life after death

The Haunting in Josephburg


How does one politely tell the spirits to bugger off?

They mean well. I know this. Our dead family only has our best interests at the center of their wispy insubstantial hearts, but my personal preference is to live in psychically deaf ignorance of any coming catastrophes or even minor bumps. And I am not talking “bumps” in the night.

Or the early morning light.

I haven’t been able to get a full night’s uninterrupted sleep since Rob’s heart attack. Some of it, I will concede, is the reactivation of my caregiver’s spidey sense, but the physical presence(s) in our room are not helping.

For some reason, I am able to tune in to the frequency of the departed with nerve jangling clarity in the early morning hours. I wake nearly every night to the powerful sense of someone standing by the windows.

Thursday morning I was awakened by footsteps that started at the door and ended at the foot of the bed. I started because they were loud and opened my eyes to spy a human shape heading towards Rob’s side of the bed.

Sunrise filtered illuminated the shape and I assumed it was Rob. He is often up to use the bathroom on the main floor. I heard him ask,

“What’s wrong?”

“I heard footsteps,” I told him and thinking now that they were his, I went back to sleep.

Only it wasn’t Rob.

Later as I thought about it more – while sitting in the ER as the doctor tried to determine if Rob had suffered another heart attack – I realized that the figure was clad in light coloured clothing. Rob’s robe is dark and even when he shuns it – which he isn’t at the moment with my mother visiting – he is dark.

The chest pains turned out to be a reaction to the Lipitor, which is another kettle of fish for another day, but as I headed into town to spring Rob from the Fort Hospital – also a tale for a day soon – Metallica came on the radio.

Metallica is hardly in popular radio rotation anymore. When the rare song turns up, it usually comes at “interesting” moments in my life. As they were my late husband’s favorite band, I have to wonder at the timing.

“These are definitely messages for you, ” Rob remarked when I told him about it later.

Perhaps I should pay more attention than he did.

My Life as a House


The quaintly cliché notion that surrounds terminal illness has no better friend than fiction.

I suppose if one has never watched another die than the idea that fleeting finality will coalesce into heartwarming relationship building that shores the foundations of love so that it may bear the separation and even jump-start positive growth experiences is comforting. As it is meant to be. But it’s not real.

Rob and I watched Kevin Kline’s 2001 film entitled Life as a House last evening. Of course, Kline’s character is dying. Naturally he is estranged from his child, ex-wife and living life in general prior to receiving his personal wake up call. And as most dying people do, he decides to demo the shack he lives in – interestingly situated on prime California ocean front property – to build a new home to leave to his sixteen year old son.

Although, the house is the least of what Kline’s character hopes to leave behind, a loft full of death-fueled ambition propels this man.

And it’s predictable. Epiphanies pop like flower buds in the morning sun after a night’s rain. Good is rewarded and annoying folk awarded their comeuppance.

Kline’s character dies more convincingly than 99.9% of the screen deaths I have seen. Having stood bedside myself, I am morbidly critical of fake death. His last moments struck truth. Not that I care all that much to see accurate death-bed scenes, but I hate it when they are prettied up.

Admittedly, given Rob’s recent heart attack, Dee’s birthday with all its memories, and it being the season of “anniversaries”*, we probably should’ve watched that horrid Vince Vaughan tripe holiday throwaway I found the last time we were at the book mobile.

But we are fond of Kline. He’s also worth watching. Vince? Not so much.

What’s stuck with me today though is  the lessons thing. That when someone becomes so ill that death is inevitable, those around learn something from that person’s grace under pressure example. Dying people are seen as sages and their loved ones gather at their feet like disciples at the Last Supper.

It’s not like that. Love is more often left hanging on whatever peg it was carelessly allowed to dangle on and recalcitrant children opt to revert even further to the typecasting of their younger selves. Neighbors more often decide to scuttle like roaches than step up and words are left unsaid that need to be spoken and shouted that should be swallowed.

The whole stoic saint persona was/continues to be the most difficult for me.

Rob’s recent brush with acute illness sharply reminded me that I function better in long seige conditions and not in the initial skirmishes when the enemy’s unknown and the terrain is new.

But I did like the house analogy. Death is a metaphor’s goldmine. To me it makes total sense that the old is razed and the new is rebuilt atop. Phoenix from ash. Apt.

I dream a lot about houses. They are never finished and I am usually in transit from one to another. They are always in the college town of long ago, which symbolically makes no sense aside from the education aspect.

I wonder sometimes what it will mean if I should ever dream that I am in a finished house. Of course, I will have to actually live in one first as I need a template.

Three houses passed university and not one ever “done”. Now there is a better analogy for my life.

Best line – “Change can be so slow that you don’t know if your life is better or worse until it is.” That, thank goodness, is not one of my analogies.

*I think the whole anniversary of deaths, non-birthdays, non-wedding anniversaries and – worst of all, in my own opinion – the idea that events leading up to deaths should be observed in any way are products of a society lulled into the false belief that death is the trauma that keeps on refueling. And that ‘s it better to acknowledge and acquiecse to it than simply acknowledge and get back to daily life. I read accounts of people who literally lose weeks to gearing up and ramping down. If I took time out to do more than simply recall that “oh yeah, that happened today”, I would never get up off the floor in the corner I was curled up in. I’d be like that old SNL skit. “Yes, the late Mr. Loomis used to lay in a basket by the door. He had no spine, you know. God rest his soul.”  If grief is a 12 step process, and I suspect strongly that it isn’t, it’s not productive to recycle it yearly. No good can come out of  that kind of hindsight flogging.

I was not Marilyn Monroe


… in a past life. Though I had a dress like the one she’s wearing in that photo of the subway ruffling her. Except it was navy with white polka-dots. And it never wafted up on me though it attracted a bit of attention.

And I only just recalled that right this minute, which is why a post from me on my past lives is such an oxymoron. I can barely recall events that happened in my current life.

Though I defy most people to remember any piece of their college wardrobe twenty-five years after the fact.

I have a friend whose past lives currently beckon.

She’s writing a book with a reincarnation theme and in her research found Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls. This led her to past lives regression therapist and to the idea of virtual time traveling via hypnosis herself.

My self’s past incarnations aren’t that personally alluring. I know I’ve existed before, but I don’t need to know the details. They are for the times when I am “offline” and have the leisure and guidance to reflect. When I am engaged in a life, I am afraid that knowledge of my former selves might distract me or mislead me.

You wouldn’t find me lurking in the pages of history at any rate. I was never notable. I was just a girl. Always a girl though why that sticks out, I can’t say. Never a queen or adventuress or the woman behind the man as most people with claims to past lives seem to always be.

Being famous in a past life, in my opinion, is a sign that one needed remediation of some kind. Why else throw a soul into high profile, larger than life should be situations that require so much support staff? I think the bigger your soul-tourage; the more lessons you might have not mastered the last time around. Something to ponder the next time you’re envying Lady Gaga or Prince William.

Abby is in consultation with the regression therapist. You can’t just stare at an open flame and 1, 2, 3, find yourself at Hampton Court celebrating Mid-summer’s Night with the Tudor court. It’s a bit more work than that. And now you know.

Newton’s book struck a chord and clarified some of my thoughts on the subject of living and re-living. I didn’t pick the book up looking for that however. I was looking for a more plausible afterlife in the wake of my first husband’s death.

Curlicue clouds and fluffy robes? I had a difficult time imaging my flannel-clad, shaggy bearded man in wings and a white starched choir robe.

What I found was not heaven in my reading. I’m from Iowa, which is not heaven either but a portal,* so I know of what I speak**.

Newton talks of soul groups, debriefings, and lesson/life plans. It’s work. Not the alluring stuff of the salvation vs damnation lottery.

I am following Abby’s adventure with interest however. I’ll keep you apprised.

*FYI/dumb fact: My cousin’s daughter’s in-laws own part of the Field of Dreams.

** Over the course of 12 years of Catholic school, the subject of heaven comes up a lot.