Fall 1999
The Death of a Colleague and
Subsequent Thoughts on Immortality

As many of you already know, it is with profound grief that I announce the passing of another valued colleague Ted Smith, D. Min. who died of a heart attack this past May. Ted was one of the early pioneers in Imago Relationship Therapy, beginning in 1983 when he first met co-founder Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. He was a Certified Workshop Presenter, a Clinical Instructor Candidate, a founding member of AIRT, and a beloved colleague and friend.

As often when a person I know passes on, my mind swirls with a "panoramic review" of our past interactions. I also awe (and tremble) at the sanctity of my own life and those that continue to live on in my circle of friends, colleagues, and family. (And perhaps I even embrace my children a little closer, feeling the preciousness of our present moment together.) As I began to reflect on how to honor Ted and the others that have moved on from this world, I wrestled with the concept of immortality-not in the traditional sense of reincarnation or meeting our Creator or even the end of individual consciousness but of the immortality that is summoned in an authentic dialogue between the self and other.

In her book, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics Danah Zohar proposes this alternative view of human immortality. In her chapter "The Survival of the Self: Quantum Immortality" Zohar explains that at the quantum level, when individual particles collide with other particles, they either become something new or "return to the source from which they sprang." But although the individual particle ceases to be what it originally was, its brief existence influences what it has now become.

At the quantum level, there are always traces of what was in what now is. Zohar proposes the question of whether or not humans have similar grounds for immortality and answers in the affirmative by exploring the wave aspect of the individual-that based on relationships.

To define our self is to define our self in relationship. We relate to others, to our context, and to our past to name a few. We do not and cannot live in a vacuum. For instance, Zohar discusses how the past is alive and in dialogue with the present. In our field of psychotherapy, we see on a daily basis how the past is influencing our clients' inner realm and mode of relating. Indeed, the past is far from "dead and gone," but alive and present even if the present is giving the past "new life and new meaning, at times transforming it utterly." In addition, when I am in dialogue with Celeste, I am not only relating to my past but she also is relating to my past since "my past" is now woven into and creating "our present." Elements of the past are reincarnated and remain eternal in this way. It is here where Zohar derives the survival of the self:

Zohar concludes in the chapter that the I-and-you of intimate relationship exists only to the extent that I have related to you in the first place. This is what Imago Therapy strives for in the process of Dialogue, the difference between Martin Buber's I-It (subject/object) and I-Thou (subject/subject) modes of relating. In the former, one relates to another in a non-mutual fashion, usually to use or gain from another without giving in return. In the latter, two subjects meet, share, enter into dialogue "with your whole being" as Buber would say, confirm the other while holding onto the self, and allow the potential for conversion. (In fact, conversation and conversion derive from the same Latin root.) It is mutual contact. Like Zohar, Buber finds the eternal in relationship. Buber believes that the Eternal Thou (God) is only found through the finite thous of our everyday relating. God is the verb, the activity of authentic meeting between two subjects, evoking connectivity and transformation.

I liken authentic dialogue to the act of respiration. When we breathe in, the air mingles with our internal body, nourishing every cell of our being, breaking down molecules in order to release energy. The breath out is the residual. It contains some of what I inhaled, some of what was already inside of me, and in the process of exhaling continues to be altered by meeting with the immediate elements (the air, the sun, the earth) slowly dispersing itself throughout the universe for continued nourishment and transformation. The breath in (the listening) and the breath out (the response) are latent with potential for gifting, receiving, and transcending.

As I mused over the deluge of e-mails following Ted's death, I find comfort in the knowledge that his life touched and influenced so many. He obviously had various moments of authentic dialogue, which now means his presence is forever embedded in the continued meetings of the "finite thous." Ted's "particle" aspect may be gone -and his physical presence, his passion in his convictions, and his profound insights will be greatly missed by many including myself. But his "wave" aspect will continue on into eternity.

Sophie Slade, Ph.D. shared with the on-line community the following excerpt from a poem Ted wrote titled "The Dance of Words":

The scientific mind seeks words precise
With boundaries clean and clear and neat and nice,
For drawing lines to thus create a map,
With which to limit life within its trap.
But for such minds I've thus far said too much-
The purpose of my words is just to touch.

May our prayers and thoughts be with Ted's two grown sons, to his committed partner and Imago therapist Victoria de Lissovoy, and to all who collectively grieve the passing of his untimely death.

1 Zohar, Danah. The Quantum Self. New York: Quill, 1990, pp. 142-143. 2 Ibid., p. 149.