#SOL16: Blind Faith

Blind Faith (M.A. Reilly, West Milford, NJ, 2008)

I.

She wasn't what I expected. She was ordinary looking--like a former neighbor you might bump into at a supermarket one afternoon in fall. I expected exotic and yes there was incense and holy water, and rose spray, and tuning forks and the quiet intimacy one might expect. But Anne Marie looked more like a woman from the suburbs, than a 50s hipster.  She was funny and kind and I realized as we began and she called upon St. Michael to bless our encounter--deeply religious.

Mostly, she was genuine.

I had not been to a psychic-medium before yesterday and I want to say here that the experience that stretched across 90 minutes was wonderful. For the first time since Rob's death I felt a deep measure of peace.  It's hard for me to explain how unsettled my life has felt during these last six months. Every minute is a reminder of the loss.  Every minute. But yesterday as Anne Marie scribbled on the pad and asked me to help interpret what the dead were showing her, peace and contentment settled over me like a favorite blanket, like a chance encounter with a lost friend whom you suddenly meet.

I went to see Anne Marie mostly because I wanted to know that Rob was okay. I needed to know this. I also wondered about his spirit--was he still of this world in some manner?  I learned he was both okay and of this world.  I also encountered my mom and dad and a former neighbor.

II.

In prior years, I may well have been the least likely person to seek a medium or a psychic. I'm more of a skeptic, than a believer. But perspectives change with experience and that's the overarching lesson I want to remember. Perspectives change. And how grand is that? Ok, well sometimes those lessons come with a cost. But these costs are often what we most need to bear as they are doorways of a sort that open us to other ways of being in the world and that surely is grand.

When I arrived home, I shared the encounter with Devon, who makes me look like a true believer. But even he was surprised, especially when I shared aspects of the encounter that focused on him. Who knew he had his eye on a black sedan? Certainly not me. We talked physics in the kitchen as I finished preparing dinner. We talked about energies being neither created nor destroyed, but rather transformed. And as we talked, I wondered less about Rob's or my mom's or my dad's human body and more about their spiritual energies. There's great comfort in knowing each is present in some manner.

Anne Marie told me things she could never have known--details long ago forgotten or just recently encountered. Early on she asked me why my mom was showing her the place where Anne Marie's husband works. I asked where he worked as she said the Archdiocese of New York. I couldn't fathom why my mom would be showing her this and then she mentioned Cathedral High School, which is located within the archdiocese. And I knew. My mom graduated from Cathedral back in the 1930s. Then there was the specificity of what Rob wanted to thank me for--things only he and I knew, or the chance encounter with a cardinal I experienced only hours before or mentioning Devon's acceptance at the very college he most wants to attend--the same college who sent him an invitation to apply priority status this afternoon.

III.

Not everything Anne Marie mentioned could be understood. For example, Rob showed her a tree with cherries and cherries in a bowl and I still don't know what to make of either. He mentioned someone named George and that name meant nothing specific to me. And I find I mostly like this--the unsettled and unexplained--the space where silence reigns and talk is not present or needed.

 Last night I was reading another book by Thomas Merton (it's like he's whispering directly in my ear). About halfway through Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings, Merton writes:

But there is a greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. Eternity is in the present. Eternity is in the palm of the hand. Eternity is a seed of fire whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss" (Kindle Locations 431-433). 

The substance of silence. Oh my.

Mysteries abound and surely that is for our good.

#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.