Gift From the Beyond, part 2 by Sara Wright

Part 1 was posted yesterday

My friend Lise sent me some words on the eve of Davey’s birthday (unbeknown to me until the 6^th) that reminded me of how often I spoke to him during those months.

“The reason I pray to the dead is I trust their timing. They have all the time in the world, after all, and they also see the big picture and the long story. I pray to the dead because, I admit, how little I know, how little I can understand, and how vast the mystery is of the soul.

Let me circle myself with the living who can hold both, with the dead who can hold it all. We are entangled souls…. We are all praying together, with the flowers, the trees, with all that is.” (I substitute talk for pray because that is what I do)

And these words bring me around to the beginning of this story.

 After receiving the nudge and feeling my way out the door I am held by the darkness as I stand under my still fragrant flowering crabapple. A thousand tree frogs are singing to a chorus of peepers. I look up and a firefly is descending from the mother pine. Blinking furiously this ‘lightening bug’ is slowly coming towards me… a few others glorious golden lights join in circling round..

Then it happens. I am breathing deeply; the air is so sweet. I am totally rooted to the ground and simultaneously transported. Davey is with me, just as he has always been. and I hear the words ‘Life and Death are One’… we will always be part of the same story”.

I have no idea how long I stood there but when I came in, I threw open all the windows (it had been very humid) so I could fall asleep to tree frogs and watch the lightening bugs’ cool lights. Not a sound. Not one light. I stared out the window waiting for those magical fireflies who never came. Finally, I fell asleep.

The following day during our morning conversation I told Gary the tale and he replied, ‘the hair rose up on my arms as you were telling me this story’.

 Davey and Gary both.

Some people know….

*3 Footnotes

 I had hairy and downy woodpeckers chirping persistently as they flew to the feeder for hours while I was writing. Papa was teaching his young how to navigate the spring loading device to keep it from shutting down (very clever birds). Too many woodpeckers I thought before the teaching began. Birds act as messengers and woodpeckers always alert me to an experience of holes being punctured in my body. This writing brought me back to the agony of loss.

_____________________________

Halfway through this writing I received a message from someone who has been trying to find me. Needing a break from myself I answered immediately. John came to my house during the years that Davey was at Harvard and was one of his roommates for three years. All were runners.

Listening to John I relived my brother’s life at Harvard, especially with regard to his years as an internationally known athlete still from a distance. I knew Davey was famous, but the two of us had the kind of bond that excluded his immense accomplishments… they were always an adjunct for me. Perhaps this is why when my brother told me he had stopped running I didn’t care. All that fame meant nothing to me – he was my beloved. After pulling out of the track team he confided in me that he was tired of people not seeing him as a person but only as an athlete. Certainly, my family did. My parents had an entire room full of his gold medals.

 In retrospect of course I understand how crippling Davey’s invisibility was to such a brilliant and sensitive young man who had no intuitive/compassionate adult male model to help ground him in a life beyond world fame.

 All he had in the end was me.

Sadly, I wasn’t enough.

_________________________________

Last night I was exhausted from writing and conversation – very depressed. I got into bed with my dear dogs, turning out the lights – and suddenly one emerald firefly started blinking at the window. I wept. Davey loved the golden insects the most, but the greens were my favorite…