The Eyes That Returned
How my grandfather found his way back to me through someone else’s gaze.
As a Transition Doula, I help people navigate the thresholds between who they’ve been and who they’re becoming — the spaces where the past whispers and the future hasn’t yet taken form. These liminal places are where our ancestors often reach through, offering quiet guidance when we need it most. What follows is a story about recognizing that presence — about the ways love, lineage, and intuition weave together to remind us that we’re never truly walking alone.
I’ve talked with so many people who feel their ancestors close — through songs on the radio, feathers on the ground, or the sudden smell of someone’s favorite perfume.
For most of my life, I didn’t.
In readings, healers and mediums often tell me I have a hefty spirit team behind me — guides and protectors who help steer my choices and soften life’s sharp edges. But no one ever came forward with a name or a face. No ancestor I could point to and say, that’s the one who walks with me.
That changed recently.
As I’ve been walking this podcasting path — speaking truth aloud, sharing stories of transformation, and holding space for others to do the same — I’ve found myself intentionally calling in my maternal grandfather.
He was an extraordinary man, though most of his accomplishments I only learned about after his death, during my first year of college. He was active until the end: creating documentaries, traveling the world, and engaging in meaningful work that quietly shaped communities.
He rarely spoke about what he did. I only remember standing as a small child in his office, surrounded by our extended family, watching slideshows of his travels flicker across a large projector screen. The room glowed with that nostalgic hum of film and light. Later, the images of his most recent adventures would live inside photo albums — glossy prints tucked into plastic sleeves. I would flip through them, mesmerized by places I didn’t yet understand but somehow felt connected to.
After his passing, I discovered the fuller picture: his involvement with the Universal Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, his work in the Civil Rights Movement, and his role in Look Up and Live — a non-denominational Sunday morning show that explored spirituality from many perspectives.
He died suddenly, sitting in the same recliner where I had often perched, flipping through his photos. He had just returned from an international trip.
I’ve always longed to sit with him again — not as a child this time, but as an adult who could ask questions and absorb the wisdom behind his quiet eyes. I’ve wondered why he kept his work and family life so separate. Maybe that’s something I’m here to bridge in my own lineage — the integration of purpose and personal truth.
What I do remember clearly are the smells. His home on Thanksgiving: warm air thick with roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. That’s where I first learned what food made with love tastes like — and that love, in his kitchen, tasted mostly of butter and salt.
I still try to make fruit salad the way he did. Mine never turns out quite the same. I don’t have the wild blueberries he’d bring back from Ontario each summer, freeze, and sprinkle in. But I let the fruit sit long enough to make that sweet juice at the bottom of the bowl — the part everyone secretly waits for.
In the summers, he took my cousins and me to his cabin on the Naiscoot River, where the water fed into the Georgian Bay and then Lake Huron. I can still see him sitting in his wooden Amish-made rocking chair in the golden light of sunset. I can hear the scrape of his knife as he filleted the fish he’d caught that day, the gentle hiss of the grill, the way he’d listen quietly while we went on about our teenage lives. I remember his laughing eyes most of all — kind, perceptive, and twinkling with humor.
This week, those eyes came back to me.
Not in a dream.
Not in the smell of his cooking.
But in the gaze of another human being.
For a brief moment, I saw him — unmistakably — looking back at me through someone else’s eyes. The recognition was immediate and cellular. A deep calm washed over me, the kind that doesn’t come from logic. It was a message that didn’t need words:
Everything is going to be okay.
Maybe that’s what ancestral connection truly is — not just visitations or signs, but a quiet thread of recognition that runs through time and body. Maybe our ancestors live in the eyes that meet ours when we need reassurance most.
Lately, I’ve been practicing listening for those subtle moments — the ones that don’t make sense but feel deeply true. That’s intuition at work. That’s lineage remembering itself.
So tonight, I’m lighting a candle for my grandfather.
For the documentaries he made.
For the fruit salad.
For the eyes that found me again when I needed them the most.
Tonight, as I honor my grandfather’s memory, I also call upon Nokomis, the Anishinaabe Grandmother spirit — the wise elder of the Ojibwe and Algonquin peoples whose stories ripple through the lakes and rivers of Ontario. She is the keeper of ancestral memory, the one who teaches that all things are connected through love and respect. May her presence guide my steps as I listen more closely to the whispers of lineage — human, earth, and spirit alike. And may her calm, steady gaze join my grandfather’s in reminding me: everything is unfolding exactly as it should.
Have you ever recognized someone you love in the eyes of a stranger? What message did it carry for you?
I love the way you automatically knew what you knew without having to be told it was who it was.
Grandfathers are the best, aren't they? I was particularly close with mine and when I moved out of my marital home, there was a lot of tumultuousness and I saw him in my dreams for a few night. My aunt, a lifelong healer herself, said it was his way of protecting and letting me know that everything was going to be all right. I liked that explanation. :)