#SOL17: A Thin Place

March 8th will arrive--and with it, the one year anniversary of Rob's death. This evening I wondered if the distance between earth and heaven might be more permeable on such a day.

I come from Ireland and though I don't practice Celtic spirituality, I did grow up hearing stories about the afterlife and the spaces between here and there. It's a thin place when the boundaries between earth and heaven become more transparent. In such a space we can better sense the divine--commune with those who have gone before us. The Celts call these spaces, CAOL ÁIT.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by the closing lines of Whitman's Song of Myself.  I would walk about reciting these lines in my mind--almost as if they were a mantra.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. 

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood. 

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

I wonder where Rob has stopped, who he now is, and what he means. He told me heaven was a parallel universe and I should sense him in the darkened sky.

"Leave breadcrumbs," I whispered as he was dying. "Leave breadcrumbs and when it is my time, I'll follow."

#SOL16: Birds

I.

from my art journal, 6.24.16
(gesso, acrylic paint, alcohol inks, stabilo pencil, marker, digital remix). 

Birds like me.

When I walk, a lone bird, often a cardinal, will land nearby. It used to be that birds would quickly lift as I neared, but that no longer happens, not since Rob died and I began to walk daily. Now birds stand still as if they might have a message I most need to hear.


II.

Birds do not visit me in groups.

Yes, they still gather on wires above and spread across the lawn during the early morning hunting for worms.  From the opened window I can hear them calling to one another. But when I walk, birds arrive solo, reminding me that we have but this present moment.

Be still, each bird seems to say. Be here.


III.

Birds are more bridge than not.

They are an evolutionary bridge between the dead and us with their wings spanning a distance you and I cannot travel. The cardinal, I've been noticing, finds swift flight and slips the gravity of this world foregrounded in the patches of sky revealed between a tangle of tree branches.

And I ask, Who better to tell us where the dead go?


IV.

Birds don't always sing.

Against the rising moon, the birds have grown quiet alongside the darkness. Without their song, I have gotten lost among the light and shadow mistaking the foreground for the background. I have traveled beyond a place of comfort. And still I want to ask, What happens to the dead?


V.

Birds get lost.

They don't follow the cardinal rose.  Direction is more myth than truth. What is essential still rests--not in their wings--but in our mortal hands.


VI.

Birds are rarely foolish, unlike me.

Some moments I feel stripped, a bit crazy, daft even. Grief will do that for in a world where a man like my husband can die so suddenly, all things good and dire are possible.

#SOL16: Something's Eternal

I.

Each day I find Rob's death hard to believe.  He is my home and so I find my body responds as if he is just away somewhere and will be coming home soon, after the weekend is over perhaps. Or he is out running errands, visiting a client, at the doctors, getting some coffee. His absence is earthly.

I think about us a year ago. What were we doing?  How odd it is now that Rob's death (in)forms my every breath that we did not know last April and May would be his last spring. 

II.

Yesterday I came across three sets of text messages Rob and I exchanged on my iPad. I knew of the text messages from my phone, but I forgot about the ones on my iPad as I don't usually use it to text message. These messages chronicle our day-to-day lives from November, 2012 through to February 3, 2016. A little more than 3 years. On my phone I have other text messages between us and these end the day Rob came home on February 17. 

I started to read the messages from 2013 and realized I couldn't bear it. Instead I reread the last few messages we ever exchanged and marveled at how Rob was so in the world, so present. How could he decline in just a handful of day?  Below is an exchange from early on Valentine's Day and the 16th. (I am the blue with white print and Rob is the grey with black print.)

  

2.14.16 - 1st Part of the text message exchange.

2.14.16 2nd Part of the exchange

2.16.16- 1st part of text message

2.16.16 2nd part of message

2.16.16 -4th  part of message

2.16.16 - 3rd part of message

One thing that surprises me is that I too didn't think of his time as being imminently over. I was praying for a miracle. I don't think I remembered feeling that. I do know that by the time Rob came home I needed to learn from the Hospice caregivers to shift my attention from life saving to comfort. My friend Jane tells me that I called her to tell her that brisket was on sale at Kings the day before Rob came home. He had a hankering from brisket and I bought one to cook for him at home. 

It remains in the freezer. 

Rob came home on a Wednesday the 17th and by Friday the 19th he would eat half an egg sandwich in the morning and that would be the last meal he would ever eat.

III.

For now, I can't go back to read our texts from the ordinary days before we knew Rob was dying. I'm not sure I will ever be ready for that.  Knowledge of the future corrupts the past. All of this reminds me of Act III from Thornton Wilder's Our Town. This act opens with the burial of Emily Webb. We watch as Emily takes her place among the dead and those who had attended her burial leave the cemetery. Now only the dead remain and the Stage Manager. Emily, as you might recall wants to return to the living. She is cautioned not to do this but she insists.  She wants to see just one day. Just one day.

STAGE MANAGER: And as you watch it, you see the thing they--down there--never know. You see the future. You know what's going to happen afterwards. 

EMILY: But is that--painful? Why?

Wilder doesn't let any of the characters answer Emily's question. How clever of him to make us all wait and to experience the why with Emily.  Emily selects her 12th birthday to step back into her former life. As predicted this step back in time is a mistake. A painful one. After witnessing the absence of intensity on the part of her mother and father she understands a truth that I too know now. 

 Emily tells us:

EMILY: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another.  

She breaks down sobbing. 

The lights dim on the left hand of the stage. MRS. WEBB Disappears. 

I didn't realize. All that was going on in life and we never noticed. Take me back - up the hill - to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.  

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners? Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking? and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths? and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.  

She looks to the stage manager and asks abruptly through her tears: 

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every, every minute?  

STAGE MANAGER: No. 

Pause. 

The saints and poets, maybe--they do some. 

IV. 

At the very beginning of Act III of Our Town, the Stage Manager tells the audience, "There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being." I liked to believe that my soul--that thing that is eternal in each of us--will (re)connect with Rob's soul. I want to believe that we will be reunited in/at another space-time. 

Something eternal. Yes. I saw what is eternal leave my husband's broken body as he exhaled his last breath that Tuesday afternoon in March. I know he stops somewhere waiting for me.

---

#SOL16: A Fleeting Chirp

Forgetfulness (M.A. Reilly, 2010)     

...4

I stay up late listening.
My feet tap the floor,
they begin a tiny dance
which will outlive me.

From Larry Levis's "Signs"

I.

The squeaking sound In the hallway has me raising my head. It's late and as I look up I see a body, shrouded in a white sheet being pushed passed the door on a gurney. The person in the room next to Rob's has died. This glimpse at death remains unseen by Rob and Devon, both of whom are sleeping. Dev has insisted on coming tonight to spend the last night at the hospital with his dad. Earlier he said to me, "Let's make the most of this time with Dad."

"Yes, let's."

II.

I never gave much thought to an afterlife. But now I do. I know there is more to us--to Rob and me-than this mortal time we have composed and shared--a time cut too short. Two days ago, Rob told me that he would leave signs for me to follow as he travels from this universe to a parallel one.

"Pay attention," he jokingly scolded. "Read the signs I leave."

III.

Signs abound and tonight has me thinking more about possibilities than certainties.

1.3 billion years, two black holes collided and on the day the infected port was inserted under Rob's skin--the very act that started him on this road towards death,  "[a] team of scientists...heard and recorded the sound" of the collision: a fleeting chirp from a cosmic event that happened more than a billion years ago.

Tonight I am thinking how faith need not be limited to incense and prayer.

"I'll listen," I say softly into the darkness of the room, pausing to hear him asleep.