When the Veil Grows Thin

As we come towards the end of the harvest season and closer to Samhain, I always feel the shift. The days are drawing in, the trees are letting go of their leaves, gardens are dying back, compost is turning, fires are being lit. Nature is beginning to turn herself inwards.

Samhain is an ancient Gaelic festival and one of the traditional cross-quarter days, sitting at the threshold between autumn and winter. For many of us witches, it is our New Year. The ending of one cycle and the beginning of another, a moment to acknowledge what has been harvested, what has reached its end and what we are ready to carry with us into the darkness.

It is also a time when the veil is said to grow thin. The space between what is seen and unseen, between what is here and what is no longer physically here, somehow feels a little closer.

Perhaps that is why this time of year has always felt so liminal to me. Nature herself is showing us that death and letting go are part of the cycle. Leaves fall, plants die back, what has finished returns to the earth and becomes nourishment for whatever comes next.

It is a time of clearing, endings and transition, and perhaps inevitably, a time when grief can come closer to the surface. We are also beginning the approach towards the holiday season, which can carry its own weight for anyone living with absence.

This time last year, one of my best friends died after a three-year journey with illness.

I was with her during the last days of her life, stepping into an unofficial doula role as she approached the end. And now, as the season begins to turn again, I can feel myself coming around to the anniversary of her death.

I have been thinking about making myself a piece of memorial jewellery for her.

Something of her that I can hold close.

I know that she is already part of me. She lives through me and through the memories I carry of her. I don't need an object to make that true.

And yet there is something incredibly powerful about having something physical to hold when the physical form of somebody we love is no longer here.

Something you can touch, something with weight, something that can sit against your skin on the difficult days. It might seem like such a small thing, but I don't think it is.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons I have become increasingly drawn towards making memorial jewellery as my own work with death and grief has deepened.

The more I work with grief, the more I understand that it belongs to so much more than physical death. We grieve people and beloved animals, our furry companions who have shared our homes and our everyday lives. But we also grieve relationships, marriages, homes, places and identities.

We can grieve divorce, retirement, selling a childhood or family home, the loss of maidenhood, a child growing up and leaving home, a body changing, a chapter of our life closing. We can even grieve transitions that we chose.

There are so many little deaths within a life.

And then there are the great griefs. The death of someone we love. the losses that divide our lives into a before and an after.

Jewellery has marked these thresholds for thousands of years. Birth, love, marriage, death, inheritance, devotion, belonging. We place these small objects against our bodies and somehow they become capable of holding things far larger than themselves.

I believe metal holds memory, believe that stones do as well and so do all the other elements that go into the making process...earth, air, fire, water and spirit are all there working with me and I with them.

The materials I work with are ancient. They have existed for an almost incomprehensible amount of time before reaching my hands, formed through heat, pressure, earth and time. The atoms within them have been part of countless other things before us and will continue long after us.

Nothing really disappears, it changes form.

We come from what was here before us and, eventually, our physical bodies return to it.

There is something very grounding for me in that.

It is why a piece of inherited gold can feel so different from newly bought metal. Why a stone taken from someone's ring can carry a significance far beyond its monetary value. Why melting down a wedding ring after a divorce and turning it into something entirely new can feel like an act of transformation rather than destruction.

A memorial piece doesn't necessarily have to commemorate a death. It can mark a threshold.

And it doesn't always have to be about letting go.

Sometimes it is about keeping something close.

That might mean remaking a person's jewellery, resetting a stone they wore, working with their gold, incorporating hair or ashes, or creating something entirely new that somehow speaks of them.

And sometimes it is simply making an object that says: this happened, this mattered, this changed me.

There is no timetable for doing that.

I feel very strongly that memorial commissions should never be rushed. You might come to me weeks after a loss or twenty years later. We might begin talking and then leave it alone for a while. We can return when it feels right.

These pieces can move at their own pace, I want there to be absolute spaciousness around this work.

As I continue my death doula training and grief tending, and as death and grief become an increasingly important part of both my personal life and my practice, I am beginning to understand my role in these commissions differently too.

Of course I am your jeweller, but I can also sit with you.

I can listen to the stories attached to the things you bring me. We can talk about what you want to keep, what might be transformed and what you might be ready to release. There can be tears, there can be laughter, there can be pause, there doesn't have to be a decision that day.

I can hold some space around the making.

Because ultimately, I don't think memorial jewellery is really about death.

I think it is about love.

About relationship, transition, about what mattered enough to leave a mark on us.

And perhaps that is what I will be thinking about as I make my piece for my dearest friend.

Not how to make something that represents her death, but how to make something that holds a little of what remains.

Something tangible to reach for when I miss the physicality of her being here.

Something to hold close.

Sara x