Tag: thin spaces

Closing Time….

Each closing time is of course also some other beginning’s end. More of another slide around a circle. We rarely know the exact moment anyone we love will no longer be traveling hand-in-hand with us (at least in a way others can see) or how thin the space between us may remain.

Sometimes we know that day will come all too soon.

Measured in traditional human time, this is a fairly momentous anniversary of one of those days of physical parting. The final days of my husband’s life, in our home, have haunted me so much that since then I’ve found myself fruitlessly packing up and fleeing, more than once, with assorted combinations of children and beagles and oh-so-much weight in ultimately ephemeral belongings. The things we carry.

I think that today, he’d want me to share some of the heavens I’ve seen in solitude over the years only because I heeded his wish to get outside. To breathe in the wee hours when I’d need to make room to see the big picture, where it’s never closing time.

Disbelieving Dark

 

Messenger (c) October 30, 2012

“Just because you don’t believe in something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

A  strangely compelling Boardwalk Empire character–a World War I  sharpshooter who carried his talents back to a morally complex civilian life during Prohibition–dispensed this worthwhile advice at an Easter gathering.

A fellow blogger whom I count as a cyber-friend writes movingly of her own life, love, and loss of a beloved mother.  She wrote this morning that, surveying the bright colors of visible reminders of el dios de la muerte, she wishes she were “one of the haunted.”

She does not receive from her the mother the signals she hoped to receive–those elusive thin spaces in which she still can feel her presence.

I do not consider myself a believer in the afterlife in a traditional sense.  But I am unquestionably  haunted. I recently fled one haunted home, but remain surrounded by what I choose to believe are signals from Jim.

After my husband Jim spoke of his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, one of our friends looked at him–a young, outwardly robust, healthy man who betrayed no sign of illness, let alone such a devastating one–and said, with a hint of the abject disbelief we all felt, “The good kind or the bad kind?”

My ever-unflappable and good-natured husband replied, with his trademark wry grin, “I’m not sure there is a good kind of pancreatic cancer.” Continue reading “Disbelieving Dark”