“{The day before my mother died, she turned to my father and said “I saw Yia-yia (my grandmother, her mother) last night and she said everything is going to okay.”
The day my mother died, the priest “said the prayers” (you know the ones I mean) and soon thereafter mother saw her Yia-yia who had died 45 years earlier and had a conversation with her and the angels who were with her. I was there and mother was completely lucid. She4 died about 2 hours later.
For those of you who are not Ort5hodox, this is frankly a common, though completely wonderful occurrence.
This idea is very potent for me in cinema (whereas in real life I have a taboo of "speaking to the dead"). This scene in ANDREI RUBLEV, where Andrei has an interesting conversation with the murdered Theophanes, is very memorable. Theophanes tells Andrei—who killed a man to prevent a rape, and is remorseful—“God will forgive you, but you should not forgive yourself. You will forever walk between God’s forgiveness and divine torment.”
Tarkovsky's films deal beautifully with life and death and memory.