Ghost Matt
Right after Matt died, a well meaning neighbor smiled sadly and told the kids, " your daddy is your guardian angel now!"
Maile responded in her flat jaded 6 yo way: "he is definitely not an angel."
We all agreed. Angel Matt-- not a possibility.
But then Maile considered it for another moment. "He's a more of a spirit."
Vigorous nodding. Yup. Definitely more spirit than angel.
*
I don't know what I believe about the afterlife.
If you asked me 20 years ago, as I was preparing to go on my mission, I would have been really clear about it. We are spiritual beings having a human experience! We persist in the next world, and serve others by teaching them the truth, and eventually maturing into greater and greater spiritual beings, and eventually even godhood!
Ten years ago, my answer would have been just as definite. Nothingness. The electrical silence of the brain is the end. We only persist in the sense that the matter that made us and passed through us persists, and will, from big bang to black hole.
There was a kind of quiet comfort in that: no judgement, no mortal tests to past for the hereafter-- just the material challenge of living well for a short beautiful electric brain moment. Make art, love others, diminish the suffering in the world, because this is it. And this world, the here and now, is beautiful.
And then, a few months before Matt died, that little spiritual lobe in my brain flicked back on. It was a bizarre sensation-- a sense organ I thought was gone came stalwartly back online. Gentle nudges and persistent spiritual shoves-- hey. The universe said. Remember me? Remember how to hear things with this inner ear? Hey. Listen.
I was baffled-- why now? What does this mean for the story of reality I've been telling myself? I couldn't answer that, but I mentally shrugged. Sure. Hey universe, sup?
When I left the Mormon church, I made a solemn promise to myself and to God, whatever that is, that I would listen to the spirit when it spoke to me. I expected it to call me back to church, any day, but it never did. When I did feel those nudges of-- whatever it is-- intuition, spirit, guidance, Spidey sense-- I tried to listen. But the skill eroded and I figured, after many years away from it, that the practice of "listening to the spirit" was a kind of social pressure combined with deeply seated wishful thinking.
Until it started up again. Then the alienness, the outside-ness, the not-just-me-ness of that spiritual Knock Knock at the door-- it surprised me. Maybe...there is Something. My spiritual identometer nudged away from staunch confidence of athiesm towards a more tentative agnosticism. 42?
On my 2016 planner, I wrote the guiding words: optimism and intuition. If the universe was going to talk to me, I would try to learn to hear it.
Five months later, Matt died by suicide.
We came crashing to Utah, homeless, sick, wrecked.
In those first few days, running miserable errands (how many things have to be notarized? How many copies in triplicate do we have to procure of which bloodless documents?) we went to the Orem library. Where else? (The day my mom died I got on my bike and rode to the library, tears flying out of my eyes like Ghibli movie. I was gently gathered up by my friend's mom, a librarian, and taken home. Now I think, my God, how could I have fled my family at that moment? But I did.)
I sat on a bench with the kids and read Tam Lin to them and ugly sobbed. It was the last story Matt told them, and the story he had told me, in his oblique way: be my Janet. Let me claw at you and burn you and wreck you because somewhere under here I am your handsome prince.
A librarian recognized me, he went to high school with my dad. He said pertly, "And how are you today?"
"Really truly terrible."
He fled. "Hope you feel better soon!"
Hah, thanks I won't!
Surely people could see the sparking aura of pain I traveled in, the lightening struck tower cast over me?
We left the library and the kids pointed up at the sky: it's daddy's horse!!!
Clear to the eye, and even in the shaky cell phone photo I took, was the galloping line of Matt's horse tattoo.
In Hawaii, we watch for hoailona. Spiritual signs in the natural world. Clouds that make the faces of the ancestors, strange rainbow swoops in a clear sky, the voices of animals, the flashing otherworldly presence of the sea-creatures, our ancient cousins. We take these little shows of the universe as a given-- this is communication.
Seeing that horse, those ancient strokes carved in chalk on the other side of the world, instead arching across the evening sky-- I felt hopeful and bitter and hurt and seen.
How dare you, how dare you send me signs. How dare you try to speak to me this way.
I remembered Epona, the Celtic horse goddess, and a psychopomp. A being that transports the dead to the next world.
That sign across the sky said: In transit.
It wasn't Matt speaking to us. Someone who has cut off their access to their organs of speech cannot speak to us.
It was the horse itself. The horse is the journey. The ancient transformation. The inevitable crossing.
Like an empty cross, the horse is riderless. The rider, he is dead. He is not there. The horse runs on. Maybe he is burdened with the impossible lightness of souls.
In Hawaii, a great ulu tree overhangs the cliffs of Polihale. This is the entrance to the land of the dead, the land of darkness: Po. The souls of the dead cling to the branches of this tree like aphids. When their non-weight is heavy enough to break the branch, it falls into Po, taking them with it to the next world. Into darkness.
Maybe that's what the horse is carrying. Something invisible but heavy enough to break you, and send you hurtling over the cliffs edge and into the wine dark sea.
I had a near-stranger tell me, bashfully ("I don't know if you believe in this kind of thing, but I thought you should know--") she woke up shaking, Matt's voice loud in her ear: SORRY.
My sister dreamed he walked into the living room like nothing had happened. When she screamed at him, "You fucking killed yourself!!" He said, no no no, NO. He began railing and ranting, beating himself up. He was scary.
He didn't know what he did, she said. He didn't know he was dead. He didn't know what he did to you all.
We made a daddy shrine on a shelf in the living room. As we unpacked, Matt's things ended up on the shelf. Jars of sand from Kauai, his buck horn handled knife, made by my uncle as a wedding gift, his tweed hat from our Christmas trip to Dublin, his cattlemans association day planned, marked with his tidy slanted cursive: "Guinea Grass Samples", "Move Goats," "4-H meeting" stretching across the year. We placed the tiny votive candles they gave us at the Kauai grief group around next to the box of his ashes in the tied Hawaiian print cloth.
More and more items collected there. His cowboy hat. His books. Pictures. His watches and belt buckles. Leatherman and Japanese business cards in a silver card case. The shrine began to vibrate in the corner of the living room with a kind of aware intensity-- it throbbed in the corner of your vision when you walked in.
Maile was shaken with nightmares every night. If I asked her about it in the morning, she yelled at me-- I didn't dream anything!!
It was spooking me. I smudged the house, banishing the creepiness. It helped us feel better, and kept the nightmares away a little.
I talked to him constantly. He was always in front of me-- always my interlocutor. I railed against him, begged him, interrogated him-- but the stream of communication was constant. His voice-- his self-- was still crisp in my mind. I knew what he might say, the inflection of his voice, the quirk of his mouth.
But the monologue is just that-- it's a call into a canyon with no echo. I was talking to him, to keep him alive. To keep him an active part of my life, living in my mind. Once I saw it, I knew it had to stop. I decided to quit cold turkey. "You're dead. I need to stop talking to you."
The inner monologue went silent. Just myself to talk to around here.
Then I had a nightmare. Matt was standing on a ledge, looking down at us. He was watching us intently, shirtless, hair wild-- looking just like he always did at home. I said, "You need to go. You are dead." He snarled, and his aspect was suddenly transformed.
He grabbed the baby out of my arms, and gripped her, and shook her violently, threatening her. "She is MINE!" he growled. I woke up shaking.
My friend Amanda texted me immediately "This may be weird. But I have a strong impression I need to take you to go buy some kind of... Door? Curtain? Is this making any sense?"
"Ah, yep. that makes sense." It was time to cover up the daddy shrine. There is supposed to be a veil there. And he is supposed to be on the OTHER side of it.
We went to a witchy store in salt lake, got hot paper cups of chai and meandered around ringing on the singing bowls and huffing nag champra. Maile and Amanda picked out a tall blue curtain, printed with paisley curls and white flowers. I nailed it over the daddy shelf.
By this time, it was Utah winter. My kids were wearing leopard print coats-- same as all the other poor kids in the neighborhood-- donated from the school for all the kids who qualified for free and reduced lunch. They stomped through the snow to the bus stop each morning with plastic grocery bags in their Ugg boots (borrowed from grandma-- at some point she had acquired about 5 pairs of almost indistinguishable uggs-- probably gifted to her by concerned daughters and daughters in law who didn't understand why she wore nylon mesh slippers 365 days a year).
Eight inches of snow outside made everything look clean and muffled. I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the kids.
One afternoon, we looked out of the window of the living room. Matt's horn-handled knife was stuck, upright in the snow. Like the sword in the stone.
That's...odd, I thought, and bundled up enough to walk up the stairs, out the front door and around the outside of the house to retrieve it.
"Stay," I commanded it as I put it back on the daddy shrine shelf.
The next day, it was out in the snow again.
Grandma's little dollhouse is a treasure, and it lives upstairs in her bedroom. It has perfect tiny china, a miniature wood stove, tiny copper pots and pans, and a whole family of little wooden dolls. We were down in the livingroom watching a movie when the daddy doll launched itself from Matt's shrine as if shot from a potato gun-- straight out of the shelf-- and landed with a clatter against the TV.
Okay. Time to lock this up.
I went to an antique store in downtown Provo and bought a big heavy steamer trunk with a wide iron band all the way around it. It was a lot of money, over 100 dollars. I felt light headed buying it. The shop owner chatted. "What you gonna use this for?"
"A coffin."
He was stunned.
"For my husband's ashes." I didn't want him to imagine some small figure curled up, fetal position.
"I'm sorry," he said, choking. "I lost my daughter."
I began to cry, and so did he.
"I'm sorry," I said. "And thank you." He helped me load the heavy trunk into the car.
I held a funeral in the basement, just me.
I lugged the heavy steamer trunk into my Sherlock Holmes study. I picked a book at random off of the shelf for a little "lectio divina" and it was, I'm not even exaggerating, a scottish poem about a Widow bidding her husband a final farewell.
"Fuck you," I said to the air, and also laughed, and also cried.
I figure if I'm cussing out God, she can take it. And if I'm cussing out Matt, he fucking deserves it.
I loaded all the things from the Daddy shrine into the box. The ashes, the buckles, the kilt, the aikido certificates, the photos, the sand. Books and jewelry and ordinary things, become treasures through the alchemy of death.
I talked to him again, but kindly, as I put it all away. Thank you. Thank you for the work you did on the farm. Thank you for caring for the animals. Thank you for washing the dishes sometimes at night. Thank you for the fancy fathers' day meal last year, with the creme brulee and the little propane torch. Thank you for the art museum visits in London and the scathing political commentary. Thank you for the bedtime stories over facetime. Thank you for holding and dancing me through three beautiful births. Thank you for the ways you've pushed me to move to wonderful places and take on new challenges. Thank you for my girls, for the athletic strength and quick minds they have from you. Thank you for setting out to try and make a family together.
Crying does not come easily in this kind of gritty grief. It would be like trying to cry sunflower seeds. It hurts too much to cry. But packing those things away, clearing off the shrine, I cried. Crying is good for you. It dissolves the poison salts that build up in your brain. That's not science, probably. But it's still true.
I cried, and then I shut the heavy lid-- watch your fingers-- and then I fastened the heavy iron band all the way around the steam trunk, and laid him to rest, with a sigh of relief, that was not only mine.
*
Daddy is, we decided early on, in a spirit hospital. He probably took a long time to even realize where he was. But when he did, he needed lots of healers and helpers around him to sooth him, comfort him, make him rest. His uncle Ken. His grandpa Nagasawa. Yes, it's real. Yes, you killed yourself. No, there's nothing you can do. We imagined the terrible recovery he would have to endure-- his soul and mind were so damaged and addicted by the end. How do you recover from an addiction without a body to retrain? It must be delicate and difficult work. But time ticks on, maybe at a different pace than on our plane. And those healers, those good hands working on him, eventually are able to sooth and calm him.
I felt like a part of him was there in that spirit hospital we imagined, healing, getting better. Resting from the turmoil of his mental illness and self-destructive life. But there was a sick and scary damaged part of him, the part that rushed at me like a gorilla, that smashed a hole in the door with his head, that choked himself to death-- that part stuck around like a poison miasma. We smudged the shit out of everything, cried, and locked him away bound in iron, with a feeling of relief.
With my imaginative spiritual eye, I would check in on him. Is he still in the hospital? Is he still lost? Is he an angel or a spirit yet? Is he a grinning ominous threat in the shadows-- something to be cast out?
I felt that he was still in healing.
It was just over a year when we went camping in Idaho to see the total solar eclipse. I was expecting something reasonably cool, with some really sweet and interesting people-- the earnest focused sober hippies that I have only ever met in Utah-- who shear their own sheep and make their own tipis and dye their own woad, etc, etc.
We sat on a mountaintop and watched as the world dimmed. It was neat, all the shadows turned into sickles. Some nice mormon families from BYU were there wearing NASA tshirts and setting up cool telescopes. We chatted and shared supplies. Kids skittered around the rocks, and we all sat waiting, as if municipal fireworks were about to be set off.
And then the total solar eclipse exploded into being.
It didn't happen. It roared to life. How did it not make an actual sound? The steel-rending-steel spiritual sound of it tore my brain in half with awe. I wept, open mouthed, gasping. Everyone around us on the mountain was screaming and sobbing and laughing, whooping and hollering, shaking!
The eclipse was the open yoni of the goddess, the brilliant maw of the creatrix, kali's cunt in the sky. It was the dilated pupil of the universe itself, and the daytime stars black angelic witnesses to creation.
How did it not roar? In my memory it seems, surely it roared and moaned at frequencies that registered in our DNA, in our sex cells, and unzipped and rewrote us as we gazed at it. A kind of anti-radiation, black brilliance, dark illumination.
And out of it I saw a bold warrior, a sun king, a beautiful new man, freed from the darkness. The warrior spirit, released. He was beautiful and armored like a samurai, scales and drapes of armor swirling around him.
I saw him-- imagined him-- felt him-- arrive as if to say-- I'm better. I'm healed. I'm ready.
He's no angel. But. I think he may be okay.
Maile responded in her flat jaded 6 yo way: "he is definitely not an angel."
We all agreed. Angel Matt-- not a possibility.
But then Maile considered it for another moment. "He's a more of a spirit."
Vigorous nodding. Yup. Definitely more spirit than angel.
*
I don't know what I believe about the afterlife.
If you asked me 20 years ago, as I was preparing to go on my mission, I would have been really clear about it. We are spiritual beings having a human experience! We persist in the next world, and serve others by teaching them the truth, and eventually maturing into greater and greater spiritual beings, and eventually even godhood!
Ten years ago, my answer would have been just as definite. Nothingness. The electrical silence of the brain is the end. We only persist in the sense that the matter that made us and passed through us persists, and will, from big bang to black hole.
There was a kind of quiet comfort in that: no judgement, no mortal tests to past for the hereafter-- just the material challenge of living well for a short beautiful electric brain moment. Make art, love others, diminish the suffering in the world, because this is it. And this world, the here and now, is beautiful.
And then, a few months before Matt died, that little spiritual lobe in my brain flicked back on. It was a bizarre sensation-- a sense organ I thought was gone came stalwartly back online. Gentle nudges and persistent spiritual shoves-- hey. The universe said. Remember me? Remember how to hear things with this inner ear? Hey. Listen.
I was baffled-- why now? What does this mean for the story of reality I've been telling myself? I couldn't answer that, but I mentally shrugged. Sure. Hey universe, sup?
When I left the Mormon church, I made a solemn promise to myself and to God, whatever that is, that I would listen to the spirit when it spoke to me. I expected it to call me back to church, any day, but it never did. When I did feel those nudges of-- whatever it is-- intuition, spirit, guidance, Spidey sense-- I tried to listen. But the skill eroded and I figured, after many years away from it, that the practice of "listening to the spirit" was a kind of social pressure combined with deeply seated wishful thinking.
Until it started up again. Then the alienness, the outside-ness, the not-just-me-ness of that spiritual Knock Knock at the door-- it surprised me. Maybe...there is Something. My spiritual identometer nudged away from staunch confidence of athiesm towards a more tentative agnosticism. 42?
On my 2016 planner, I wrote the guiding words: optimism and intuition. If the universe was going to talk to me, I would try to learn to hear it.
Five months later, Matt died by suicide.
We came crashing to Utah, homeless, sick, wrecked.
In those first few days, running miserable errands (how many things have to be notarized? How many copies in triplicate do we have to procure of which bloodless documents?) we went to the Orem library. Where else? (The day my mom died I got on my bike and rode to the library, tears flying out of my eyes like Ghibli movie. I was gently gathered up by my friend's mom, a librarian, and taken home. Now I think, my God, how could I have fled my family at that moment? But I did.)
I sat on a bench with the kids and read Tam Lin to them and ugly sobbed. It was the last story Matt told them, and the story he had told me, in his oblique way: be my Janet. Let me claw at you and burn you and wreck you because somewhere under here I am your handsome prince.
A librarian recognized me, he went to high school with my dad. He said pertly, "And how are you today?"
"Really truly terrible."
He fled. "Hope you feel better soon!"
Hah, thanks I won't!
Surely people could see the sparking aura of pain I traveled in, the lightening struck tower cast over me?
We left the library and the kids pointed up at the sky: it's daddy's horse!!!
Clear to the eye, and even in the shaky cell phone photo I took, was the galloping line of Matt's horse tattoo.
In Hawaii, we watch for hoailona. Spiritual signs in the natural world. Clouds that make the faces of the ancestors, strange rainbow swoops in a clear sky, the voices of animals, the flashing otherworldly presence of the sea-creatures, our ancient cousins. We take these little shows of the universe as a given-- this is communication.
Seeing that horse, those ancient strokes carved in chalk on the other side of the world, instead arching across the evening sky-- I felt hopeful and bitter and hurt and seen.
How dare you, how dare you send me signs. How dare you try to speak to me this way.
I remembered Epona, the Celtic horse goddess, and a psychopomp. A being that transports the dead to the next world.
That sign across the sky said: In transit.
It wasn't Matt speaking to us. Someone who has cut off their access to their organs of speech cannot speak to us.
It was the horse itself. The horse is the journey. The ancient transformation. The inevitable crossing.
Like an empty cross, the horse is riderless. The rider, he is dead. He is not there. The horse runs on. Maybe he is burdened with the impossible lightness of souls.
In Hawaii, a great ulu tree overhangs the cliffs of Polihale. This is the entrance to the land of the dead, the land of darkness: Po. The souls of the dead cling to the branches of this tree like aphids. When their non-weight is heavy enough to break the branch, it falls into Po, taking them with it to the next world. Into darkness.
Maybe that's what the horse is carrying. Something invisible but heavy enough to break you, and send you hurtling over the cliffs edge and into the wine dark sea.
I had a near-stranger tell me, bashfully ("I don't know if you believe in this kind of thing, but I thought you should know--") she woke up shaking, Matt's voice loud in her ear: SORRY.
My sister dreamed he walked into the living room like nothing had happened. When she screamed at him, "You fucking killed yourself!!" He said, no no no, NO. He began railing and ranting, beating himself up. He was scary.
He didn't know what he did, she said. He didn't know he was dead. He didn't know what he did to you all.
We made a daddy shrine on a shelf in the living room. As we unpacked, Matt's things ended up on the shelf. Jars of sand from Kauai, his buck horn handled knife, made by my uncle as a wedding gift, his tweed hat from our Christmas trip to Dublin, his cattlemans association day planned, marked with his tidy slanted cursive: "Guinea Grass Samples", "Move Goats," "4-H meeting" stretching across the year. We placed the tiny votive candles they gave us at the Kauai grief group around next to the box of his ashes in the tied Hawaiian print cloth.
More and more items collected there. His cowboy hat. His books. Pictures. His watches and belt buckles. Leatherman and Japanese business cards in a silver card case. The shrine began to vibrate in the corner of the living room with a kind of aware intensity-- it throbbed in the corner of your vision when you walked in.
Maile was shaken with nightmares every night. If I asked her about it in the morning, she yelled at me-- I didn't dream anything!!
It was spooking me. I smudged the house, banishing the creepiness. It helped us feel better, and kept the nightmares away a little.
I talked to him constantly. He was always in front of me-- always my interlocutor. I railed against him, begged him, interrogated him-- but the stream of communication was constant. His voice-- his self-- was still crisp in my mind. I knew what he might say, the inflection of his voice, the quirk of his mouth.
But the monologue is just that-- it's a call into a canyon with no echo. I was talking to him, to keep him alive. To keep him an active part of my life, living in my mind. Once I saw it, I knew it had to stop. I decided to quit cold turkey. "You're dead. I need to stop talking to you."
The inner monologue went silent. Just myself to talk to around here.
Then I had a nightmare. Matt was standing on a ledge, looking down at us. He was watching us intently, shirtless, hair wild-- looking just like he always did at home. I said, "You need to go. You are dead." He snarled, and his aspect was suddenly transformed.
He grabbed the baby out of my arms, and gripped her, and shook her violently, threatening her. "She is MINE!" he growled. I woke up shaking.
My friend Amanda texted me immediately "This may be weird. But I have a strong impression I need to take you to go buy some kind of... Door? Curtain? Is this making any sense?"
"Ah, yep. that makes sense." It was time to cover up the daddy shrine. There is supposed to be a veil there. And he is supposed to be on the OTHER side of it.
We went to a witchy store in salt lake, got hot paper cups of chai and meandered around ringing on the singing bowls and huffing nag champra. Maile and Amanda picked out a tall blue curtain, printed with paisley curls and white flowers. I nailed it over the daddy shelf.
By this time, it was Utah winter. My kids were wearing leopard print coats-- same as all the other poor kids in the neighborhood-- donated from the school for all the kids who qualified for free and reduced lunch. They stomped through the snow to the bus stop each morning with plastic grocery bags in their Ugg boots (borrowed from grandma-- at some point she had acquired about 5 pairs of almost indistinguishable uggs-- probably gifted to her by concerned daughters and daughters in law who didn't understand why she wore nylon mesh slippers 365 days a year).
Eight inches of snow outside made everything look clean and muffled. I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to the kids.
One afternoon, we looked out of the window of the living room. Matt's horn-handled knife was stuck, upright in the snow. Like the sword in the stone.
That's...odd, I thought, and bundled up enough to walk up the stairs, out the front door and around the outside of the house to retrieve it.
"Stay," I commanded it as I put it back on the daddy shrine shelf.
The next day, it was out in the snow again.
Grandma's little dollhouse is a treasure, and it lives upstairs in her bedroom. It has perfect tiny china, a miniature wood stove, tiny copper pots and pans, and a whole family of little wooden dolls. We were down in the livingroom watching a movie when the daddy doll launched itself from Matt's shrine as if shot from a potato gun-- straight out of the shelf-- and landed with a clatter against the TV.
Okay. Time to lock this up.
I went to an antique store in downtown Provo and bought a big heavy steamer trunk with a wide iron band all the way around it. It was a lot of money, over 100 dollars. I felt light headed buying it. The shop owner chatted. "What you gonna use this for?"
"A coffin."
He was stunned.
"For my husband's ashes." I didn't want him to imagine some small figure curled up, fetal position.
"I'm sorry," he said, choking. "I lost my daughter."
I began to cry, and so did he.
"I'm sorry," I said. "And thank you." He helped me load the heavy trunk into the car.
I held a funeral in the basement, just me.
I lugged the heavy steamer trunk into my Sherlock Holmes study. I picked a book at random off of the shelf for a little "lectio divina" and it was, I'm not even exaggerating, a scottish poem about a Widow bidding her husband a final farewell.
"Fuck you," I said to the air, and also laughed, and also cried.
I figure if I'm cussing out God, she can take it. And if I'm cussing out Matt, he fucking deserves it.
I loaded all the things from the Daddy shrine into the box. The ashes, the buckles, the kilt, the aikido certificates, the photos, the sand. Books and jewelry and ordinary things, become treasures through the alchemy of death.
I talked to him again, but kindly, as I put it all away. Thank you. Thank you for the work you did on the farm. Thank you for caring for the animals. Thank you for washing the dishes sometimes at night. Thank you for the fancy fathers' day meal last year, with the creme brulee and the little propane torch. Thank you for the art museum visits in London and the scathing political commentary. Thank you for the bedtime stories over facetime. Thank you for holding and dancing me through three beautiful births. Thank you for the ways you've pushed me to move to wonderful places and take on new challenges. Thank you for my girls, for the athletic strength and quick minds they have from you. Thank you for setting out to try and make a family together.
Crying does not come easily in this kind of gritty grief. It would be like trying to cry sunflower seeds. It hurts too much to cry. But packing those things away, clearing off the shrine, I cried. Crying is good for you. It dissolves the poison salts that build up in your brain. That's not science, probably. But it's still true.
I cried, and then I shut the heavy lid-- watch your fingers-- and then I fastened the heavy iron band all the way around the steam trunk, and laid him to rest, with a sigh of relief, that was not only mine.
*
Daddy is, we decided early on, in a spirit hospital. He probably took a long time to even realize where he was. But when he did, he needed lots of healers and helpers around him to sooth him, comfort him, make him rest. His uncle Ken. His grandpa Nagasawa. Yes, it's real. Yes, you killed yourself. No, there's nothing you can do. We imagined the terrible recovery he would have to endure-- his soul and mind were so damaged and addicted by the end. How do you recover from an addiction without a body to retrain? It must be delicate and difficult work. But time ticks on, maybe at a different pace than on our plane. And those healers, those good hands working on him, eventually are able to sooth and calm him.
I felt like a part of him was there in that spirit hospital we imagined, healing, getting better. Resting from the turmoil of his mental illness and self-destructive life. But there was a sick and scary damaged part of him, the part that rushed at me like a gorilla, that smashed a hole in the door with his head, that choked himself to death-- that part stuck around like a poison miasma. We smudged the shit out of everything, cried, and locked him away bound in iron, with a feeling of relief.
With my imaginative spiritual eye, I would check in on him. Is he still in the hospital? Is he still lost? Is he an angel or a spirit yet? Is he a grinning ominous threat in the shadows-- something to be cast out?
I felt that he was still in healing.
It was just over a year when we went camping in Idaho to see the total solar eclipse. I was expecting something reasonably cool, with some really sweet and interesting people-- the earnest focused sober hippies that I have only ever met in Utah-- who shear their own sheep and make their own tipis and dye their own woad, etc, etc.
We sat on a mountaintop and watched as the world dimmed. It was neat, all the shadows turned into sickles. Some nice mormon families from BYU were there wearing NASA tshirts and setting up cool telescopes. We chatted and shared supplies. Kids skittered around the rocks, and we all sat waiting, as if municipal fireworks were about to be set off.
And then the total solar eclipse exploded into being.
It didn't happen. It roared to life. How did it not make an actual sound? The steel-rending-steel spiritual sound of it tore my brain in half with awe. I wept, open mouthed, gasping. Everyone around us on the mountain was screaming and sobbing and laughing, whooping and hollering, shaking!
The eclipse was the open yoni of the goddess, the brilliant maw of the creatrix, kali's cunt in the sky. It was the dilated pupil of the universe itself, and the daytime stars black angelic witnesses to creation.
How did it not roar? In my memory it seems, surely it roared and moaned at frequencies that registered in our DNA, in our sex cells, and unzipped and rewrote us as we gazed at it. A kind of anti-radiation, black brilliance, dark illumination.
And out of it I saw a bold warrior, a sun king, a beautiful new man, freed from the darkness. The warrior spirit, released. He was beautiful and armored like a samurai, scales and drapes of armor swirling around him.
I saw him-- imagined him-- felt him-- arrive as if to say-- I'm better. I'm healed. I'm ready.
He's no angel. But. I think he may be okay.
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