A Widow's Awakening

The guide shrugs and leaves the room…almost as if he’s been waiting for me to speak up. With shaking hands, I pull my shirt back down and it hits me: if I ever want another blue antelope to perceive me as a pink gazelle, then I’m going to have to learn how to see myself that way first. And the first step toward that is to smarten the hell up and start taking care of myself.

  “Gazelle?” Tamara says from the doorway. “Are you OK?”

  “Not particularly,” I say. “We have to get back to Spain. I need a hospital.”

  TWO DAYS and ten packages of re-hydration salts later, Tamara and I are back on the ferry to Algeciras, swapping travel tales with a Swiss backpacker. I am waiting until we get back to Spain to go to a hospital, so I’m in pretty rough shape. I mention the Ourzazate military man who spoke of Northrop Frye and earth, wind, fire and water.

  “Archetypes, you mean?” the Swiss girl clarifies.

  I search my dusty mental filing cabinet but come up empty.

  “Supposedly,” she says, “archetypes are part of our collective consciousness. Carl Jung wrote about them. The sacred elements of earth, wind, fire and water are an ancient way people perceived the world around them.”

  Another piece of dormant education flickers to life.

  “And with the environmental crisis today,” she continues, “it totally makes sense that these elements are resurfacing from our subconscious into our conscience.”

  Tamara looks at me. “What were you saying in the desert about water?”

  “That it’s connected to the soul,” I say. “And the Englishman said that water symbolized consciousness.”

  The Swiss gal nods. “Yeah…that sounds about right.” Then she leans back in her chair and thinks a moment. “Although, maybe what we call our ‘soul’ is actually consciousness?”

  As much as I’d like to continue this discussion, I’m hit with another stomach cramp and race to the toilet. When I get back, the Swiss girl is telling Tamara about a recently intercepted email between the CEOs of two large American corporations. “It caused quite a fuss because it mentioned that the race for control of the world’s water supply is already well underway. Contrary to popular belief, we can live without oil—but not without water.”

  “Are you all right?” Tamara asks me.

  I rest my head against the window. “I think I’m outta water.”

  “She lost her soul mate eight months ago,” Tamara explains to our new friend.

  The backpacker looks at me. “I don’t think anything real is ever lost.”

  Tamara laughs. “Oh, we’ve figured out that much. He pops up all over the place.”

  IN RONDA, Spain, Tamara sleeps in the hospital waiting room while I spend the night in emergency, hooked up to an IV recovering from severe dehydration.

  In the morning, I call my mom and fill her in. She freaks.

  Then I call Sam’s parents and chat to his dad. Having a great time, I say.

  Next on the clipboard of fun is Seville, where we’re inside a Roman Catholic Church when Tamara, staring at a large metal sculpture on the wall, suddenly bursts into tears. I lead her outside and we sit together on the church steps: she sobbing, me with my arm around her.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “I have no idea! I was just looking at that sculpture and then it…transformed into this huge twisted mass of metal. And there was all this smoke and people were screaming and I—well, it was like I could feel their pain.”

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s kinda weird.”

  She shakes her head. “I just can’t believe how much it hurt.”

  It’s kinda nice to be able to be the one to give the raised eyebrows for once.

  WE END our journey in Lagos, Portugal. Now Tamara is the one drinking while I frantically try to complete the first draft of the manuscript by the nine-month anniversary. It’s not quality material I’m cranking out but at least I’m keeping my promise to myself.

  Tamara places a glass of wine on the patio table for me. “Look at you go.”

  I put down my pen and take a sip of wine. “I’m trying to describe the mixture Sam’s mom prepared for his forty-day anniversary.”

  “What’s significant about forty days?”

  “The Greeks believe that on the fortieth day after a person dies, Michael the Archangel takes their soul to God and they’re told what work they’ll do in heaven.”

  “What’s in the mixture?” she asks.

  “Wheat seeds, which represent the soul that goes on to eternal life after the death of the body. But there were also these red pomegranate seeds in there and now I can’t remember what they symbolized.”

  She thinks about this. “Remember the red light I saw above the door in Nerja?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was about the size of a pomegranate seed.”

  I nod. “That’s right…the pomegranate seed also symbolizes the soul.”

  Tamara takes another sip of wine.

  I smile. “And rebirth, I think.”

  ON THE morning of June 29th, I complete the first draft of the manuscript. It’s an ugly baby but it’s out. In celebration, Tamara and I are spending the afternoon sipping fruity cocktails beneath our beach umbrella when a man wearing a big, floppy hat and carrying a canvas bag comes up to us. “Carved animals for sale,” he says.

  I smile. “Do you have a gazelle?”

  He frowns. “A gazelle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. But I have giraffes, elephants and many beautiful necklaces.”

  I buy a necklace for my mom. But just as he’s about to leave, he roots around in his canvas bag again, pulls out a wooden gazelle and hands it to me. “I guess I have one after all.”

  Tamara laughs. “When we get back to Canada, I’ll make her a tiny pink jelabah.”

  AFTER A dinner of sea bass and beer, we’re walking back to our pension when we pass a building with graffiti on the side that reads: Without truth you are the loser.

  I’m wearing funky new tie-dyed pants, a fitted T-shirt and my favourite jean jacket. On the outside, at least, I’m looking better. The Sahara Desert dehydration diet has slimmed me down considerably. I hand Tamara my camera then stand beneath the graffiti.

  She leans back and snaps my photo. “Got it.”

  LIFE BACK home in Canada, however, is no quiet beach in Portugal. Within twenty-four hours, I am completely overwhelmed again by phone calls, drop-ins, answering machine messages, unopened mail, unread emails, and social functions to attend. However, it’s a minor oversight by the police service that sends me over the edge.

  “There were no goddamn trumpets playing,” I scream at the unfortunate person in Human Resources on the other end of the line, “Because nobody was invited to attend the ceremony!”

  In the police administration building downtown, there’s a glass display cabinet that holds plaques in memory of officers who have passed away in the line of duty. While I was away, Sam’s plaque had been placed in the cabinet without his family being informed. Instead, Angela had read in the newspaper: “There were no teary-eyed crowds or soulful trumpets playing to commemorate the officer…”

  “We made a mistake,” the police chief tells me when word reaches him. “We’re very sorry.”

  No, I say to the water fountain after hanging up. Sorry isn’t good enough. In fact, no to a lot of things. No to Sam going to work and never coming home again. No to him giving his life searching for a nonexistent intruder. No to him choosing his stupid job over me. No to the doctor who told me he was brain-dead, but could I spare a coupla organs? No to the dozens of people who paraded through his ICU room, constantly interrupting our last fucking day on earth together. No to the prayer service where I stood in a receiving line in front of his dead body, shaking hands with five hundred people. No to the public funeral with cameramen on the roof taking my picture. No to the company that couldn’t give a shit about safety. No to the multiple false alarms that night. No to the…wait: how did they know those other tw
o alarms were false?

  The phone rings.

  “Fuck off!” I scream at the handset. “Leave me alone!”

  No to the bloody phone that won’t stop ringing. And no to having to sit under a palm tree in the middle of the goddamn Sahara to be able to finally get some peace.

  Did it take the heat of the desert to finally thaw the rage frozen inside nine and a half months of grief? Regardless, I know I need to be left alone for the flood. I vow to say no to every demand placed upon my time, including the wretched baby showers popping up at an alarming rate. I resolve to not answer the phone or door and instead, focus my efforts on accomplishing the one thing I do have control over: creating a publishable manuscript.

  I begin typing into the computer what I’d handwritten while traveling. Unfortunately, I have enough piss and vinegar flowing through me to poison an elephant—not a state of mind conducive to effective storytelling. Nor do I have a new deadline to aim for. I glance up at the bookshelf and John Irving’s book, A Widow for One Year, again catches my eye. Done. A year it is for the manuscript and me. The Latin meaning for the word widow is “empty.” But I am not going through the rest of my life defined as a hollow vessel…something left behind. I was signed up for a contract position and I’m not renewing it once the year is up.

  And look what’s beside the John Irving book? Sam’s copy of Noam Chomsky’s What Uncle Sam Really Wants. I spend the rest of the day reading shocking facts about US foreign policy and the propaganda behind it. In the late afternoon, I come to Chomsky’s reference to Walter Lippmann’s “bewildered herd.” Comprising the majority of the population, the herd is supposed to follow orders and keep out of the way of the important people. The bewildered herd must remain bewildered because if they trouble themselves with the reality of what’s really going on in the world, they may set themselves to change it. And the others—the powerful elite—cannot allow that.

  Thus, into my manuscript thunders the bewildered herd, followed by findings from the other homework assigned to me in Morocco. I track down Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and also discover his Spiritus Mundi. Between the two books, Frye articulates much of what I’ve been thinking and experiencing since Sam’s death in regard to religious beliefs. Frye warns of the danger in taking stories from the Bible, or any religious document, as literal truth. Analogies and metaphors are tools to understand valuable human lessons—not necessarily truths in themselves. This is what bothered me so much about Christianity’s resurrection belief.

  On January 10th, I’d finally faced the truth that it was physically impossible for a human being—Jesus or otherwise—to come back from the dead. Reading Northrop Frye clarifies the message behind the story: when a person dies, the best of him or her rises up and continues on in our hearts and lives.

  In other words, Jesus doesn’t need to come back and save us; he already gave us the tools to save ourselves.

  Then I read up on Carl Jung. Sure enough, earth, wind, fire and water were ancient archetypes that have, over the course of our evolution, resurfaced from our collective consciousness with different twists, depending on the culture and point in history.

  I finish reading The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki and Jane Goodall’s A Reason for Hope and start in on Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. The message in all three is clear: our environmental crisis is dire; we cannot sustain the path we are on; and we’re going to have to change the way we relate to the natural world. Simply put: we need a new worldview.

  What, am I busy?

  Not particularly. I get to work creating one. I look at the archetypes of earth, wind, fire, water and add a fifth—life itself. Then I think about what love means to me and wonder if it, too, is experienced on five levels: body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit.

  I reflect on some of the strange occurrences—possible “signs” from Sam—that have happened over the past year: Sam having a seizure when I kissed him in the hospital, after he’d been declared brain-dead; the pee in the toilet in the Toronto hotel room during the howling snowstorm; the gold heart pendant floating in the melted wax of the mysteriously reignited candle around Valentine’s Day; and the wolf pendant given me by the girl on the plane while thinking about a symbol to represent what Sam stood for.

  I connect the dots and come up with my own little way of viewing the world: the earth represents the body; wind represents the mind; fire represents the heart; life represents the spirit; and water…well, I’m pretty sure it represents the soul, but I haven’t yet received a clear sign from Sam.

  I pour my 80% complete worldview into the manuscript stew, then return my attention to Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet in the E=mc2 book. I read again how Émilie’s work, two hundred and fifty years earlier, had led to Einstein squaring the speed of light in his famous equation.

  Light.

  What about the red light? I haven’t incorporated that into my worldview—but surely it must be significant, especially since I’m pretty damn sure it is somehow Sam. But how can that be?

  I start scribbling down thoughts. E=mc2 means that the potential amount of energy “hidden” inside matter is determined by multiplying its mass by the speed of light squared (which is an astronomically large number). But, of course, the right conditions are needed to unlock this vast potential energy. I first saw the red light right after Sam’s heart had physically been removed. If love is the energy of the soul, then maybe the red light really was Sam’s soul coming to pay me a visit after being released from his body?

  For what is light but…energy.

  Then I think back to what my reverend said about the spirit being the life-force of the soul. Maybe light is how the soul travels—it’s mode of transportation?

  I am fascinated with exploring the possibility that E=mc2 may apply to more metaphysical, spiritual matters but I realize I am incapable of going much further down the rabbit hole at this point—intellectually or emotionally. I resume reading and come to the part where Émilie had been writing madly to finish her work before the baby arrived. Surrounded by books and piles of papers, she’d been sorting out ideas by candlelight. I look to my own desk, covered in books and papers as I try to sort out ideas, and ponder again the possibility of reincarnation. Or am I just resonating with Émilie’s story because there’s a significant life lesson in there for me? For as much as I love working at this level of intensity, I can’t help but wonder if I’m rushing to get my book done because I do want to have a child?

  This is not a rabbit hole I wish to explore.

  My phone rings and a man from the Human Resources department of the police service starts to leave a message on the machine. I’m surprised they’re still speaking to me after the trumpet incident.

  I pick up the phone mid-message. “Hi.”

  The officer—I think it’s the same guy who drew stick figures for me to explain Sam’s funeral procession—asks me if he’s interrupting anything.

  “Oh no, no,” I say, waving at the bookshelf.

  Then he tells me the police service would like to send me to Ottawa at the end of September for the national memorial weekend for fallen peace officers.

  “I didn’t realize there was such a thing,” is my reply.

  “There is.” He clears his throat. “And it actually falls on the one-year anniversary of Sam’s death.”

  “I see.”

  “We’ll also be sending a police representative along with you and Sam’s family.”

  “Who?” I ask, even though my stomach tells me I already know the answer.

  FOR NAVIGATIONAL assistance through this latest tidal wave of guilt, I call Amanda and she joins Sasha, Sven and I at the dog park. I tell her that Tom and I will be in Ottawa together for the national memorial service.

  She throws the ball and Sasha races after it. “The future must seem pretty daunting on your own,” she says finally.

  “I’m OK.”

  Amanda smiles. “Oh, I know you are. But I just wo
nder if deep down, you’re worried about your future—and the idea of one with Tom makes you feel better. And if so, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  I let out a snort. “Except that it’s not real.”

  “It is to you. I mean, it’s where you’re at right now.”

  “Did you know the memorial service for fallen officers coincides with the one-year anniversary of Sam’s death?”

  “No,” she says. “But that makes sense because September 29th is St. Michael’s Day and since he’s the patron saint of police officers, that’s probably why they hold the national memorial service then.”

  “And Sam just happening to die on St. Michael’s Day is…what?”

  “Very odd.”

  I throw up my hands. “Then why am I the only person who questions this stuff?”

  “You’re not.” She tosses the ball again and Sasha chases it. Sven charges her on her way back and the two of them tussle in the long grass. “I told my sister-in-law about Sam’s dream—the one where you cheated on him.”

  I turn to her. “I thought we came to the conclusion that Sam was worried I would betray my own self by having a baby before I got my book published?”

  “There might be more than one meaning,” she replies, “because apparently when you dream you’re being cheated on, that means the person cheating on you is going to be honouring you in the near future.”

  “That’s not what Sam got out of the dream.”

  Amanda smiles. “I asked about that too. My sister-in-law said that was probably Sam’s ego responding to the dream, not his real self.”

  I stop walking. “His real self? As in his soul?”

  “I guess,” she says. “Do you remember when we went for lunch last November and you told me how it felt like you had two selves?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But that you only show people the person you want them to see.”

  I nod. “Uh huh.”