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Friday, November 3, 2017

Moon Signs


My lack of faith sometimes causes me to miss some pretty bright signs.

Or perhaps … my delusional wish to believe in an afterlife sometimes causes me to imagine signs where there are none.

You can decide, depending on your own bias, which of these statements is true about the signs – or the delusions – I had the last couple of nights.

Our friend Carolyn had come to watch some disappointing episodes of Stranger Things with us, and as she was getting ready to leave, I stepped outside to give our dog her night outs. As soon as I clicked on Lola’s harness, I looked up at the sky -- and drew in a breath at the beauty of the full moon shrouded in fall clouds over darkly silhouetted trees (see totally inadequate picture).

The moon, as I explained when sharing this photo in a Facebook post, was a symbol my children and I used to communicate our connection to one another. Wherever we were, if we wanted to tell the other two we loved them, we would send a photo of the moon – even though photos cannot do the moon justice. We understood this meant we were shining our love up at the moon – and that the moon, in turn, was beaming our love back down on the other two. This practice stemmed from a fun elementary school assignment in which students had to find the moon each night (even if it meant driving around for a viewing) and then create a project about it each day.  Kyle and Jamie wrote poems about the moon, did artwork and science projects about its phases, and looked forward with excitement to our nightly search. So did I.

Since Kyle died, the moon’s beauty is often a reminder of how there are now only two of us looking up at it – and only one other person to whom we can send a photo. But the moon is still a reminder of our spiritual connection, now as a symbol of how Kyle’s love continues to shine down on us even though he’s not here with us. I try to keep my heart open to that idea, though sometimes seeing the moon just makes me tear up with how terribly I miss my son.

Jamie has a haiku she’s saved in her phone that Kyle wrote and texted to her about their moon connection – and I thought he’d sent the poem to both of us. After sending Jamie a message last night while looking at the full moon, I yearned for a connection with Kyle, too, and thought I would dig up his haiku message. Turns out I couldn’t find it – nor any of the messages I know he sent me with moon photos. Nearly all my many texts and FB messages from him seem to  have disappeared. (Perhaps this is a sign that I am supposed to stop looking for them, part of my letting go.) But as I looked at our last FB Messages, I was prompted by a yellow hand in double parentheses with the words, “Send Kyle a wave.”  By this time, I was crying a little, telling Renee why I was sitting outside in the dark tearing up at the sight of the moon, and so when this prompt showed up on my phone screen, I laughed through my tears and said, “OK, fine, I’ll send him a wave.” And I pushed the button and a little wave showed up, and now the screen says “Waiting for Kyle...” at the end of the exchange.

It wasn’t until I woke up this morning that I realized how I had gone looking for a sign from Kyle, and then he had pretty much waved at me… This idea really made me smile.

I know part of why this didn’t occur to me while it was happening is because my wife is as close to actively atheist as an agnostic can be -- as Kyle sometimes was. She doesn’t believe there is any higher power, doesn’t see how it’s possible that there could be a supreme being caring about each individual hair on our heads. I get it. The idea is impossible to conceive, beyond human understanding. A friend of mine in high school who had found Jesus but managed never to get preachy about it wrote a poem about how trying to explain the vastness of God’s love was like trying to scoop up the ocean with a Dixie cup. Our minds are the Dixie cups, way too small to hold on to an idea so big as God. Kyle liked that analogy, too, and told me he shared it sometimes in meetings. (Here, as a total aside, is the value of poetry, even when we don't know who our audience might ever be. I read this line in high school; it was never published outside the school -- but I still remember it 35 years later, and it has now been shared with countless others)

But back to my musings on signs from the beyond: I feel better when I believe in them and worse when I discount them. So hey there, Kyle, thanks for encouraging me to wave at you. I'll try to keep my eyes and heart open for your next sign.  And I'd also like to recognize that maybe your daughter dressing up the same way you did at the same age could have been a sign, too.  I hope you could see her following in your Power Ranger footsteps from wherever you are:




P.S. I called my cousin Debbie two nights ago to make sure she was OK after the NYC terrorist attack; she was, thank God. But she mentioned that she’d read my last blog post and wondered if I’d ever finished compiling my poetry manuscript. YES, I did, and I am sheepishly proud of it, and I’ve sent it in to several poetry publishing contests and also sent several individual poems in for consideration by various magazine editors. I did all this while I was in Maine staying alone in the empty home of our friends, and am hugely grateful I had that time and space to get that done. Now on to National Novel Writing Month, because it's good to have goals.

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