The trains are full. The train station teams with men in uniform. It is impossible for civilians to buy tickets, not just for the day but for the week, he’s told, maybe more. Their suitcases are ready. He had tried to get his first job after college closer to home and family in Chicago. Reader’s Digest had not wanted him. He attributes this rejection to his paralyzed legs and his canes. There was no Americans with Disabilities Act in 1941. He telephones Fort Monmouth. “Of course, we’ll hold the job,” they say. “We need you,” they say, “now more than ever.” Who would be more understanding than the Army Signal Corps?
We wait in the country’s turmoil. Every young, able-bodied man is enlisting; the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. We are at war. He is not enlisting. He is not able-bodied. Or not enough, at least, for the military. “You will be doing your part. It is important to write the technical manuals the Army needs,” my mother reassures. He has lived with this wound since he was two. The women in his life have always comforted him. I wonder now if I ever did, though I doubt it. I was too busy with my own wounds to give my father’s much attention.
On the crowded train, ten days later, we are the only civilians. The boy-soldiers are excited and nervous and they won’t let themselves know they are scared. They admire my delicate and pretty mother. The basket—designed to hold lettuce—that is my carrier is passed from soldier to soldier, so they can admire me too. They eye my father and his canes warily, full of pity for this crippled man, and maybe a tiny bit jealous that he gets to stay behind.
He senses all this. He has breathed the dark smoke of pity all his life. My mother touches the back of his hand with one finger. She knows for a proud man pity cuts deeper than a sword. I awaken, crying. There on the green mohair train seat, they do all that must be done for a four-month-old baby. Some of the watching boy-soldiers will remember me and my pretty mother and my crippled father at certain key moments on the battlefield.
After the war a new toxin will infect the pity my father receives. Veterans will make assumptions. “What battle were you wounded in?” they will ask, puffed with manly pride. Or sometimes just, “Which battle?” with a chin angled toward his legs and canes. By then I am old enough to feel the armor of fierce independence that rises in my father as they rush to open doors he can open himself. I don’t remember how he replied to their questions though.
Recently I opened a door for a wheelchair-bound woman half my age. She was clearly grateful. But when I hurried ahead to open the second door, which was lighter, I flinched under the proud annoyance that flavored her curt thank you. I, of all people, should know that too much help is not welcome.
I am able-bodied. I walk with a vigorous gait, but there are wrinkles and gray hair and that thing I call my turkey wattle and to a 20-year-old I guess I look ancient. When one sees me crossing the parking lot and holds the Credit Union door open way too long as he waits and waits for me, I feel the shadow of my father’s wounded pride rise up within me.
The young man looks so pleased with himself. “Thank you,” I say with a smile and I am grateful, not for the holding of the door, but for this opportunity to be present in the face of my inexorably advancing years; for this opportunity to connect with a young man the age of my grandson; for a chance, perhaps, to balance and heal the wound that pity left in my polio-stricken father, dead, now, for thirty-three years this December.
Perhaps my father and this story come to mind because of the nearness of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and how the veil thins between the living and the dead at this time of year.
If you’d like to share how your deceased beloveds have visited you, there’s a way to do that on my website at https://anniemattingley.com/participate/ If you’d rather tell me your story verbally, let me know, and we can arrange for that.
While you’re at my website check out my Events page to see what I may have scheduled in your locale. The next two New Mexico events are:
Book Signings and After-Death Communication Talking Circles at:
The Ark Bookstore, 33 Romero St. (by the Railyard), Santa Fe
Saturday, October 14, 3 pm
and
The Blue Eagle Metaphysical Bookstore, 2422 Juan Tabo Blvd., NE, Albuquerque
Sunday, October 15, 2 pm.
I’d love to see you there!
The After Death Chronicles: True Stories of Comfort, Guidance, and Wisdom from Beyond the Veil was released by Hampton Roads on October 6, 2017. Order online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound, or find it in your local bookstore. Find out more on my Book Page.
Blenders go on in the middle of the night. Alarm systems may suddenly malfunction. Televisions change channels while they’re off or turn on when no one is around. Lights flash. Unexamined, these may simply seem strange, as well as unrelated to the dead. If experts are called in and no problems are discovered, we may be told, “It’s just a fluke, ma’am.”
There was also something more fundamental to be noted. The role of an alarm system is to keep us safe, which, when we’re young, is our mother’s role as well. That protective role was one of the hardest things for me to let go of as my two daughters matured. Perhaps this mother was pointing out her desire to continue keeping her daughter safe. Before we allow a surprising event to frighten us it behooves us to try to determine what our dear dead might be trying to say.
Synchronous experiences are easier to ignore than the beeps of an alarm system and we love to brush them off as coincidental. Again, I suggest we look for meaning. Heidi awakens at 2:22 AM convinced that her mother has died. Within minutes a call from the nursing home confirms this. Long after her mother’s death she finds that whenever she notices 2:22 on a clock, she strongly senses her mom’s presence. The time—2:22—becomes a kind of secret code language between them. Although I didn’t hear that this was true for Heidi, at times, the specific numbers may hold important keys to either the living or the dead. Sure, any of this could be “coincidence.” However, such experiences are often accompanied by an uncanny and difficult to describe (or to defend to a skeptic) awareness, a knowing. If we reject this knowing, we could be allowing logic to rob us of a sweet and profound gift.
“I’m okay, scariest earthquake ever.” (on Facebook from Oaxaca)
I’m dizzied by keeping track of my loved ones, checking on hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, and extreme heat across the continent. I read rising death tolls in Texas, the Caribbean, the Isthmus of Mexico, Florida. The number of acres burning in the northwest is reflected by the smoky haze where I live in the southwest more than a thousand miles away. I am face to face with the risks of being alive, the reality of our mortality. Death looks over my left shoulder. It keeps clearing its throat to remind me of our impermanence.
I try to remember how to keep my balance. I note the beauty of my maxmilian sunflowers which just burst into bloom today, the red on the wings of a flicker flying past the window. I have my mantra practice, my own breath. I ask for extra hugs from my sweetie. A friend shares a mantra from Thich Nhat Hanh—I have arrived and I am home. Home is a place of safety and like it or not, home encompasses it all, including both life and death.
This photo of me and Mickey Mouse was taken thirty-two years ago as he pretended to hand me the giant key to the Chevy Cavalier I’d just won. It was Disneyland’s 30th anniversary, though I hadn’t paid any attention to the signs that said every 3,000th visitor would win a Chevy during the celebration. The snapshot doesn’t do justice to the tug of war that had just gone on between us. Mickey may look benign, but he was strong, and he wasn’t about to let me have that key until the PR photographers had gotten this picture.
Here’s a tiny preview of next week’s blog that will focus on after-death communication through physical and electrical phenomena. These are true incidents when people’s dead beloveds made contact in ways that had particular meaning to the living person:
Today I’m continuing with the third in my series on the various ways in which our dead beloveds visit us. This week’s examples focus on what can occur just before and after deaths, during the dying process, and at the moment of death. Each example is a real experience that has happened spontaneously.
A drawing done hours or even years before a sudden, accidental death may later reveal details about the death as though the person had known when and how and where they would die. What does this say about time and its mysteries?
Annie Mattingley 