The Loss of Loved Ones; Premature Deaths

When death comes to reap a harvest in your families, indiscriminately taking the youngest before the oldest, you often say, “God is not just since he sacrifices the one who is strong and has a great future, while preserving those who have already lived many years full of disappointment; taking those who are useful and leaving behind those who no longer are, and breaking a mother’s heart by depriving her of the innocent creature that was her whole joy.”

Humans, it is in this matter that you must lift yourselves above the commonplace thoughts of life in order to understand that the good is often where you believe you are beholding evil, and providential wisdom is where you believe you are beholding the blind fatalism of destiny. Why do you measure divine justice according to your own? Do you think the Lord of worlds inflicts you with cruel punishments out of mere caprice? Nothing is done without an intelligent purpose, and no matter what happens, everything has its reason for being. If you were to better scrutinize all the pains that strike you, you would always find in them a divine reason, a regenerating reason, and your miserable self-interests would be a secondary consideration that you would relegate to last place.

Believe me, in the case of an incarnation of twenty years, death is preferable to those shameful immoderations that desolate respectable families, break a mother’s heart and cause parents’ hair to gray before its time. Premature death is frequently a great blessing that God grants to those who depart, thus preserving them from the miseries of life or the seductions that could have led them to their loss. Those who die in the flower of youth are not victims of fatalism; rather, God deemed it useful for them not to remain on earth any longer.

It is an awful misfortune, you say, for a life so full of hopes to be cut short so soon! What hopes are you talking about? Those of earth, where the one who departed could have shone, making his or her way and fortune? This narrow way of looking at things is always what renders you incapable of rising above matter. Do you know what would have been the fate of that life which, according to you, was so full of hopes? Who is to say that it would not have been full of bitterness? Do you then count as nothing the hopes of the future life? Are you saying that you would prefer those of the ephemeral life that you trudge through on the earth? Do you think a high position amongst other humans is worth more than one amongst the blessed spirits?

Rejoice instead of complaining when it pleases God to take one of his children from this valley of misery. Would it not be selfish to wish for them to have remained in order to suffer along with you? Ah! That is the grief conceived by those who have no faith, who see in death an eternal separation. But you Spiritists know that the soul lives better when disencumbered from its corporeal envelope. Mothers, you know your beloved children are close to you, yes, very close. Their fluidic bodies envelop you, their thoughts watch over you and your memory of them inebriates them with joy; but your unreasonable sorrow afflicts them too, because it denotes a lack of faith and is a revolt against God’s will.

You who understand the spirit life, listen to the beating of your heart calling to those loved ones, and if you would ask God to bless them, you would feel within you those powerful consolations that dry tears, those marvelous aspirations that show you the future promised by the sovereign Lord.

Sanson, former member of the Parisian Spiritist Society (1863)