If the Spirit Moves You: Life and Love after Death - Paperback

If the Spirit Moves You is the story of life after death—it chronicles a year in the life of Justine Picardie after the death of her sister, her soul mate, from breast cancer. It tells of the yearning to conjure a voice from the vast silence, of how we fill the space that appears when someone dies, or how the space fills itself, of the bond of sisters that, like an endless conversation, carries on.

Told in a series of diary entries from Good Friday to Easter Sunday a year later, the book is filled with significant characters from the author’s life—her Jewish academic father, who searches for answers to life’s existential questions in the Kabbalah; her Catholic therapist mother; her husband, her children—as well as the spiritualists she encounters and their machines that speak to the dead.

A search for the afterlife in the age of reason, If the Spirit Moves You is poignant and bracing, cosmic and upl, If the Spirit Moves You chronicles the true life story of British Vogue writer Justine Picardie's desperate effort to contact her deceased youngest sister. In a year's worth of journal entries, Picardie shares a common theme for those who are grieving a death: the intense yearning to fill the cavernous void, to hear her sister's voice. (Picardie's sister's story Before I Say Goodbye chronicles her death from cancer.) Initially, this memoir repeats the same struggle: Picardie tries yet another cockamamie contact-dead-people machine or meets with yet another charlatan medium and comes up feeling more isolated than when she started. Things begin to shift when Picardie encounters a medium who sees Ruth on a bicycle (she rode her bike everywhere) wearing her favorite linen shirt and promising Picardie that the two sisters will speak again someday. And yet, Picardie still feels empty. Finally, a massage therapist tells Picardie, "You know, you can't bring back the dead, but you can make your children happy."

"This seems to me like the best advice I've heard for some time," Picardie writes. And from here she begins the deeper spiritual work at hand: committing to the land of the living, accepting the limitations of death, while still being willing to love and silently engage in dialogue with her sister without a shred of proof of life after death to cling to. --Gail Hudson