Like her grandmother, Gail seemed to find something more during sleep. Facing bed alone she was prompted to rummage through the meditation CDs sitting by the stereo. She found one called ‘Mental Resilience: A guided relaxation’. The disc is an accompaniment to the book by Kala Sarma, an international management consultant and fund manager who writes that he resorted to the lessons he learned in an Indian ashram following the death of his baby daughter. Gail climbed back into bed as the CD began to spin. This time she lay on Chris’s side of the bed. They had slept in the same formation for close to thirty years — his right shoulder touching her left. In order to feel closer to him, she simply lay in his place.
The CD did its job. Gail listened, stilled her mind without too much trouble and drifted into sleep. Listening to the CD became a daily habit. As the weeks after Chris’s death became months, she did this unfailingly every night. And as is common with habits, the more she practised, the better she became.
One night, Gail lay there not quite asleep but not fully awake when there was a sudden shift in her senses. She felt as if her body was moving forward, as though she was in an accelerating car. The two-dimensional blackness behind her closed eyelids turned into three-dimensional darkness, like a black void. It became dotted with stars. Brighter and brighter they shone. She was in the night sky. It happened the next night too, and again soon after that, until night after night she would enter this space. It became so reliable that it would be as if it arrived to collect her. Expecting it, she would lie in bed and wait. And then she would stay in the sky until she drifted into sleep.
As this ritual continued, she began to see more than stars. There were faces in that void, milky faces that looked like holograms or x-rays. She didn’t recognise them and some were frightening. But one night she saw Chris’s face — blurred and undefined; present but distant. ‘Christie,’ she said. He didn’t reply and drew away into the dark void again.
Gail knew she couldn’t tell many people about these metaphysical travels each night. She confided in Dominique, a trusted friend who is also a spiritual director. Gail had known Dominique as a devout member of the parish, but through many conversations had learned that her friend’s spiritual life transcended the concept of ‘a judgmental grandfather in the sky’. Gail described the faces. Dominique smiled. ‘Like looking through a glass darkly,’ she said, referring to a phrase from Paul’s famous letter to the Corinthians.
One night, after her flights, Gail dreamed about a diamond ring Chris had bought for her. She had misplaced it and had been looking everywhere for it, simultaneously scrambling for those tangible memories she could hold on to yet reminding herself of the insignificance of material possessions. As she prepared for bed that night, she asked Chris to help her find it. Then, in her dream, she saw the ring. It was standing upright and shining in a rose-coloured light. The next day while getting dressed, she looked at her pink dressing gown hanging on the back of the door and peered into its slim pocket. There was the ring, resting in an upright position, glowing in the pink fabric. She clutched it in her hand and pressed it against her heart. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ she whispered.
Gail was well on her way on a spiritual journey that took her outside of the walls of a church. Affirmations that perhaps Chris was not so remote were finding their way to her. After making a speech at a retirement village in the northern suburbs about her and Chris’s experiences, a woman approached her with tears in her eyes. ‘On the way here, I heard Chris,’ the stranger said. ‘He said, “I’m always with my wife.”’ At a dinner with Chris’s past colleagues, a New Zealand woman whispered, ‘Chris is here,’ waving her fingers over Gail’s head and shoulders. ‘I can feel him.’
Gail took her father to South Cronulla beach and he sat on a bench while she walked over the rocks. She was feeling fragile and her eyes welled with tears in the fresh sea air. Christie, please send me a sign, send me a sign, she thought. She considered a story she had read in which the writer had drawn meaning from a feather found on a beach. She looked around. Don’t bother about feathers, they don’t mean anything to me, she thought. The next day was a scorcher and the stifling air was still. Gail called out to Adam as she walked through the dining room and felt something underfoot. She stopped and looked down. It was a long, perfect feather, yellow and white in colour. ‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’ Adam came in after hearing his mother gasp. Gail had the feather in her hands. ‘That’s from a cockatoo,’ he said. ‘How’d that get in here?’
Gail was sceptical of signs, but what was she to make of these people and events? The rational mind could easily dismiss them as coincidences and some weirdos. If these were signs, then of what? ‘That’s what spiritual direction is,’ Dominique told her. ‘It’s noticing. Noticing the Spirit communicating with you.’
Years earlier, shortly after Gail had converted to Catholicism and was regularly attending mass at Villa Maria, a young, dynamic priest visited from the USA. He spoke to the parish and said, ‘There are no coincidences, they’re all Godincidences.’ That had stuck in Gail’s mind. Through her relationship with Dominique she was returning to this idea. They discussed coincidences, awareness and noticing, Jungian synchronicities and the opportunities at connectivity, that these are moments that are ever-present, if one is open to them. There is a choice to brush them off as chance or probability, or to notice them and tacitly accept them as a part of a current running underneath the water’s surface.
Dominique suggested that Gail speak to someone about her noticings, someone who could offer pastoral support as well as guidance. She recommended Sister Pauline, a spiritual director at Mary MacKillop Place in North Sydney. Sister Pauline had trained Dominique, who had great respect for and trust in her. Gail made the appointment and found the little elderly nun sitting in a pew at the back of the church. She followed the woman out of the church and through a maze of corridors in the residential area. They entered a small, stark room, with a high window that revealed the sky.
It was the first of monthly sessions over the next year, in which Sister Pauline’s gentle questioning led to emotional outpourings of grief. A box of tissues nearby identified that this was common.
At the end of one session, Sister Pauline asked, ‘So what is it that you want, Gail?’
Gail looked out the window thoughtfully. ‘I want to be struck dumb with the awe of it.’
Sister Pauline smiled. ‘No one’s ever said that to me before.’
My dear Mum,
I struggle to ‘notice’ things like you do, or appreciate small details of life as signs of some greater force. I do not deter you from your journey, but I do not accompany you either.
As we share your story with anyone who will listen, is there anything that you’d like to say to them — and to me?
All my love, Juliette
* * *
My darling,
I have been reluctant to tell people about my experiences, fearing how I would be judged. Would I be humiliated? Would people not take me seriously?
I would be a deserter if I didn’t tell it the way it is. A deserter of the many people who have similar experiences, and a deserter of the truth.
‘Just tell the truth’, is what Thomas Merton said, and I know what the truth is.
From Richard Rohr: ‘Be prepared to be humiliated at least once every day.’ And I am!
My darling, all that I can do is invite you to suspend judgment. Suspend judgment, Juliette. That is all you need to do.
Love, Mum
Asking the Questions
When Patsy brought us Dad’s ashes a few days after he was cremated, she held the cedar box with reverence. ‘He had heavy bones,’ she said to Gail. We placed the box in the living room and made plans to place the ashes in the garden.
A few months later, on Father’s Day 2009, the extended family gathered with us to do this. At the far end of the lawn, sandstone steps led down to a private little area with a curved seat, azaleas, agapanthus and a
statue of a small boy gazing down. We would place Dad’s ashes there, but only for the time being; if we ever moved house we would have to take them with us.
‘You’re going to have to put them in something watertight then,’ Gail’s mother told her. So Gail went to Bunnings in search of an appropriate vessel.
‘You’re after an Esky?’ a smiling young man asked, as she studied the range.
‘Um, yes,’ said Gail. Please don’t ask what it’s for.
Phil, Mike and Gail’s brother Murray worked together as the heavy, bony ashes were removed from the cedar box and, still within their plastic casing, placed in the Esky. They sealed the edges and dug a good-sized hole among the agapanthus. Aunt Alison read a poem and guided us in a small ceremony. We laid Dad’s ashes down and covered them over with earth, placing small ornaments beside them. The statue of the boy gazed over them and later a rose bush was planted over the spot where they lay. It soon produced tiny delicate yellow roses. It was a small, peaceful, sacred corner of the world.
We found ourselves clinging to Dad’s possessions. His work shirts. His jackets and shoes. Even his Blackberry mobile phone took on a precious quality. Just nineteen years old, James had not cried freely until a simple but tangible loss brought him undone. The hospital band he had taken from around Chris’s wrist had disappeared, possibly thrown out by a cleaner who swept through his room. James was distraught at the loss of this simple object; the real loss of his dad surely lay behind his tears.
Gail put Chris’s aftershave in its elegant bottle beside her bed. She would breathe in the familiar fragrance to make him feel close. Scraps of paper with his handwriting couldn’t be thrown out. I have one today in which Dad’s pen has written ‘Births and Deaths’ across the top. ‘George Washington 1732 — 1799, Mark Twain 1835 — 1910’, the list goes on. Was it a mental exercise, I wonder. But beside each date is a number: 67, 75; how many years they lived. Nearing the end of his own life, was he reflecting on the longevity of others? These are the kinds of meditations that such physical objects provoke. It’s as if your loved one has become a historical figure and you’re searching for clues to their existence.
People would ask Gail to go for walks but she chose to walk alone. She took long treks with Mr Menzies through Kelly’s Bush — a patch of bushland on the Hunters Hill peninsula that had been saved from development in Sydney’s first green ban. The bush was healing for her and she was very thankful to the women and men who had ensured that it remained. The smell of trees, moist grass, wattle, gum leaves and eucalypts, the sounds of the birds, the aloneness, the quiet. She never wanted to run into someone she knew and would venture off the beaten track to avoid it. She would sit on a log on the ground and let the bush speak to her.
On one of these walks, along a tiny track she had walked several times, she came across a unique and magical-looking tree. It rose up magnificently in the middle of the bush and was completely covered in fungus. Toadstools sprouted and shone from every inch of the giant. Then Gail saw it was not one tree, but two. One large bole was anchored into the earth and two distinct trunks grew out of it, leaning on each other as they stretched up to the sky. Always on the lookout for messages, Gail found one here. The tree spoke to her: We are still two, together as one.
That day as she picked up the pace to get home she rolled her ankle, the same one she had injured tumbling down the stairs in the QVB. She hobbled home, which exacerbated the injury, and by the time I arrived hours later she couldn’t put her foot anywhere near the floor without pulsating pain. I found her in bed with her foot propped on several cushions. She tried to move and, nimble as ever, slid off the bed, flipped onto one knee and then back onto her elbows, all while holding her sore foot high in the air. She wasn’t amused when I joked that she looked as if she was doing some weird contemporary dance routine. A week later she limped into a kitchen store in search of a new dishwasher. The store owner, an elegant Frenchwoman, asked what was wrong. When Gail explained that she had sprained her ankle, the woman said, ‘Come, sit and put it up. I can help you.’
Gail sat and felt awkward in this peculiar situation — surrounded by display kitchens with a stranger massaging her foot. She confided, ‘My husband died recently, so everything seems harder than usual.’
‘But he is still here,’ said the woman. ‘They’re only on the other side of the curtain.’
The woman’s husband appeared through a doorway and asked what she was doing. ‘Mal au pied!’ she snapped. He shrugged his shoulders and left, as though he had walked out of the back office many times to find his wife whispering intensely to a stranger while giving a foot massage.
‘I have a healing class that I go to,’ the Frenchwoman said. ‘You should come. There are very special people who come to this.’ Gail went to the healing class in a small apartment in Willoughby. She was told that it was energetic healing, a therapy that claims to use the body’s energy circuits to facilitate natural healing mechanisms. About ten people were there. They all seemed genial enough, and although Gail found the therapy that involved tapping on her acupressure points relaxing, she didn’t go back.
My mother’s inability to believe that her husband’s love could simply evaporate had set her on a course in which she couldn’t shun opportunities for unorthodox methods of healing, which seemed to find her regularly. Determined to be open-minded, she would say yes to many different things and occasionally ended up in some strange situations. One invitation presented itself via an unlikely avenue: Lyndall, Gail’s sister-in-law and a self-described atheist who is equally intolerant of traditional religion and new-age spirituality. Lyndall told Gail that she’d heard about a Maori woman on the Central Coast who was said to be a spiritualist with incredible clairvoyant abilities.
When Lyndall asked whether Gail would like to see this woman, Gail didn’t hesitate. The two of them drove to a sleepy beachside suburb north of Sydney. The house was a modest weatherboard cottage on the corner of the main road. Lyndall knocked on the front door, which was answered by a petite grandmotherly woman with short white hair. She looked directly at Gail.
‘Someone’s died! Your father!’ she exclaimed.
‘No, no,’ Gail stumbled and started to back away. She was reluctant to go inside and looked at Lyndall, who said, ‘I’ll do my session first.’
‘Could you please tell me if there’s a coffee shop nearby where I can wait?’ Gail asked, but the woman standing in the doorway appeared confused and distracted. Her response was incoherent and she flicked her hand vaguely. The door closed and Gail turned around, wondering what she had got herself into. She wandered around for an hour, passing small, identical houses and old, battered shops. She returned to the cottage, sat on its wooden verandah and felt in her pocket for Chris’s rosary beads. Please come to me, Christie, she whispered, cupping the beads in her hands.
Lyndall appeared. ‘It’s your turn.’
‘Hello dear, I’m Suzy,’ said the woman as Gail stepped into the house. Suzy had a New Zealand accent and her manner had completely changed. ‘I’m sorry about before. There was so much noise in my ear! Someone was trying to get my attention. Kept on and on at me.’
Gail had heard nothing and didn’t understand what Suzy was talking about. They entered a small hallway and turned into a dimly lit room on the right. There was a small square table in the centre with two chairs facing each other and a sofa to the side. A tape recorder sat on the table. Suzy showed Gail to one of the chairs. Gail looked over her left shoulder and saw a mirror hanging on the wall.
Suzy sat down and began to pray in Maori. She then looked over Gail’s shoulder into the mirror and appeared to start having a conversation. She was calling someone Florence and explained to Gail that this was Suzy’s grandmother. The conversation continued, and then Suzy said, ‘Okay, so Chris is in the hallway now.’
Gail’s heart began to race. Sure, she had been speaking to Chris and even praying to him just moments before. But she didn’t actually believe that he was
there.
‘Be careful, Chris,’ Suzy said. Gail turned her head over her shoulder and looked towards the mirror. She saw nothing.
‘How did you find me, love?’ Suzy asked. Gail opened her mouth to answer, but Suzy put her hand up and looked into the mirror.
‘Yes, I can hear you, Chris.’ She started repeating what Chris was saying, but it was a string of non sequiturs that moved between first person and third.
‘Oh, you’ve moved to Chris’s side of the bed.’
Gail froze. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘Chris says that’s good. He can reach you more easily there. I see a fountain in a garden. There’s a stone, curved seat. That’s where his ashes are. Chris says he’s going to change the colour of the roses. Don’t do anything, he will change the colour.’
Gail began to laugh and cry at once. Suzy continued, ‘2010 will be punctuated by Gail. You will make an impact. I’m right by her side. I have him in spirit. Life is an adventure. This is for Gail. This is for Gail to find out what her vocation in life should be. Chris was on a mission in life, almost running; you will make a quiet impact. Not done by yelling and screaming.’
And then the session was over. It felt as if it had lasted just a few minutes but Gail looked at her watch and saw that two hours had passed. Suzy was sweating profusely. They walked out to the verandah where Lyndall was waiting.
As they drove home, they shared with each other what had happened in that room. Gail asked Lyndall, ‘Did you give Suzy any information about me?’
‘I didn’t even tell her your name. I used my first name to make the booking.’
During the following months, Gail spoke to Suzy regularly. She told Suzy that she felt better for having done so, and Suzy assured her that she felt the same way about Gail. Suzy refused payment so often that it felt as if she and Gail were friends more than anything else.
This is Gail Page 14