My name is Bob Livingstone and I am a licensed clinical social worker based in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1987. I work with children, teens and adults. One of my specialties is grief counseling.

I became interested in this subject because my father died suddenly when I was fifteen years old. I have written books and many blogs with grief and loss being the centerpiece. I believe grief never ends, it evolves. We gain insights. We learn to feel. We laugh and cry. We move from survival to actually living life. We learn to be present for ourselves and others.

While I was writing my first book Redemption of the Shattered: A Teenager’s Healing Journey through Sandtray Therapy in 2002, I frequently created scenes in the sandtray where I had conversations with my father’s spirit. Sandtray therapy is where the client places miniature figures in the sand and talks about her experiences with the therapist. I often wondered if I was being delusional during these talks with him. I knew he wasn’t really present and that he had been dead thirty-six years. Yet I got so much comfort and connection from his spirit. His spirit explained events that happened during his life that were healing and relieving.

His spirit told me that towards the end of his life he had these blinding headaches the doctor wouldn’t or couldn’t explain. I remember seeing him at the kitchen table holding his head in his hand. He was a great and cautious driver, but almost ran into the car in the next lane of the Jersey Turnpike. He seemed to be unaware of his near accident. He washed my black jeans in bleach which caused them to be discolored so he painted them black. He forgot to tell his boss he was going on vacation, so they fired him. One day he became angry at me and held his fist in a position to knock me out. Instead of him belting me, I punched him in the stomach and then he walked away. He never spoke to me again and he died a few days later.

I talked with his spirit about the last event. He told me that he was out of his mind and his thinking process was destroyed by the small strokes he was having. He told me that he was sorry this happened, and he was not angry at me for hitting him. He understood that I was a fifteen-year-old kid trying to protect myself.

The book was published and obtained rave reviews. I stopped interacting with my father’s spirit. Why? Well some of the reviews stated that the sandtray process allowed me to fully integrate the loss of my father. So, the book was done, and the healing process should be complete as well. I believed that to return to my father’s spirit would have been a step backwards in my healing process. I believed I would have demonstrated regression and would not be totally immersed in the acceptance stage of grief. Therefore, I would have been a phony and a fraud. That was back in the day when I actually believed that you could become emotionally healed.

I suffered from what I call the closing credits syndrome. We are taught from a very early age that personal tragedies and traumas will one day be over; that the credits will roll at the end of the movie and you will never be troubled again by the event. You will be healed.

Now I know that the closing credits syndrome is a myth. You will always have memories from time to time about the trauma. Sometimes you may be overwhelmed by them. Other times the memories will have little charge. Unless you have amnesia, you will have memories of the event from time to time. That doesn’t mean that you cannot live a fulfilling life. It doesn’t mean that you are not healing. It just means there is no real finality where you can wrap the tragedy in a box, tie the bow and never be troubled by it again. That is impossibly unrealistic. Other terms that I have discarded are: closure and acceptance because they imply that there is a finality to all your struggles.

I also believed that if I was to continue to connect with my father’s spirit, it would complicate my ingrained position that God doesn’t exist. I was more an agnostic than an atheist because it would certainly make my life easier if I believed in an afterlife.

However, I disdained organized religion ever since the days surrounding my father’s death. The rabbi who we didn’t know had a fit because my father didn’t have a Jewish name. My mother, sister and I didn’t care if my dad had a Jewish name. The rabbi ineloquently spoke at the funeral. He said, “Joseph Livingstone was a good man even though he didn’t have a Jewish name.” No one from any of the area synagogues or any other religious organization lent their support to our grieving family back in 1966.

I see organized religion as a means of social control; a way to keep people in line if they are thinking of challenging the status quo.

But, as I am coming to learn, religion has nothing to do with spirituality. The spirit world keeps us all connected in a mysterious, loving way. It provides us with internal warmth when no one else is there. It connects us with our deceased ancestors.

I decided to assemble a sandtray that included the teenage me, the adult me, my father’s spirit and Baby’s First Steps which is strictly in the background. The adult me is the long haired blond person, the teenager is the boy standing next to him and his father’s spirit is man with the long white beard. Please see photo.

The man asks his father’s spirit how he can learn to make priorities in his life. The man says that he is too busy to work on fun projects that could be lucrative. He also doesn’t have enough time to play guitar, sing, drum write songs and blogs. His Father’s Spirit responds, “Son, first of all I want to say how proud of you I am. I had the dream of opening my own hardware store before I got sick. I was in my mid fifties then. You had the courage to strike out on your own and develop your own successful psychotherapy practice. You chose to marry a Black Woman back in the days(1972) when it was not acceptable in America to make this move. You loved her and you stuck to your principals and you are still married to her forty-six years later.

He continues, “I think you find yourself in survival mode and think about how you can make money immediately to pay the rent and save for the future. You get triggered when you think about this. This comes from being a man in America where men are expected to provide. It also comes from knowing that life can go into total disarray in a heartbeat. You experienced this when I died. Life is supposed to be enjoyed, not endured.”

The teenager uncharacteristically is not rebelling here. He says, “Hey you two are actually talking and getting along. I feel safe now. Please keep talking.”