One can learn many things from those who channel non-earthlings.
One of my daughters recently finished a school-specific rite of passage that involves writing a Senior Meditation. I know little of this ritual. I do know that our puppy consumed a good helping of fiber from a book of past Meditations, because I discovered shreds of palpable (pulpable?) evidence of that transgression.
I know only the tidbit of information my daughter was willing to disclose to me about her Meditation: it was about aliens.
“Did you get it done?” I was slightly afraid to ask, particularly because she spent the last three weeks of winter term with a horrible flu that turned her silvery voice into a froggy, hacking mess.
She nodded. And unleashed a coughing fit.
“What was it about?”
“Aliens.”
“Aliens?” I asked, sloshing coffee on my suit, shoes and outgoing mail as I headed out for work. “Like, undocumented immigrants?”
“Tralfamadorians.” She replied.
“Oh.” Enough said.
Tralfamadorians, as any Kurt Vonnegut fan knows, dispensed pearls of wisdom and were not favorably disposed to linear time: “It is just an illusion, here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.”
A few nights ago, on the anniversary of the day when my husband finally came home from the hospital, I read Hallucinations. Not unsurprisingly, Jim then visited my dreams, but in a disturbing way that left me feeling acutely that there was something more I could have done. Time and time again, in that peculiarly concentrated kaleidoscope that makes up REM sleep, Jim and I were racing to find the solutions to intricate word puzzles–and we always found the answers, but were too late.
In this dream world, governed by the strictest of linear time, only those who got the answers first won.
When I replay the weeks and days leading up to my husband’s death I think there was something more I could have done, some puzzle I could have solved in time to help him, to alleviate his pain, to make things somehow easier for him. Perhaps this is common for caregivers.
Some version of that searing self-doubt is my constant winter companion, when the very feel of the air and lighting of the sky brings me back to the moments when I rushed Jim to the emergency room, when snow curved into waves on the flat rooftops outside his hospital windows, when I trudged miles along an empty highway in a blizzard , ice granules whipping against my face, to get one more medication for him to try.
Yesterday was the day that contained the moment my husband’s heart stopped beating. Continue reading “Earthly Illusions and Blackwater Woods”
Love in the Spaces 