Posted on by Meghan · 2 Comments

The Statue of St. Fiacre

As promised long ago, here is another story of Adventures with Dead People.

In August of 2016, I was buying some plants for my classroom. I passed up the Calloway’s closer to the school and went to Ruibal’s. The plants could be pricey, but my mother was a certified Master Gardener, and she said they were excellent. This was back when my mother was alive and could say stuff like that directly.

I’m really straining here to slip in some details you need to know without ruining the story, but I don’t know how to do it. I’m just going to have to lay it out.

  • My grandmother Jean, my mother’s mother, had died almost a year before.
    • Not strictly relevant but entertaining in its way: my grandmother famously had a “black thumb.” Presumably, my mother’s talent with plants came from my great-grandfather, who grew “dinner-plate dahlias.” My grandmother could kill a plant just by looking at it cross-eyed.
  • St. Fiacre is the Irish patron saint of gardeners (also of sufferers of venereal disease, fistulas, and hemorrhoids, but you’ll be pleased to learn that those appear in this story not at all).
    • I knew who St. Fiacre was because my mother had long searched for a St. Fiacre garden statue. No, St. Francis would not do. And yeah, the Interwebs have All The Things, but the cost of shipping a garden statue is shocking.
  • My grandmother loved Gerber daisies. They were her favorites and everyone knew that. To this day, Dad plants them by his front door for her.

I picked up a few nice, murder-resistant, green classroom plants (sansevieria, pothos, some other leafy guys, no flowers) and then felt a pull toward a corner full of huge flowerpots. I did not need or want a huge flowerpot, so I thought, Nah, and then I thought, But then again… Oh, I wish I could explain how ordinary it is when it happens! It’s not weird. It’s not like being possessed (I assume, having been free of demons to date). It’s just a very compelling argument in my own head.

Side story: the purpose of such compulsions does not always even become clear. I was driving home from somewhere once and got close to a Barnes & Noble I liked. Now, it doesn’t take much to get me into a bookstore; it’s getting me out that presents the challenge. But this particular day, I was done with my errand and I really had to use the restroom. So I thought, no, I’ll just go home.

Barnes & Noble has a bathroom.

I know. But I could also just go home.

BUT YOU COULD ALSO GO TO BARNES & NOBLE.

We (I still don’t know who or what was the other party on the line) went around like this a few times. At one point I moved the wheel to change lanes and then said aloud, “No, okay then, I guess not,” and got back in the right lane and turned in to the parking lot, because apparently that’s what we were doing today.

I did the standard “shopping with dead people” bit: wander, keep an open mind, pick things up and put them down. Once I had used the restroom, I felt nothing compelling at all. Frustrated and feeling a little crazy, I left.

In the parking lot was the green Saturn sedan belonging to my ex-husband, Jason. Not just a similar one, but clearly his car, with the CELEBRATE DIVERSITY sticker intact. He had been in the store with me. In fact, unknown to me at the time, he was working there. But I hadn’t noticed him, and I had no idea what I should have done about it if I had.

I stood and stared at the car for a minute. Then I left. And I never figured out what the point of that whole thing could have been. Maybe it wasn’t about me at all; maybe he needed to see me for some reason. But I never spoke to him again, and after some years he died quite suddenly.

And yes, in fact, I did hear from him after he died, which was especially interesting because he was an atheist. His grandmother, a sweet-tempered and deeply devout Christian, is one of the few people who’s ever visited me in a dream, and I assume it’s because Jason himself simply did not truck with that nonsense. I remember only that the dream had snow in it, and that at the end, I didn’t want her to leave, so she started to…materialize, I guess. And at that moment I learned I did not ever want to see a real ghost. Ever. And thankfully, I haven’t yet, and I hope I never do because I’d be terrified.

Jason never would have been so overt—even in life he was so unassuming—so he sent me one of those “coincidences” that will never convince the unconverted but work quite nicely for me. The morning after I learned of his death, I heard a song by Throwing Muses, a band he had loved that I’ve hardly ever heard on the radio. I said aloud, “You have my attention.” The next one was Tori Amos’s “Cornflake Girl,” another deep cut from an artist he liked. “Okay,” I said. “If the next song is by Natalie Merchant, I’ll know it’s you.” And damnit, it wasn’t Natalie Merchant…exactly. It was 10,000 Maniacs, which is the band she was in before she went solo. Close enough, says I. I was moved, and a little awed, and grateful.

But why couldn’t he have just opted for one of her solo hits? There were plenty. And why “Cherry Tree”? It’s about illiteracy, of all things. And of all the Tori Amos songs he’d put on my mix tapes, “Cornflake Girl” had never appeared. It always goes like this. Some part of the experience is always not quite cooked to order.

I am quick to acknowledge that such a discrepancy between the request and the result could occur because it’s all coincidence and none of it means anything! That’s a very respectable and defensible point. You’ll never embarrass yourself in polite society with a stance like that. You’ll always win that argument. But this story is maybe not for you.

By that August, I had had a few of these experiences, enough to recognize the wordless pull of Psst! Over here! I did not need a huge flower pot. But I rolled my cart into the corner anyhow…and a door opened. I had never noticed a door in that corner of the greenhouse. I went through it, and to my left were large concrete garden statues. I knew Fiacre would be there. I recognized him immediately by his spade, but I checked the tag to be sure. Two hundred bucks was steep, but I knew my family had to have him. I lugged him up into the seat of the cart.

In those days, Ruibal’s had a little food market, and I had been planning to pick up a few groceries. But before I could get there, I was beset by courteous employees who wanted to help me get my cart to the checkout. I saw their point. St. Fiacre was heavy and two feet tall and cumbersome and leaning dangerously out of his seat. I let them take the cart and trotted behind. As we swept through the market, I grabbed a loaf of bread from a display and chucked it onto the checkout belt: at least I could check that off the list.

And St. Fiacre was on sale! Score! After I got in the car, I looked at the receipt to see how much I had saved on my discounted saint. The first three items on the receipt were “St. Fiacre” and “Grandma’s Perfect White Bread” and “Gerber Daisy.”

I had not bought any Gerber daisies.

Fear not: I’m pretty sure the imaginary Gerbers weren’t more expensive than what I actually got. In my experience, the Dead Relatives are pretty budget-conscious. As you will see.

I was dying to talk this over with my mother, but my parents were out. Finally, I left St. Fiacre by the back fence where they’d see him right away when they got home. Mom said later that even though she wasn’t wearing her glasses (and her eyesight was terrible), as soon as they turned into the alley, she said, “Oh, that must be St. Fiacre,” as if she had been expecting him any day. When I spoke with her that night, she offered to pay me back. I said not to worry about it.

A few weeks later, I was visiting my parents, and Mom approached me with some cash in her hand and the oddest look on her face: a little hesitant, a little dazed. She explained haltingly that actually, it was my grandmother who had been looking for the St. Fiacre to begin with. She’d wanted it as a gift for my dad, who had taken up gardening in the last few years. She’d told my mother to buy it if she ever found one, and my grandmother would pay her back.

“But you don’t have to pay me back, it’s fine,” I assured her.

“Well…I’m not. She is. I’ve been keeping blankets in the bureau I got from her house. I’ve been using those drawers for a year and never saw anything. But today the corner of the drawer liner was folded up, and this was under it. So I think this is yours.” She handed me two hundred-dollar bills: the original price of the St. Fiacre.

I keep wanting to explain that I am not insane or stupid. I know how probability works, more or less. I live with garden-variety coincidence every day of my life and don’t get hung up on it. I can’t prove anything or convince anyone, and I promise I’ll never try because that would be crazy. It’s not the things that happen. It’s the way they feel when they do.

I’ve been sad lately, and agitation seems to cause static in my reception. So it’s been quiet in my little World of Woo-woo. But last week I went out for a walk for the first time in a while. I wondered what it might be like to feel my mother’s spirit so surely that she could tell me where to turn. Not that it mattered where I walked, but just to feel her, to be less lonely. And I got the urge to cross the street at a random point. I didn’t credit the idea with any particular importance. Then again, what would it hurt to just go with it? Why not? It was late at night. No cars, little light. As I crossed, I said in my head, I hope you know that normal people call this mental illness. Now I was on the other side of the street. Looked pretty much the same. But now I was close enough to see a mailbox that stood in shadow; I almost walked past it before I turned around. It was decorated with astonishingly realistic butterflies: one of my mother’s many sigils (probably the most conventional one in a long list that includes carousel horses and Jackson’s chameleons). It was beautiful. It didn’t change my fate or anything. But I got to see it because I crossed the street. That’s all. It’s like that.

Posted on by Meghan · 3 Comments

Thanatopsis

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”