I have been dreading writing this. It’s not going to be wise or funny or clever, and it definitely won’t make me look good. I’m only doing it because I think I have to. Some people say life is learning. In my life, that means reading things I wrote before and learning to be mortified.

Richard Bach, New Age spiritual big shot and author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, fell in love with actor Leslie Parrish in the 1970s, as described in The Bridge Across Forever. And it wasn’t just love. It was a holy occasion of spiritual reunification. He had dreamed of her, he had loved her in previous lives, they had out-of-body experiences together. They gave workshops on what it meant to find a soulmate. They were cosmically, existentially it.

Which is why people had a few questions when they got divorced. The divorce itself was apparently amicable, the details pedestrian. They grew apart, wanted different things, would still be friends. It wasn’t newsworthy except, hey, wait a minute, didn’t you two have some sort of eternal metaphysical bond happening? So some years ago, Richard Bach took to the Interwebs and briefly explained the perfectly ordinary end of their marriage. And he acknowledged that he had said a lot of things previously about forever and eternity and all that jazz. And he said something like, I should have added one thing: maybe I’m wrong about all of this.

I don’t think he was wrong about it, not exactly. He was just wrong about what it meant, how it would play out in their experience. Maybe they were cosmically bonded–but they still had to suffer the earthy, dirty reality that marriages end.

Before my mother died, she and I had experiences with The Dead Relatives. And sometimes they were so compelling that I would think, “This is it. This is all the proof I could want. I will never doubt the reality of a spiritual afterlife again.” But both Mom and I noticed that over time, the glow would fade and the story would get scrambled in our memories. We’d tell each other the stories to remind ourselves. One of the last things she said to me was, “We have to write down all the stories so they don’t get lost.” She died. On the whole, the stories did not get written.

But then she gave me the best story of all, the one I wrote about. And it isn’t that I doubt it now. It happened just as I said. I believe that my beloved dead are not gone and that they are with me. I can’t doubt it.

But I was naive about what that meant. I thought it meant I didn’t have to miss my mother—and it’s true that I mourned her far less than you’d expect because I felt her so near me. It was even a bit exciting sometimes, like having a friend with a backstage pass. And I thought, “How amazing life will be now that death is nothing to fear.” I’m really embarrassed about that, which is why I’m writing now. It was hubris to the highest, filthiest degree. I thought I was off the hook of being human.

In late June, my sister was supposed to be on a business trip. My father came over to feed the cat and found her body in her bed. He cried, “I thought your mother would take care of her.” I’ve given it a lot of thought since then, and maybe Mom was taking care of her, somehow. Maybe the other options were worse. The cause of death is unknown as of this writing, but maybe a sudden death was a better deal than whatever slow torture was waiting for her. I don’t know. I try not to believe in cosmic error, but it’s hard. She left two small children with her ex-husband and no explanation for any of us.

The day before Melissa died, we spent the day together doing very ordinary things: we went to a furniture store, got coffee, looked for wallpaper, ate pizza. There was no warning. The Relatives were silent. My mother said nothing I was aware of. The whole day, I thought I smelled flowers—not perfume, but real flowers, and it didn’t seem to belong to either her or me, but it followed us everywhere we went that day. If that was some sort of sign, it was the only one we got.

And what I want to acknowledge is that I was a goddamn fool. Knowing what I think I know, it has not saved me. I know Melissa is somewhere because everyone is somewhere, and I know she’s okay because ultimately, cosmically, everyone’s eventually okay, right? I don’t believe in Hell, and I don’t believe her atheism is going to get her bounced out of any afterlife worth afterliving. But oh, I wish I could reach back in time and smack my own smug little face. What a happy, happy story I had to tell! I thought it wouldn’t hurt so much because of what I know, and maybe that story could keep it from hurting someone else so much, too. I’m telling you I was wrong. She may be okay. I am not.

I don’t want to get into the specifics of who she was, and how special, and how loved. But without her, I am a jagged broken piece. I was Jelly to her Narwhal, Arthur to her Tick. I bet she’d tell me to be my own hero now. Easy for her to say.

I was an entity within a matrix of social structures that have collapsed without her. Three people out of four was still a family, but my father and I alone are lost and barely know what to say to each other. Her children took up as much head space as my own son; now I see them for a few hours every other weekend, and only because I insist on it. Their father, and my father, seem willing to watch the whole extended edifice fall to pieces. Or not even watch it. Just turn around and find it gone, like Melissa herself.

My sister had dependent children and no will and owned a house. It’s a mess. Apparently we’re just waiting for an agent of the probate court to come change the locks. In the meantime, my father visits every day. Sometimes I do, too, but it hurts me, God, it hurts me everywhere I can feel pain. This is what’s left, the exoskeleton of the life she chose for herself and her children (and she and I chose many aspects of that life together). And I go there and sit on the orange couch among the pictures of cows and llamas and her children, and I think I can feel her but it’s just because the interrupted remnants of her personality are still humming all around me. The last time I was there, my heart felt so big and I stood in the living room and called, “I love you! I love you! Melly, I love you so much! I love you. I love you.”

About three weeks after she died, I went there to pick up some clothes for the children. I washed and dried them, and as I sat on the couch and listened to the dryer, I fell into a sort of meditative trance. And I want so much to tell you that she was there, that she spoke to me, that I was comforted. But it’s almost worse. I think she spoke to me and it was a freaking fiasco.

I thought practicing with my mother had suited me for spirit communication, so maybe this was just mental illness. It started there while I was still in the house and continued the whole time I was visiting her children. I can barely begin to describe how strange it was. My mother speaks in urges—turn here, pick that up, look over there. My sister, it seems, speaks in images and static. It was like having someone else’s memories or dreams, without words or context. It went on for hours, distractingly, and I couldn’t make any sense of it. It was as if everything I thought reminded me of something else…but the something else didn’t actually belong to me, and then it seemed like the original thought didn’t either. That’s the best I can explain it.

Finally I took a nap, hoping to get something a little more direct. Before I fell asleep I jotted descriptions of three images that emerged from the mess. One was the pink Troll doll from the movie, but I haven’t seen it, so that was no help. The second was the face of the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, one of Melissa’s favorite movies, in that moment right after he transforms into a man, that expression of confused wonder. And the third was a character from Inside Out, which she and I saw together and loved. It was Joy.

I hope it was her. And I hope it means good things. When I woke up, whatever had been in my head was gone, and it has not come back in all this time.

If nothing else, I thought a firm belief in life after death would make me less afraid of my own death. It has not. I am so aware now of the way a life can just end. Bam. I play a morbid little game now, the “not-dead” game. I see an ancient street person pushing a grocery cart. Dave says she’s been living on that corner for years, and I imagine how hard that is and say, “Yet she is not dead.” In the news, someone is stabbed multiple times—yet he is not dead. My friend had a stroke and, between CT scans, resigned herself to her death–yet she is not dead. Somehow, whatever happened to my sister’s body was so terrible that she actually died, all the way, permanently. With all these people walking around not dead, I can’t begin to imagine what happened to her in her own bed that could be that devastating. But whatever it is, there’s no reason it (or something worse) couldn’t come any time for me, my husband, my son, my friends. I guess I knew that.

The death of my cats changed something in me. From the day we brought our new dog home, I’ve been aware every time I touch her that there is a death waiting inside her. But now I feel like that about people, too. And I’ll say it again: knowing that death isn’t the end doesn’t help the way I thought it would. I want this life, here, the one I’ve built for myself, with these people who would cry if I disappeared. I want this man, this boy, this dog, this garden. And I want my sister.

The story of my mother may have been naive and overly chirpy, but at least it was optimistic. The story of heartbreak is old and unsurprising, but it’s the one I have at the moment. I hope I can come back and offer a better one, I really do.

“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.”

Robert Hass, “Meditations at Lagunitas”