In the wake of my wife’s passing, my children still had obligations to meet. My son was in a job out in New York. My daughter had a semester to finish at Augustana College. Yet all of time seems to stand still when you’ve lost someone that important in your life. A husband misses a wife. A son misses a mother. A daughter misses the mom, especially at the age when young women are forming ideas about a model for their life.
Yet as grief sets in, the human mind does some strange things. In my son’s case, the pain swirled inside him and the temptations of a New York life beckoned him. My daughter wasn’t all that happy at Augustana. She made friends, but as a junior college transfer, there were many social constructs into which you can’t just walk in and adapt, or adopt. Plus the college had broken promises about transfer credits. That was a raw deal, yet she made the best of it in many ways.
In my case, I took a few days off from a new job as a Senior Copywriter at a web marketing agency and went right back to work within a week. I’d been out of a job freelancing to make ends meet the previous year while taking care of Linda and was concerned that spending time away from the new position could impact how they viewed me at the company. I didn’t want to lose a job I’d just started a few weeks before.
Lives in the balance
A couple weeks out from Linda’s passing, one of my daughter’s friends came over to spend the night and keep her company. It might have been Spring Break or something, so they both had time off from school. Her friend was an astronomy major. She also came from a culture that favored feng shui. She was invited to sleep over in the front bedroom but something in that layout didn’t set well with her, so she moved out to the living room where our giant Wickes Furniture couch offered a comfortable place to sleep.
I loved that couch and its partner chair. They had an almost denim feel, soft, and offered just the right amount of support and cushioning. Most of all, that furniture was wide enough to relax without feeling like you were going to fall off. Plus, those couches lasted forever and ever. They had been a centerpiece of our existence in the Batavia house for more than a decade.
So my daughter’s friend brought a pillow out and went to sleep on the couch sometime late into the night.
Her feet faced the end of the couch toward the middle of the room. That’s where my late wife’s head had rested on the medical bed the last day of her life. That all took place rather fast. The EMTs had arrived that day to help move her out from our tall bed in the master bedroom into the medical bed in the living room where care could be properly administered. They had nothing to carry her from the back of the house to the medical bed (which surprised me) so the EMTs plopped her upright in an office chair and wheeled her through the hallway to the medical bed. Once she was comfortably situated, I came to her bedside. She looked up at me with that typical twinkle in her eye and chuckled, saying, “I thought I wasn’t supposed to suffer!”
We both laughed at that. Compared to the things she’d been through to that point, the chair ride was nothing difficult, yet it did help to laugh about it. A few days before when things weren’t going so well for her digestively, I helped her with some bathroom issues. That isn’t a comfortable situation for anyone at any age. She was crying from embarrassment mostly, so I looked up at her and said, “Remember our marriage vows,” I urged her. “One flesh. We’re one person right now.”
Even so, there were some changes in her body that were so difficult to manage that I called in help from the wife of one of my best friends. She is a nurse that had helped us through many situations, including Linda’s difficult days after the emotional collapse years she’d experienced after the recurrence of cancer followng a year of “Gold Standard” treatments didn’t keep that awful disease at bay. That same nurse friend drove me home from Dodgeville, Wisconsin the day after I’d crashed on my bike going 40mph on a hill due to bike wobble. She’s the kind of woman you want by your side in any emergency. Calm. Honest. Informed.
The funnel of existence
All of that difficulty felt like it poured through a funnel of existence to the moment that Linda died at around nine p.m. on the 27th of March, 2013. The fine caregiver that arrived a couple hours before had stared intently in Linda’s direction after entering the house. She was a small, wonderfully dark-skinned woman with fine features, sharp eyes and a calm personality to match. “I’ll set up in the kitchen,” she told me that night. After Linda’s passing, she pulled me aside and said, “Your wife was already gone when I got here,” she told me. “Her body was still going but she was gone.”
That brings us back to the experience my daughter’s friend had the evening she stayed over to keep us company. To fully understand this story, it is important to acknowledge the framework of this young woman’s mind. She is a scientist by education and training. She is also a no-nonsense type of person in many respects. One afternoon while watching TV with us, she proclaimed, “You need to get rid of that big fat TV.” We still had one of those monster TV sets with the big silver case and a plastic “ass” with vents that stuck out the back of the TV stand. While working at Best Buy to make money for college, she had learned quite a bit about flat screens and recommended we dump the huge old tube set. A few days later, that TV literally blew a circuit with a spark, after which a veil of smoke rolled out the back. “See?” she laughed when we told her. “I told you it was time to get a new TV.”
That’s what makes the events during the night she stayed over so compelling. Sometime during the night she woke up and felt a presence in the room. At her feet near the end of the couch, there appeared a set of three lights. She described them as Orbs. One Red, another Green, and a third one in the middle was White. That same night she noted that one of a set of three four-inch tiles hanging on the wall popped off its nail. The image on it was a dragonfly.
I may not have recalled all those details perfectly. The experience she’d had was unexplainable, so she wasn’t all that forthcoming. It freaked her out a bit. It freaked me out a bit. Yet in some ways it fit perfectly with the idea that my late wife’s spirit or presence had somehow manifested itself in our realm in a way that none of us could fully understand. Some things just are…unexplainable.
No hookum spookum
I’ve looked up “orbs” and there are plenty of references to them online. One writer named “Kimberly Dawn” (real or fake name?) on Linkedin, of all places, shared this perspective about them,
There is no scientific evidence to support the existence of angel orbs. However, many people believe in them and claim to have seen them with their own eyes. Some say that they’ve seen these orbs in photos or even in person. Whether or not you believe in angel orbs, it’s undeniable that they capture the imagination and provide comfort to those who believe in them.
As I’ve shared, this young woman was no “hookum spookum” person prone to making things up for dramatic purposes. I entirely believe in what she’d seen or experienced. Even if she was dreaming somehow, it doesn’t matter to me. The fact that we have these mysterious encounters in any state of mind is important. The night that my mother died back in 2005, I was driving home through a dark November rainstorm when a giant buck deer ran across the road in front of my car. It’s often said that we see some sort of spirit animal in the wake of a loved one’s passing. That’s unexplainable too. I’m plenty satisfied leaving some things to the unexplainable.
I’ve come to believe that our emotional states and our sense of “being” are as “real” as material reality. Even if by encountering death we’re dealing with chemically-driven synapses or electrical impulses in response, those are wrought through millions of years of evolution, as we are all chemical beings. Our feelings of grief and loss are real because they drive chemical reactions in our brains. Our feelings of love and hope and memories are real too. These are all we have to explain our lives. These same thought constructs drive all of literature, and scripture, science and culture and relationships.
And if somehow the collective experience of human consciousness and conscience comes to use through the portal of three lighted orbs, it is there to tell us that life has value, that we should treasure those around us, and that something does exist beyond our material understanding, even if it is unexplainable.
We Run and Ride 