Talking To The Dead

@chowtobearetronaut.com

Following a well worn path, I think more about ghosts as I age; surgeries, illness, the deaths of my grandparents, of children of women I've known, sudden losses to agonizing to be borne, yet sometimes are.( I say sometime to acknowledge the fact that not everyone makes it after this kind of loss. No. Some are lost to drugs, some abandon their families physically, some emotionally, some unravel mentally, some kill themselves. When a person is told You are so strong to keep going and they reply What choice do I have? I think of the others. )

The first time someone I knew as an adult lost a child was five or so years ago, when a woman I'd known intimately through a private online Attachment Parenting group lost her oldest son, Jordan. He had been ill, that was all, just sick, the way everyone gets sick. Only something happened to his heart- it got very sick, and he went to bed and never woke up. His father found him the next morning. I will never forget Mr. Curry rushing into the bedroom and waking me, voice trembling, to tell me that her son had died. He was a beautiful, sweet boy with dark hair, tall, a religious and faithful boy who loved his big family and cars. Jordan.

When my Grandmother Elizabeth died, I was in the next room. My mother, my aunts, myself, Mr. Curry- I can't even remember who all was there, just that we all were, and that in the half hour before she died, when she had been voiceless and clouded, she sat bolt upright and asked in a worried voice What time is it? My mother told her. She lay back down, appeased, it seemed. I left the room, to breathe, and she died while I was in the hallway. I look at the trees and the sky and wonder, now and again, if she's anywhere, and if she is, could it be there? In the gem green palm of the leaf of her favorite tree?

Up on Saturday night, Ever sleeping in the bed, I watched a story on what I thought was about Loretta Lynn, the country singer, but turned out to actually be about her haunted house, a colonial built in the late 1800's that stood next to a church which was used for medical purposes during the Civil War. Loretta's own son died close to that house, her oldest boy rode his horse through the river and never made it to the other side. The children were interviewed about their various encounters with ghosts, and the daughter talked of a woman in white, 'expressionless', floating into her room, then taking two, three steps backward into her bathroom when the little girl called to her Nanny. These kinds of stories and interviews have been around since people have been talking, but I'm recently hearing them all around me.

Two weeks ago my preschool started collecting books for a sale one of the teachers is having to raise money for her class, and I snagged a few books to read and return. I read one of them that weekend, a book by a medium named John Edward. He talks about spirits, how they visit him, how they see their 'opening' like a door opening, when he talks to someone they loved, and they move toward that door and clamor for his attention. What they want most, he says, is to tell us it's OK. They don't want us to suffer or worry. They are all right. If your child died and you could talk to them on the other side, what else could you want to hear more? I'm OK, Mom.

This Wednesday on Channel 10 there is an interview and 'tests' with a well known psychic. I'm recording it, I'm watching it. These things are popping up all around me right now, and I'm keeping my eyes open. Do I believe in ghosts? I don't know. I am too aware of everything I don't know and don't understand to presume that I know there are or aren't ghosts. I know physics is amazing, and I know Albert Einstein said 'The more I study science, the more I believe in God.' Einstein's God wasn't a God of magic or spirit but a God of infinite Universal science spun as a great, incredible being that we cannot or do not comprehend. I know that black holes, quarks!, the miracle ( I believe it is ) of finding Pi in everything from the center of every single snowflake to every single eyeball, the traveling of light, the beginnings of life- all these things are amazing and mystifying and wondrous to me.

I wouldn't like to be bullshitted if my child died.

But I think the temptation to reach out, with any grain of hope- however miniscule or far fetched- to my child would be so great that I would try.

Would you?