Signs and Portents: Seeking Meaning in Grief

(If you look carefully to the left, you'll see a rainbow hanging in the clouds at sunrise. I pulled over to take this shot on the way to work the other day.)

When we lose someone we love, the world often feels like it shifts into a strange and unfamiliar place. In those quiet, hollowed-out spaces of grief, we grasp for signs—anything that might reassure us that the connection hasn’t been completely severed.

I’ve found myself doing this lately. A dream of my father, vivid and bittersweet, left me wondering if he was trying to reach me. A sunrise rainbow, its soft arc briefly visible through an overcast sky, felt like a whisper from somewhere beyond.

Some say dreams of departed loved ones are their spirits reaching across the veil to comfort us. Others believe phenomena like rainbows, sundogs, or breaks in the clouds during a gloomy day are messages from the universe—little nudges reminding us that beauty and hope persist even when we feel hollow.

And yet, the skeptic in me questions all of this. Couldn’t dreams just be the mind’s way of sorting through loss? Aren’t rainbows simply light refracted through droplets of water, as indifferent as gravity or time? Maybe. But in grief, logic feels sterile and unsatisfying.

Synchronicity, Jung's idea of meaningful coincidences, is more than a cool Police song to me these days. I can’t help but wonder if there’s something to it—a universal algorithm that connects us through threads of time and space, weaving meaning into moments we might otherwise dismiss as random.

Is my mind inventing meaning where none exists? Or am I touching something bigger, something I can’t yet understand?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Grief has a way of stripping us down to raw need. Whether the signs are real or imagined, they offer me a thread to cling to. And maybe that’s enough: not definitive proof, but comfort—a shaft of light breaking through the clouds.