Hello from the other side

The Sunday Dreads Vol. 31

I am writing this from my friend

Caroline Moss

’s bed in Altadena, California. Caroline is not here, because we are excellent communicators and she had made plans to visit her former babysitter in San Francisco.

I talked to Aaron last night. My first husband. The one who died in November 2014. Whose initial I wear around my neck. Whose writing I wear on my wrists. Whose soul I carry tucked inside of my own.

The before times.

I have spoken with him before; short, accurate and resonant messages randomly delivered by two different mediums, visits in dreams where he is both dead and also alive and ready to tell me something important. He shows up for me in numbers (666), in the sky (hawks), in obscure songs that hit the radio at the exact same moment.

I am not the most woo of people, but I did grow up Catholic, and there’s a mysticism to that religion that does make sense to me: pray to a saint, pray for your dead loved ones, remember them with lit candles and rosaries. The veil between what is now and what is next is sometimes thin, and I have seen through it only a few times. When I told my stern father, on his death bed, that he’d been a good dad, he’d looked at me with childlike disbelief. Softened by the specter of death, he’d whispered and incredulous, “really?” He died a few hours later.

Weeks later, when Aaron took his very last breath and I felt a keyhole to the universe opening up. When our son — unprompted — stood on his tiny picnic table in the backyard of a home Aaron had never lived in and said, “I’m waving to Papa! He’s the sky. He’s the grass. He’s the clouds.”