Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, bsc

This isn’t a post for everyone.
It’s for the ones who still talk to their dead.
The ones who whisper a name into the dark in the midst of tears and half expect to hear an answer back, even though they believe it is not possible.
The ones who can still feel the weight of a hand that’s been gone for years.

It’s for the heartbroken, too—the ones who didn’t lose someone to death but to distance, silence, or choice. The ones who keep a ghost alive in their phone gallery, or in the way they still look for familiar eyes in a crowd.

You don’t have to wear black or believe in magic to know what it means to grieve. You just have to have loved something so much it rearranged your world, and then had to keep living after it was gone.

On a more personal note: For a long time after my husband died, I lived in a kind of half-world. Days happened, people spoke, I worked, I parented, but everything sounded like it was coming from underwater. Grief isn’t loud the way movies make it; it’s a quiet corrosion. I remember looking at the chair where he used to sit and realizing how something can be completely still and still ache...the chair I now have to sit in day in, day out, the chair I loathe and somehow invite back to our home every time I send it away… that chair.

I started meeting other widows. We found each other the way lost things sometimes do—through support groups, long messages at midnight, whispered confessions about how we were all supposed to be “healing,” but none of us were moving anywhere. We traded stories and survival tricks. We sent each other reminders to eat, to breathe, to pretend for our children’s sake. Yet underneath it, we were all the same: frozen in the exact moment life split into before and after.

That’s where Your Samhain Kit was born. Not from a place of mystical fascination, but from the daily work of trying to stay human after everything had burned down. I watched women light candles for men who would never come home. I wrote through my own hollow nights. Slowly, I began to see that grief isn’t something you overcome—it’s a language you learn to live with.

This book grew out of those nights and those women. Out of our small acts of magic: making tea for one another, writing the names of our dead in the margins of notebooks, laughing at things that shouldn’t be funny just to remember we could. Samhain is our collective spell—a promise that while pain doesn’t vanish, neither does love.

So this book is for them. It is for him. It is for us all.

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Every autumn, as the light fades, we begin to remember. Nature withers on purpose.. trees letting go, earth pulling everything back into itself. Samhain was once the ancient festival marking this turning of the wheel, the night when the veil between worlds grew thin and the living called out to their dead. But what if the veil doesn’t just separate worlds? What if it separates you from the person you used to be before the loss?

That’s the question that shaped my book, Your Samhain Kit: Rituals, Reflection, and Renewal by a Mental Health Therapist.

I didn’t write it for the mystical elite. I wrote it for the exhausted, the broken, the ones who are tired of being told to “move on.”
It’s a book for lighting one candle and sitting quietly with the things you can’t fix. For finding meaning in the ache, instead of pretending the ache should be gone by now.

Inside, you’ll find the old stories—how our ancestors honored their dead not with denial but with ritual. How they made room at the table for those who had passed, how they believed remembering was a sacred act, not a weakness.
You’ll also find something modern: the language of psychology, of healing, of therapy—because the mind and the spirit were never meant to live apart.

Each chapter invites you into a small act of remembrance.
You’ll learn how to build rituals that help you keep the love while letting go of the pain. You’ll explore journaling prompts that draw out what you’ve buried too deep. You’ll find reflections for widows, for the heartbroken, for those who’ve lost themselves somewhere in the middle of living.

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From the Book: The Summoning of Memory

A Summoning for the Ones You Miss

Gather a candle. A bowl of water. A piece of paper and something that once belonged to them (anything touched by their life).

Sit in silence.
Feel the air between you grow thin.

Whisper their name once, aloud. Then once again inside your chest, where the echo lives.

Write what you never said. Fold it three times.

Pass your fingers through the flame—not close enough to burn, just close enough to remember what warmth feels like.

Dip the folded paper into the bowl and say:
“You are not gone. You are transformed.
You walk beside me in every breath I take.”

Leave the bowl overnight.

In the morning, pour the water into the earth.
Let the silence answer back.

It’s simple. No power games, no cosmic promises—just you, your memory, and the act of giving shape to the love that still hurts.

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And through it all runs one truth: Samhain isn’t only about summoning the dead. It’s about learning how to live again without forgetting them.

When the veil thins, so does our armor. That’s when the healing begins.

So if you’ve ever stood in the dark and wanted to bring someone back—not only with spells, but also with memory, with tenderness, with meaning—this book is your ritual.
It’s your reminder that love doesn’t end where life does.
And that grief, no matter how heavy, is proof you were once blessed with something worth missing.

Light the candle. Say their name.
Let this season carry you home.

🕯 Read Your Samhain Kit now. Let the light find you again.