancer earlier this year, at age 49. Gibson imagines speaking to a lover from beyond the grave, saying:

“My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, ‘How tall are you?'”

Gibson imagines the afterlife as radical intimacy with the beloved – a bond that we cannot perceive, not because it is distant but because it is so close. Their words echo Wisdom’s ancient message, each writer trying to unmask the deception that death is a final separation. What if death is not an exile from this world, but further integration?

The naturalist and writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt meditates on this idea in her book, Rooted. Of natural death, she writes:

“When our own bodies are liberated from the contours that shaped us in life, we become an ecological hub for a variety of […] species.” 

In other words, through the work of insects, animals, and soil, the human body transcends its boundaries and becomes part of the nourishment of all creation. Haupt concludes:

“This is the message of ecologists, and of mystics – that each life is radically connected to all of life, always, with nothing so small that it can be lost.” 

In today’s Gospel reading, Christ insists that nothing is lost, and that all will be raised on the last day. Perhaps Gibson and Haupt’s insights teach us how to read Jesus’s declaration that he will not lose anything entrusted to him. Indeed, both spiritually and ecologically, all life is interlaced. Death does not sever this connection, but pulls the laces, drawing us ever closer. Through this integration, our beloved dead are already being raised, as they rise up in our lives and in all of matter. 

Perhaps the “last day,” prophesied by Jesus, is the day on which our “farsightedness” will be corrected, and we will be able to see clearly. Maybe on that day, we will finally recognize our loved ones all around us, in earth and trees, in the “chambers of our hearts” and the air that we breathe. 

All Souls Day blurs the boundaries between death, life, and afterlife, queering our understanding of the world. As queer theologian Patrick S. Cheng writes, “Christian theology itself is a fundamentally queer enterprise because it also challenges and deconstructs–through radical love–all kinds of binary categories that on the surface seem fixed and unchangeable (such as life vs. death, or divine vs. human), but that ultimately are fluid and malleable.” 

As you commemorate the faithful departed today, I pray that they will not feel “lost” to you, but transcendently, mystically present. I will leave you with the words of Andrea Gibson, who has joined the great cloud of queer witnesses this year:

“My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before […] I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth. I promise one day you will say it too– I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.”

—Ariell Watson Simon, New Ways Ministry, November 2, 2025

Editor:  If you would like to further reflect on the liturgical readings for today, check out the All Souls’ installment of New Ways Ministry’s online resource, Journeys: A Scripture Reflection Series for LGBTQ People and Allies.