September 15, 2026

The Ghost Of Loss

And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colours, indigo, red, green and azure blue, come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

John O'Donohue was an Irish poet and former priest who spent years sitting with the dying and the newly bereaved before he wrote Anam Cara in 1997, drawing on Celtic spirituality to make sense of what he had witnessed. This blessing, titled Beannacht, the Irish word for blessing, closes the book and speaks directly to grief, picturing loss as a ghost that slips in through a window rather than something to be solved or reasoned away. O'Donohue does not ask the grieving person to feel better; he asks only that small, ordinary color and warmth find their way back in. Since his sudden death in 2008, this passage has become one of the most read poems at funerals, because it lets sorrow and comfort sit in the same room.