What Being Ghosted by a Mortician Taught Me
A Reflection on Logic, Mystery, and the Magic of Being Alive
As a medium who was recently ghosted by a mortician, I am reminded that the greatest mystery is not death, but how differently people relate to being alive.
This man (for privacy’s sake I will call him Morty) worked with the dead every day. He even grew up living upstairs from the funeral home and thus, moved calmly through a world governed by procedures, timelines, and measurements, where death itself was not something to contemplate but something to manage. Everything was handled correctly and even the rugs had to be vacuumed in a way that left systematic lines behind. Death, in his world, was finite, contained, and entirely knowable.
He had absolutely no belief in the spirit world, which I would later find strangely fitting.
Discomfort with the unseen did not stop at metaphysics. When something could not be named, measured, or neatly concluded, his instinct was not to explore it, but to withdraw from it entirely.
This was not said with hostility or debate, but with certainty, as though mystery were an unnecessary complication rather than an invitation. If something could not be proven, it was dismissed. If it could not be measured, it was deemed irrelevant. Wonder was treated as a kind of intellectual immaturity, something to outgrow rather than lean into and embrace its majesty.
What struck me most was how he dealt with grief.
He was gentle with grieving families, appropriately compassionate, saying the right things at the right moments, guiding them through their loss with professionalism and care. Grief, like death, had a structure. It was acknowledged, managed, and contained within a process designed to make the unbearable feel survivable. Emotion was present, but it was carefully kept at arm’s length and lacked depth.
When he ghosted me, it felt poetic coming from someone who does not believe in spirits, but it was also entirely consistent with how he approached anything that resisted closure or certainty. Yet, this is not a story about dating, but rather a reflection on how differently people move through life.
Some people build their entire worldview around logic and reason because they offer the comfort of certainty. Logic draws clean lines that reason can explain without mess, and for some, this feels safer than standing in the vastness of not knowing. Life, however, exists precisely in that unknowing.
Life is not efficient and does not resolve neatly. It unfolds through coincidence, intuition, timing, and moments that cannot be traced back to a single cause. The most meaningful experiences we have often arrive without explanation, carrying a sense of rightness rather than proof. Love appears without asking permission. Insight lands without warning and beauty often moves us without justification.
There is a quiet magic in being alive that cannot be dissected without losing something essential in the process.
That unexplained attraction we feel when pulled toward a potential lover, the song that moves us to tears, the impending sense of change felt before it arrives, or how we experience grief in waves rather than stages; most things in life simply cannot be cleanly explained, for they are far too subjective.
We do not need to believe in the spirit world to experience this, for such is life. Some people, like Morty, are more comfortable with death because it is final, but what really unsettles them is life, precisely because it is not.
Life asks us to stay present without guarantees, to trust what we cannot fully explain, and to allow mystery to exist without rushing to resolve it. It asks for openness rather than certainty, participation rather than control.
Being ghosted by a mortician reminded me that the magic of life does not live in what can be proven, but rather, in what can only be experienced.
Disbelieving in the unseen world is not a failure of logic, but a refusal to live in wonder.
Susan
you’re right beauty, love, insight they don’t submit resumes. They just show up and say, pay attention.”No justification, no proof, and yet they feel more solid than things we can explain for hours.
Honestly, trying to force life to be tidy can make us miss the very texture that makes it worth living. The loose threads, the coincidences, the strange timing — that’s the stitching.