Signs of the Other Side

The Blog Was Kent's Idea
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          Driving back to Austin from my mother’s funeral last April, Kent said to me, “you should stop writing fiction.”   We were somewhere around Cross Plains.  The angle of the sun was blinding – it was about 7 a.m.  It stuck in my head because I had been thinking the same thing.  Not at that exact moment.  At that exact moment, I was stretching, trying to wake up so that I could take my turn at the wheel. 

         But I’d been thinking about it in general.  Ever since I was invited to speak to my Sunday School class about my spiritual journey.  I had a lot of misgivings about accepting the invitation.  It wasn't  that I was worried about the people in the Sunday School class.  It’s not a doctrinaire church and an even less doctrinaire group in that particular class, so I knew they were open to unconventional paths.  In fact one of the first times I ever heard someone describe their spiritual journey in that class more than 20 years ago, the story involved an exploration of how LSD had positively impacted the speaker’s spiritual growth.  That was in my early days at University Methodist, and that morning was one more confirmation for me that in spite of the fact that I don’t believe (among other things) that Jesus died to atone for my sins or anyone else’s, here was a church I could attend.  Turns out it’s a church chock full of unexpected perspective and honest doubt.  I feel right at home and never have any qualms about the many things I don’t believe.  I do believe “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a good code to live by.  And I believe there’s something greater than the here and now, something unseen that sometimes penetrates the veil.  I have an almost primitive urge to at least acknowledge the unseen.  And to honor the dead, those who have gone before, the connection I still feel to them.  I don’t know how to do that, and church seems like a good way to try.  Even if I don’t believe much in the apostle’s creed, I like reciting it with other people who have the same urge I have to honor something we can't fully understand.  Still I had struggled over describing my spiritual journey in Sunday School before I was scheduled to speak and thought until the very morning I spoke about pulling out.  It wasn’t so much worrying about having something to say as wondering how much I should leave out.  My drug use?  The dreams?  The sex in the dreams?  The visions and visitations?   I wasn't nervous about my Sunday School class particularly.  I'm just nervous about talking about those things.  In general I’m afraid that if I’m honest about what I’m thinking most of the time, many people will think I’m a schizophrenic.  I remember when I was first seeing Kent, I asked him what he thought happened to us when we died.  He said, “I think we live on in the memories of the people who loved us,” and I thought “oh shit. “  I figured once he found out that I basically think I’m in communication with the dead, that there are signs of the other side around us everywhere we look, he’d head for the highway.  But he didn’t.  He accepted my spiritual credulity – some people would call it gullibility -- and perhaps leaned in all the closer because of it.  The truth was a risk, but it was better than the alternative -- keeping an essential part of myself a secret from someone I loved.

       In the end I showed up at church on the appointed day to tell about my spiritual journey and decided in the moments before I started to speak to just go ahead and leave it all in.  Or as much of it as would fit in an hour.  And before I was even through I realized that, on top of the feeling of liberation I experienced that day, the truth made for a good story. 

       Ever since then, I’d been turning it over in my head.  Feeling a little sheepish that my response to my lack of success as a writer has been to jump genres -- couldn’t get the novel published so I decided to write a play -- couldn’t get the play produced so I started writing songs and turned the novel into a screenplay.  Knowing that it’s beginning to look like the problem is not with the genre.  In spite of that, I’d been thinking about writing a memoir piece which is what Kent meant when he said I should stop writing fiction.  He meant I should start writing non-fiction instead.  He was telling me to do exactly what I wanted to do.  It was like having my conscience speak out loud.  And saying what I wanted to hear.

        It was a Thursday – five days almost to the minute since my mother had died.  Kent and I had left Roby at 4:45 a.m. that morning so that we could make the five-hour drive back to Austin and get to work by 10 in the morning.  We should’ve left the night before.  We were supposed to leave then.  We both had Thursday classes to teach.  Neither of us could afford to miss another day.  But I couldn’t bear to go.   Couldn’t tear myself away from Roby as the sun set on the day I buried my mother.  The thought of driving away was just unbearable.  I wanted to be in touching distance of my brothers and my father who were staying until the next day.  And I wanted to be in Roby, which, in spite of the fact that it is all but dried up and blown away, barely able to limp into the 21^st century, still has a powerful grip on me.  So Nick and Helen left in Nick’s car for Austin on Wednesday evening, and Kent stayed with me to go drive around the dirt roads of Fisher County with my brother and cousins and a cooler full of beer.   To give me one more night breathing air that smells like home.   It was a burden to him, and Helen would’ve stayed with me and let Kent drive home with Nick, but Kent wanted to be the one who came home with me.   And I was grateful that he did.

       Earlier in the day right after the graveside service for my mother we had gathered at my Aunt Sandra’s house which sits exactly on the spot where Dad and Granny (my great grandparents) had raised their children and some of their grandchildren, including my mother.  Some of us sat on the porch looking out at that northern view toward the Double Mountains that my mother had grown up looking at.  Others sat at the table in the house drinking iced tea.  Others clustered around the tailgate of my cousin’s pick up out behind the house.  We were all telling stories we've told and re-told hundreds of times.  Stories about how the dog -- Keno -- used to chase my father when he’d come to pick my mother up for date.  How once when they were children, Richard left my Aunt Sandra trapped down in a well hole she couldn’t get out of and went home to eat lunch, not sending anyone to help her out until after he’d eaten.   How Granny had thrown a basin of dishwater on my mother when the swing broke and she was knocked unconscious in the fall – baby J. Neal who was sitting in her lap at the time safely cushioned by her body from injury.  How my great grandfather, Dad, had worn his khaki shirt buttoned to the top button every single day no matter the temperature.   How he had ridiculed the space program and the ambition to land on the moon.  “The good Lord just put it up there for a night light, “ Dad, who was born in 1871,  used to say.  We talked about Dad’s father, a Confederate Army draft dodger, who ran with an outlaw named Quantrell and was ultimately hung for murder.   How Dad and Granny, pillars of the community and the Roby Church of Christ, had concealed that part of their history from all their children and grandchildren.  The family didn’t know about it until the 1980s when my mother and aunt, doing genealogy research, made contact with a distant cousin from Longview who assumed that they had grown up knowing the whole story and sent newspaper clippings about the trial and the hanging along with the research she’d completed on the family origins.   My mother went all the way to Union Parish Louisiana to piece together a story that she realized immediately had haunted her grandparents – who had raised her -- and colored her own childhood.  And to confirm what we all already knew – that we are not only a family of storytellers, we are also a family of secret-keepers.   And oddly the stories are more fascinating because of the things we don't or can't tell – the memories we put into words are only the exposed part of something bigger and more complicated and often forbidden.

      The stories we told around the tailgate that day are what inspired Kent to advise me to give up fiction and take up the truth.  On the way home from Roby that morning after my mother’s funeral, we talked about what I could write in the way of a memoir.  Kent loved to brainstorm about future work and career paths.  Our children's, mine, his.  I’d been thinking about writing a piece called “My Dog, My Cat, My Mother, My Father.” Those were the four deaths I knew I was going to experience in a year.  Our dog, Moon, had died the previous August; the cat followed him in February.  Though my father was still alive, it was clear that he was not long for this world.  He was weak and getting weaker after a year and a half of battling mesothelioma.  I thought I could weave a chronological story of those deaths and my mother's in with flashbacks to JB’s death 19 years earlier.  It would be reflections on those people and pets and their legacies. Reflections on what I’d learned from death.  From grief.  Kent suggested weaving songs into it.  I’d already written songs about my father, my mother, and our cat Romeo.  That was a stretch, but Kent believed in exploring all the possibilities and got really excited by trying things that stretched the limits.   Ultimately we were talking about a performance piece that would weave memoir and song together.  Writing that right now I think – that’s crazy.  But riding in the car with Kent that morning, it seemed like a great idea.  An exciting possibility.  

      Of course, the obvious irony is the death I didn’t know about.  I felt even in the first moments after I found out that Kent was dead that I was being punished for having the arrogance to think I could process death so neatly.  As if I had said to the universe – this hurts, but I can take it; I can even turn it into something -- I'll write something clever and good about it; hell, I can even start turning it into something before it’s all over -- before they're all dead.  I still feel the regret almost physically. I repent thinking that I had a handle on death and grief.  

      I don’t think that anymore.  I do still think, though, that there are signs of the other side around me, everywhere I look.  I still believe that the dead watch over me and love me.  As I love them.  That they are pointing me toward a path that I couldn't find on my own.  Since I decided to start a blog, I think that Kent was pointing me in exactly this direction when he told me that morning in Cross Plains that I should stop writing fiction.   Fifteen days before he died.  Fifteen days before my life became even more dramatic than we could imagine.  Fifteen days before he would begin to live on in the memory of those who love him.  Before I would start seeing signs of him everywhere I look.  Sometimes it seems to me as though I began seeing signs of him even before he died.   As though words he spoke to me when he was still alive were only the exposed part of something bigger and more complicated.