The Dead Part of My Job

Being a priest is a wild grab bag of tasks. One of the more interesting parts of the job is removing confused, angry, or malicious dead from someone.

Many people transition seamlessly into death, leaving nothing behind that they care to cling to. Ever so often, someone refuses to go quietly—maybe they died violently, maybe they were angry at someone, maybe they were abusive in life or abused in life—the causes are many. But for whatever reason, the person’s soul just refuses to go into death fully and participate in the cycle of rebirth.

They don’t have to believe in that cycle. It’ll happen to them either way when they go, but sometimes they refuse to go because they think they’ve lost their only shot at life.

It’s not uncommon for a dead who doesn’t want to go into death to anchor themselves to a living person, to get the energy to stay in this particular realm. They can anchor themselves to a place, but people provide more fuel to do things with, so people are often a preferred target. If the dead had strong feelings about them in life, they might also find them easier to tie themselves to, in death.

A dead with strong feelings about someone they’re anchored to can cause a lot of damage in the person’s life. They can feed negative cycles of behavior, encourage self-destructive behaviors, and attract people to the person they’re anchored to who are negative. The harder the dead wants to cling, the more likely they are to encourage negative behaviors and situations. Even a clinging dead who was positive in life will tend to encourage stagnation in the person they cling to, which is also a negative behavior.

For the obvious reasons, a dead who is wrecking or stagnating someone’s life needs to be removed. This is a skill not all priests have, I just happened to have gotten it in the grab bag of skills I got as a priest.

It feels like deep sea fishing, like pulling a large fish in on a heavy line.