#SOL17: A Process, A Serial Stalker, and Art

from my art journal. (Feb. 2017)

A theme may seem to have been put aside, but it keeps returning—the same thing modulated, somewhat changed in form. —Muriel Rukeyser 

I.

The weeks leading to the anniversary of Rob's death were more difficult than the actual day. By mid-February, a serial killer stalked my dreams. No matter what time I went to sleep--no matter how long I slept, I kept dreaming similar scenes over and over again. In most of the dreams I was investigating a series of murders. It seemed as if I was a detective. At the end of the dream--what I could remember--I sensed that a killer was stalking me as I tracked him and the fear this generated woke me from my sleep.

I did not know what this dream might mean, but I began to step up my writing.
I wrote most every day.
A lot. Often.

Within a few days of writing, my sleep became easy again, victimless. It remains so.


II.

A few weeks passed without a reoccurrence of the nightmare, but I was still curious. One afternoon, I googled, "What does it mean if you dream about a serial killer stalking you?"  The second explanation offered seemed more probable.

"...a serial killer may reflect a problem that is influencing a lot of other areas of your life. It may also point to reckless belief system "killing off" plans or hopes you had. Positively, a serial killer may represent a serious attempt to deal with a lot of problems at once." (from here).

III.

Is grief a problem?
Is the shock of Rob's illness and death a problem?

Grief as a natural expression of sorrow, not a medical malady. Working through grief is in many ways a matter of living in the present--standing where your feet are. I do wonder though about shock and the toll taken during the last 19 months. When I recount what happened most people express genuine disbelief, followed quickly by concern.

The events from diagnosis to death were so extreme,so fast, so relentless. Yes, I suspect the shock and resulting stress have been traumatic. I am not one to dwell in pity and find that being active these last 13 months has helped. Caring for Devon, writing this blog, reading what you and others have to say, keeping an art journal, talking out sorrow with close friends in a bereavement group, attending grief counseling, and walking ( a lot) have all helped. So too has been remembering how much I love my work I do and working full time again. Connecting with teachers and children is restorative.


IV.

Rob used to say that the only way out of something is through it.
This has been a year where walking through the grief, pain, sorrow, loneliness, anger, and loss has been deliberate and necessary.

#SOL16: After-Death Communications

A friend suggested I take photos whenever Rob was pointing to the ceiling. I did once, about 48 hours before Rob died. 40+ images, like the one above showed up in my photo feed.

I.

In the mid 1980s my Aunt Margaret, my mother's only surviving sibling, died. My mom and dad were on holiday in Italy and my brothers and I decided not to contact them, but rather to make arrangements for the wake and funeral and to then wait to tell my parents when they returned home the following afternoon. We were nervous about telling them, but to our surprise, my mom said she already knew. She had dreamt of her sister's death on the day her sister died.

My mom told me in her dream she had returned to her childhood home, a railroad apartment in New York City. The apartment consisted of a series of rooms that could be accessed from a single hallway with a kitchen at the end of the hall.  The hallway and rooms were dark and the only source of light was a kitchen lamp. As my mother walked towards the back of her home she could see her mom, her three brothers and her sister, Margaret.  They were gathered around a kitchen table and seemed to be welcoming Margaret. Everyone looked well and happy. My mom said she was so pleased to see how healthy her family looked especially given that her mom and brothers had all died and her sister was suffering from Alzheimer's. She walked quicker towards the entrance to the room and Margaret turned and stopped her, telling her she could not come in.  My mother woke and quickly roused my dad, telling him her sister had died.

My mom was a very devout Catholic and she retold many stories from her own youth that illustrated After-death Communications (ADC). Some were stories she had been told by older relatives and others were experiences she knew first hand.  I never knew what to make of these stories and as I grew older I dismissed these early stories my mom told as more Irish folklore than truth. But I had no logical category to place the story of the dream my mom told when she returned. How could she have possibly known?  It was then that I began to wonder if there might be experiences for which our capacity to narrate was limited by the confines of language. How do we name what is largely unknowable? What is true?

I tucked away these questions and rarely, if ever gave voice to such inquiry even after my mom, dad, and father-in-law each died within a span of six years. By the time I was 46, all three were deceased. But matters of the spirit were best left to another day, I thought.

When Rob returned home this past February, I was sitting next to his bed one evening when I saw quick flashes of white light.  It was late and Rob was two weeks from death and I thought I was seeing things as I was over tired.  I looked away from the flashes and continued to read as Rob slept. But the light flashes persisted and finally I looked up and when I did I saw the back of a woman in a white night gown quickly walking down the center hall of our home towards the front door. I had an overwhelming sense--a voice if you like-- that confirmed the woman I had seen was my mom. Later that night Rob woke and told me rather matter-of-factly that he had seen my mom, his dad and a group of men. I did not tell him about the flashes of light but did say that perhaps my mom and his dad were there to guide him. He looked at me and shook his head, no.  He said, "Your mom is here to comfort you."

II.

Since Rob's death two persistent questions have plagued me.  First, I so want to know where he is. What happened to my husband after his death?  In the span a second he was present and then gone. At death there is little ambiguity that the body that remains present no longer hosts the person loved. The body is meaningless. His indomitable human spirit lives on somewhere else. Where does he now reside? Where is he?

The second question is even more compelling.  I want to know that wherever Rob is, he is okay. My love for my husband did not end with his death. It continues on and with it my concern. For the last five months of Rob's life I held his welfare in my hands. Oddly, his death did not remove that responsibility.

Towards the end of The Inner Voice of Love, Henri Nouwen writes about love, friendship, and death. He comments:

You have to trust that every true friendship has no end, that a communion of saints exists among all those, living and dead, who have truly loved God and one another. You know from experience how real this is. Those you have loved deeply and who have died live on in you, not just as memories but as real presences (p. 81).

Rob lives on in me not just as memories, but as a real presence. A real presence I want to contact. And so perhaps you will be less surprised then to know that a week from now I will be sitting opposite a psychic and medium. If someone told me a year ago that I would not only initiate such a meeting, but look forward to it, I would have found that highly doubtful--not because I thought such things were folly, but rather because I felt little need to communicate with the dead.

What changes in a year keeps me humble. 

#SOL16: Fire

Rob in the Redwood Forest (Devon took picture)

 I.

Last Saturday night my dreams were filled with flames and soot, crackling timber and unbearable heat.  I dreamed about a wild fire burning out of control in what I think might have been the Redwood Forest in California. I kept trying to get to Rob who was caught in the forest too and each time I thought I would surely fail to reach him, the scene would reset.

I thought the dream was my attempt to save my husband.  Now I suspect I was saving myself.

II.

Years ago, Rob, Devon and I spent a late December day in the Redwood Forest. None of us had been there before. It was few days after Christmas and Devon must have received a camera and throughout the rather cold and somewhat rainy day, Rob continued to show Devon how to use the camera.  He did this with not only patience, but an odd joy. And we posed
ever so often for Dev to snap a picture. It was such an ordinary day. It had been our 17th wedding anniversary.


III.

All day long, the scent of fire stayed with me, an odd companion at that.

Dreaming: The Space Poetry Opens

I was moving some books and came across a copy of the poetry text, Dreaming the End of War by Benjamin Alire Sáenz that I had tucked away after reading it some years ago.  I found myself rereading it and wanting to share a portion of it with you. In this work Sáenz creates twelve dreams that explore the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, father and son, man and country--as well as the violence and hope that accompanies such closeness and distances among people and places.  Matters of immigration are important to me for political and personal reasons. My son, my brothers and I are US immigrants (although we joke that my husband, hailing from Brooklyn, might be an immigrant too) and as such, I feel an affinity with all who come here to live and especially those who die trying. 

We must find better ways to welcome others.  

I had hoped to hear about immigration during the last presidential debate and found the absence to be unsettling.  Perhaps President Obama and Mitt Romney might make room in the weeks leading up to the election to read Dreaming the End of War. It  is an important work--one that conveys the complexities, both personal and societal, of human cruelties and kindnesses. 

Here is a sample from the last dream.  


(from "The Twelfth and Final Dream : A Dream of The Day"  by Benjamin Alire Sáenz)

The Start to Fall (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

                                            ...Summers, I write.
There are poems in my head, stories,
novels, essays,

                    screenplays where protagonists
are as ordinary as the writer. Words clutter
and complicate. They stick in my throat
until I must find a way to clear a path
for air.

                         There are moments

when I wander from the writing.

There are things that writing cannot hold.

I stare out and see only
what is in my head. I dream of things
in the day.

                                            In the day. I dream
that nothing
in my house needs fixing. I dream
the labor it will take to build
a wall--
                   then to tear it down.

                                                              I dream
my mother has no worries. She has worked
and suffered enough,
                         worked and suffered enough
and it is time for her to rest. And though
I know my father's death cannot be dreamed
away, or my mother's memory, or her pain.
or her bills or her crooked bones--
                                         this knowing does not stop

me from my dream.

                                         I dream my mother's young
again. I dream her aging body has no aches.
                         I dream my sisters and my brothers
have no debts, and dream
                                          they have
the time to spend on who and what
they love. I dream abundance
in their lives.
                    I dream Eden and a garden
in their hearts.

                                             I dream. The day.
I dream the poor who come from other lands
will not be sent away. I dream the federal judge
will find an atlas of the world, stand
in awe of their journey--and wave
them safely in. I dream the day.
I dream that all who left my city
will come back. Exiles returning
to build again what has been
left unbuilt.
    
                    I dream. The day. I dream that all
the wars are done I dream the earth, having lost
all patience, rises up in its own revolution,
erasing all the lines we have carved
on her back. I dream there are no more
nations. This is what I dream--that
nations do not matter...



from:
Sáenz, Benjamin Alire. (2006). Dreaming the End of War.  Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.

Affinity Spaces, Collisions, and King's Dream

A Time to Break the Silence (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

 I.

It catches me by surprise when my son tells me that the age range on his Minecraft server is 7 to 73.  Eight decades. Wow, what a range of experience, a collection of perspectives, a sounding of life stories.

As a mom, I have an ear to that server and am marveling at what I am coming to understand: connected play allows for the development of ideas--'people collisions' so to speak--that have the potential to generate new ideas, open perspectives, allow for reconsideration. These collisions are inherently nomadic: just where individual ideas begin to morph into new epiphanies is difficult to trace--if at all. Now for sure, there have always been groups and ideas that have rubbed up against one another--neighborly interactions. What's different in this connected world of affinity spaces is the juxtaposition of people who previously would not have had the occasion to notice one another, let alone form important relationships.  On my son's server there is:

• A 73-year-old Minecraft player from Canada.  
• A Sultan, a 20-something Saudi prince.
• A 9-year old beginning coder from Pennsylvania.
• A 'with it' girl coder from just outside London.
• A veritable ABCs of teens and more teens from Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, France...Russia...US and so on...
• A teacher from Jersey.

Oh to be fly on that wall when this group starts chatting. Who can begin to name the possibilities that open as these players mix, collide? When I think about all those collisions, I get hopeful and I think maybe, just maybe King's dream might become reality.

II.

The first time I recall seeing my dad cry was the day Dr.  King was murdered.  I was a child then and the image of my 6' 2" father bowed by sadness remains decades later.  Dr. King had a dream that we still might get right.   He said:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Might our children become less influenced by racism as they interact with others from around the globe and from across geographic areas that are separated by income, gender, belief?  Might they code difference differently when they experience others on a daily basis?  Might affinity spaces, such as a Minecraft server, produce occasions for becoming (other)wise?

III.

We're in the car--the site of so much conversation--when my son tells me that he has changed the economic system he is using on his server from capitalism to communism.  I am uncertain as to what he means by this but do listen as he tells me that capitalism is so yesterday and it just seems to work out so much better when people have what they need.

Who decides what is needed? I ask.

You only have to say.   It's smoother that way, he says.

You only have to say. Hmm.


IV.

How different is our perspective when the world is understood as being abundant, enough? Might thinking make it so?