Ghost Whisperer and the Unfinished Life
The moral case for making sure you don't leave things unfinished.
Author’s Note: Just so you’re aware, I’ve gotten the opportunity to do a guest post on which should be out tomorrow. Most likely you will see it cross-posted here soon, but in case you wanted to sign up before, go there.
There's never enough time.
As much as we might want to believe otherwise, we can't keep putting off the things we want or need to do until tomorrow. Sooner or later, there will be no more tomorrows to put them off to. Either because you can't physically do them any more due to age or because at some point you will die. At which point you will leave things you always wanted to do unfinished. You won't be able to do it so either someone else will have to finish it for you or it will never get done. While you're still alive, you tend to call this feeling regrets. Once you die however, those who are still alive call it unfinished business. Some of this unfinished business will be good and others will be bad. People don't often want to finish the bad stuff but they will usually want to finish the good stuff.
Part of this will only happen however if those in your life know that you have unfinished business. From time to time, this unfinished business will be the kind of thing involving a parent or child or sibling who you didn't resolve an old argument with. You might have kept your feelings of regret to yourself and not expressed them in time before you died. Or maybe you were in the middle of trying to deal with them but you died in the middle of it. Which means even though you were trying to deal with it before you died, you didn't and because you're dead now, it can't be done. At least as long as you can't communicate with anyone who's still alive to do it for you.
This idea of being able to tell people what they need to know after you're gone is at least partly where we get the idea of ghosts from. We like to think that those we love that we have regrets about will want so badly to resolve it that even though they're dead, there will be some part of them that hangs around. This desire to tell you what they need you to know is so strong that they will find someone who can see them and can give them the message you've been waiting for. There's a comfort in this idea. Sadly, because of the nature of death and the dividing line it creates, it's hard to know for sure that it isn't true. As a result, we hope for it to be true because we ourselves don't want to die with unfinished business.
Ghost Whisperer is fundamentally about what it's like to have unfinished business. Melinda Warren, as played brilliantly by Jennifer Love Hewitt, can communicate with those who have unfinished business in the after life. She sees them and uses this to try and complete those regrets they had when they were alive. More often than not only as a way to help the dead who can't move on without this conflict resolved, but also to try and help those still alive come to terms with their own unfinished business with the dead. She gives them peace of mind and hope that they don't have to end up that way themselves.
As someone with an unfinished life.
Do yourself a favour and explore how to resolve an unfinished life by checking out Ghost Whisperer as soon as you can.
You can watch Ghost Whisperer on Hulu and Amazon in some places.
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