“The first thing is, she wants you to know that it was not your fault. Her death was her destiny. She completed the work she came to this world to do.” That was just what Ram Dass had told me. “And that work was to love and to know that she was loved.”
I looked away, looked back again.
“The other thing is that she was not afraid when she crashed, and she felt no pain.”
Oh, how I hoped this was true!
“And, finally, Jenny wants you to know that she is always with you. All you have to do is reach out for her, and she will be right there. She is right here, right now. Do you feel her?”
I closed my eyes, setting free the tears trapped there. I shook my head. “All I feel is my broken heart,” I admitted.
Pedro nodded, took my hand and held it. “In time you will be able to find her again. She is patient.” Pedro rose and squeezed my shoulder. “She does not want you to suffer. She is very sorry for the pain she has caused you.”
My skepticism melted, and I rested my face in my folded arms. Jeff stroked my hair. Sean and Tania sat quietly.
After I raised my head and blew my nose with the linen napkin, I managed to laugh. “Only in Taos,” I said. “A channeling maître d’.”
“In Spanish,” Tania added.
Apparently Jenny liked to make appearances in restaurants. I ordered the ravioli in her honor.
Ten years after Jenny’s death, I contracted a rare bacterial infection in the jungles of Chiapas. By the time I flew home to Taos, I was so sick I could hardly hold up my head. I had barely managed to keep any food in my body in ten days, and every joint blazed with pain. I had a high fever and spent the first night writhing in my bed like a fish on the deck of a boat.
In the height of my misery, it occurred to me to reach out to Jenny for help.
The moment I had this thought, I felt Jenny rushing in to enfold me, as if she had enormous cool feathers in which she cradled my fiery body. Her love was so tender and immediate I could not help but surrender to her embrace. As I lay in her arms I began to relax, and the pain subsided.
Gradually, I felt Jenny release me and begin to move away.
“No!” I wailed. “Don’t leave me, Jenny!”
She came flowing right back and gathered me again in her wingspan. “I will never leave you, Mom. I am always with you.”
Finally, I felt strong enough to let her go of my own volition. I thanked her for coming to me when I called, and surrendered to our separation, as I have done a thousand times.
The sound of my weeping woke Jeff, and he pulled me into his arms.
“Jenny was here,” I told him. “She was just here! Can you feel her?”
What he felt was me, burning up. In the morning he took me to the emergency room.
I realize that the feeling we have of our loved ones being close to us immediately following their death might have more to do with us than with them. At first, propelled by shock and supported by grace, we may meet them in the field of spirit. The distancing that follows may feel like they are moving away from us, yet, as with Einstein’s train analogy, that’s an artifact of relativity. We’re the ones who, in spite of our deep desire for connection, are slipping away, back into life.
If I had trouble coming up with a solid opinion about life after death, I was equally unsuccessful in explaining to myself why Jenny had died so young. A couple of years after Jenny died, a respected Tibetan lama came through town. He had been living in Mexico, and I was asked to interpret for his Spanish-speaking interpreter. So the lama would teach in Tibetan, his interpreter would translate the teachings into Spanish, and I would translate the translations into English. Everyone, including me, seemed to find this arrangement amusing.
As payment for my efforts, I was offered a private audience with the teacher. There was only one question on my mind: where is the meaning in the death of my daughter?
“Karma,” the lama answered.
“You mean that in experiencing tragedy I have chosen an accelerated trajectory to awakening?” I asked hopefully.
“No.”
“What, then, am I supposed to learn from this loss?”
“You did something terrible in a previous life,” the lama said, a bit impatiently, as if it were obvious—the only possible explanation.
“You mean, this is . . . punishment?”
He nodded. The interpreter nodded. My fellow Taoseños shifted uncomfortably on their zafus.
“No hay palabra in Tibetano,” the translator explained, apologetically. “Punishment, no. More like fruits ripening.”
“And so Jenny’s death is the ripe fruit of my previous actions.”
“Si.” The lama watched our interaction and smiled approvingly, as if the matter had been resolved and I could go in peace.
But I was not finished. “Couldn’t it be that I chose to endure tragedy in this lifetime as a kind of steep path to enlightenment?”
The interpreter interpreted, and the lama, once again, shook his head.
“Or maybe that I took on this suffering on behalf of all sentient beings?”
“No, not possible.”
“I deserve this loss.”
Apparently so. The lama was finished with our interview. He gathered his robes and rose, followed by his interpreter and a small entourage.
I tried this on, but I had grown too accustomed to my spiritual nudity and so I removed it and went back to bare unknowingness.
I think Jenny understood more about all this than I did. Death, deathlessness. I think the traumas of her early childhood yanked the gate between the worlds right off its hinges, and she gained VIP access to realms the rest of us are barred from. I knew from the moment I met her that this little being was wise far beyond her four years.
By the time she was six, my miniature daughter had doubled in weight, shot up half a foot, and her vocabulary leapt from around a dozen pretty much unintelligible words to a flowing commentary on every amazing ordinary detail of the world around her. She had also forgotten everything that happened to her before she came to live with me.
Except for a couple of incidents, which occupied a hazy corner of her memory until the day she died.
In one memory, Jenny is a princess. She is living at All Faiths Receiving Home in Albuquerque, and someone lifts her onto a throne. They set a jeweled tiara on her head and place a gilded wand in her hand. They curtsy and bow. They sing “Happy Birthday.” She is fed the creamiest delicacies, and she can stay up as late as she pleases. She is surprised by her royal status, but she accepts her situation calmly, with a mixture of glee and resignation.
In the other memory, Jenny is riding her Big Wheel through the trailer park where she lives with her Aunt Pauline, who is “sick” and cannot take care of her. She rumbles along the broken sidewalk and comes upon a man lying in the dried-up grass. His eyes are closed. As she looks at him, she sees a second body rise out of his regular body. It sits up, looks around, glances down at the one lying beneath it, and then floats into the sky and out of sight.
One of the methods I use to torture myself is to replay all the ways in which I failed to make Jenny’s childhood perfect. Instead of remembering the scavenger hunts in which I composed rhyming poems for every clue, or climbing the pyramids of Monte Albán and Chichen Itza together, or making a handmade card every year on Jenny’s birthday with a different version of “You are the light of my life” encircled by a heart with rays bursting out of it, I dwell on the days when I was selfish and boring.
Like this one:
I’m braiding her hair and tucking her in, leaning to kiss her forehead.
“Mom, can we do the Cloud?”
“Not tonight, Jen, I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired.”
I sigh. She’s right. Tonight (like Mama Sisyphus) I will roll my rock up the hill.
I begin. “You are standing at the bottom of a staircase. Climb up. Slowly. Step by step, breath by breath, until you reach the top. You are in fron
t of a beautiful door. You turn the knob, and it opens. You step out onto a platform in the middle of the sky.”
Her eyes are closed. I can see the movement of her smile muscles in the dim room.
“You look around. The sky is clear and blue. A perfect puffy white cloud in the distance. The cloud is drifting toward you. Closer and closer. Now it is hovering in front of you. Jump onto the cloud.”
In her imagination, my daughter throws herself onto the pillow of sky.
“Your cloud begins to drift away. You are safe, cradled in its softness. You turn over and look down. You can see the land below you. Rolling hills, sparkling rivers, meadows filled with wildflowers. In the distance is the ocean, waves crashing on the shore. Two unicorns are cantering along the beach, their horns flashing gold in the sunlight. They look up at you and smile.”
I can see her now, leaning over her pillowy chariot, blowing kisses to the magical beings below. We sit in silence for a while as Jenny tracks the unicorns along the shore.
“Now it is time to go back home, back to your own bed. Your cloud carries you to the platform in the sky. You step off, and you are standing in front of the door. You open it and walk slowly down the staircase, step by step, breath by breath. And now you are lying in your bed, ready for sleep. Good night, my angel.”
She snuggles into the covers and grows still.
After Jenny died, I remembered all the nights I didn’t do the Cloud, all the times I succumbed to my fatigue, my desire to be done with the day, until gradually she stopped asking, and the Cloud evaporated. I rationalized that Jenny was too old for the Cloud. But no one is ever too old to be taken on a journey through the sky. How could I have let the magic go?
After Matty died, Mom could not listen to Pete Seeger sing “Puff the Magic Dragon” without crying. It was this line that undid her: “Dragons live forever, but not so little boys.” My mother would have done anything to keep the magic alive. And I tossed it away like a pair of shoes that had grown too small.
Shoes made of magic never grow too small.
28
DOG ANGELS
Jenny sent a team of dog angels to my rescue after she was gone. They did not always act angelically. Hobbes died. Ziggy bit people and then died. Isaiah shot across the horizon of our hearts like a nova for five years, and then he disappeared. Dying angels are not exactly my prescription for healing, but they each seemed to fulfill their appointed task—prior to and because of their untimely deaths.
When I first got together with Jeff, he made it clear that he was not interested in adding a dog to the family, and the subject did not arise again. But after Jenny died, I did not know what to do with all the nurturing energy I had been accustomed to pouring onto my child. My heart was a teacup, and my love was hot tea filling up and spilling over, scorching my hand and soaking my clothes. Drenched and burning, I turned my thoughts to a puppy.
And so Jeff agreed to a scouting trip to the animal shelter, and we came home with a four-month-old German Shepherd–Australian Shepherd mix whom we named Hobbes, in honor of Jenny’s favorite philosopher—not Thomas Hobbes, the stuffy British social theorist, but Calvin’s imaginary tiger sidekick. Hobbes punctuated my bouts of leaden despair with moments of unalloyed joy. He was devoted from the beginning and seemed to know exactly how to tend my heart. The one and only day he found his way off our property, he was killed by a car a few yards away from our house and bled to death beneath a statue of Saint Francis that Father Bill had placed in his front yard next door. I concluded that Saint Francis had sent Hobbes to get me through the most arduous leg of my grief journey, and that when his work was done, he had moved on to minister to some other brokenhearted mother. But I wouldn’t survive another loss. No more dogs.
A few months later, however, I found myself driving to the animal shelter in a trance and returning with the most ridiculous looking little creature I had ever seen—a mix of about a dozen radically different breeds, but predominantly Blue Heeler and Chihuahua. He had black and white speckles, a pink belly, and an exaggerated underbite. We named him Ziggy. Our newest family member alternated between dissolving into blissful sleep in our arms and periodically snapping at our faces with no provocation. Ziggy, too, managed to slip out of the yard and collide with a car driving far too fast on our rural road. We buried him next to Hobbes.
My yearning for another dog was proportionate to my missing Jenny. I sat with that. I let it burn. And then one day the phone rang.
“Hi, Honey, it’s your friend Elaine,” said my friend Elaine. “What are you doing?”
“Reading,” I lied. I was sleeping. A bereaved father named Allen told me that when his son was killed in a car accident his boss had asked him if he was having trouble sleeping, and Allen had answered that no, it was being awake he was having trouble with. Me too.
“Can you meet me at Cid’s?” Cid’s was our local natural foods store, a place I had been avoiding, since I knew at least fifty percent of the people who shopped there, and everybody seemed to have a different story they told themselves about my loss. “There is an adorable basket of puppies in the parking lot. The guy says he’s going to drown whichever ones are left at the end of the day.”
“That is so not fair, Elaine. How can I possibly say no?”
“You can’t. Look, I’ll get one and you get one. That way when you travel I can take care of your puppy, and when I go away you can take mine. Our dogs will be sisters!” That was a good idea, actually. “There’s this tiny one with pale green eyes and freckles. She looks like you.”
“Oh, great.”
“How soon can you be here? I’ll wait.”
Never, I should have said. I can’t love another being. I have nothing left. Besides, I promised Jeff. Our dog days were over.
“Twenty minutes.”
“Great, I’ll be the lady with a puppy in each arm.”
And so it was that Gita came into my life. Gita, my special needs dog, who had one thing and another wrong with her from the moment she crept in the door and rushed to hide under the bed—a broken tail, inexplicable fevers, skin irritations. She was afraid of everything, and I developed a palette of behaviors to accommodate her anxieties. Yet once I had earned Gita’s trust, she venerated me with singular devotion, and she read my thoughts so effortlessly that any training was redundant. Elaine’s dog Ramona succumbed to one of the same mysterious illnesses that struck Gita, but Gita lived on.
After Ramona’s death, Gita was depressed. Her coat grew dull, and she was no longer interested in taking walks.
“She needs a companion,” I said.
“Oy vey,” said Jeff, but it was difficult to disagree.
It was embarrassing to go to the shelter for the third time, with two dead dogs on our record. But this time we had a foolproof containment system. We installed an expensive “invisible fence” with shock collars. Our new puppy, whom we named Isaiah after the prophet of peace, had the system beat within a week. But he lasted five years. Isaiah was by far the most beautiful of all my dog angels. He had long golden-red fur and eyes like chocolate stars. He was enthusiastic, tender, and hopelessly untrainable. Isaiah adored Gita, and she made a show of putting up with his affections. But after Isaiah disappeared one cold December night when Jeff and I were out to dinner for Amy’s birthday, Gita mourned him as fiercely as I did.
It took us a year to say yes to another dog. On the day that Jenny would have turned twenty-five, we adopted Lola, an accidental mix of two show dogs: a Keeshond and a German Pinscher. Lola bounded into the house, plopped down on Jeff’s feet, and gazed up into his face. Then, as if shot out of a cannon, she bounced from one corner of the house to another before collapsing on the floor and falling asleep. Terrified, smitten, we welcomed Lola into the family, where she has been entertaining us with her cleverness, driving us crazy with her hyperactivity, and melting our hearts with her kindness ever since.
And now Gita is growing old, little by little letting go of this life, sinking into a slow
pool of quietude, and I feel ready. Hers is a rightful passage, developmentally appropriate. I will miss her, and I bless her on her way.
29
RARIFIED
You know how the air becomes rarified when the storm of loss blows through? Charged with light. A gleaming border surrounding every leaf and eyelash. An electrical current bathing your spine as you shop for peaches and unclip the laundry from the line. As if you had been turned inside out by the darkness, rendered exquisitely singular. Almost chosen, like a prophet or a princess. And how the rest of the world goes on in its inane everydayness, oblivious to the sanctity of the broken-open sky in which you now abide?
The first time I remember this feeling is after Matty died over Christmas vacation, and when I got back to school, I was different from every other third-grader. There was no treatment for my condition, and no one even asked what my symptoms were. The next time was when Mom left Dad and ran away to Mexico with Ramón and then called for me to meet them at the border. As I climbed on that bus headed for El Paso, the sun was setting on Taos. I took my seat and looked out the window as my town went about its regular business, and I couldn’t believe they did not realize how momentous it was that my parents were splitting up for good and I was hurtling alone through space.
But the deepest chasm of all cracked open when Jenny died. The casual manner with which grocery checkers rang up my purchases and bank tellers cashed my checks accentuated my alienation. In light of my loss, their bored expressions struck me as sacrilegious, even though I rationalized that they had no way of knowing what had happened. And if they were rude to me, I wanted to have them arrested. When I described this feeling to my old friend and mentor, Asha, on the phone, she said she had always fantasized launching a black armband campaign for the bereaved. Then whenever some officious bureaucrat or apathetic stranger treated us with anything less than reverence, we could simply flash our encircled biceps, and they would bow. A grieving mom named Kirry, whose two-month-old baby had died, told me she felt like a red carpet should unfurl every time her car pulled up and she stepped onto the curb.
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