It’s not that my kids aren’t saying cute things these days. I’m just having trouble focusing. I’m a little absentminded, existentially speaking.
Just this morning Sophie asked me what language angels spoke. I said I was pretty sure they still spoke whatever language they’d spoken on earth, if you knew them on earth. I said that it was just a lot harder for us to hear them, but they could probably hear us pretty well.
Then I added the parental disclaimer that this was just Mommy’s opinion, and lots of other folks don’t agree, don’t believe in angels or heaven or God, and that’s okay too, because the fact is, nobody can know for sure what happens after we die. (I have lots of good PC disclaimers up my sleeve. I was forced at holy psychic gunpoint to endure 12 years of Catholic school, where it was Their Way or the Way-to-Hell Way, and I strive to present other points of view to my offspring.)
We’ve been to the synagogue a few times recently. I like the synagogue. I like the fact that questions are allowed there. Encouraged, even. I liked it so much, I took all their free pamphlets. The rabbi assured me that I don’t have to do a mikveh striptease and that’s another thing I like so far about Judaism.
Sophie wasn’t too interested in the disclaimer (she’s heard it enough) or in talking about mikveh stripteases. She spent the rest of the car ride talking to my Aunt Linda, who passed away two weeks to the day after Hattie Belle was born. Sophie remembers her. Strangely well. Sophie asked, “What are you doing up there in heaven, Aunt Linda? Aunt Linda?”
We had stopped at a train crossing and were watching the cars alternately glide and thunk by. Which of course was making us extra-late for kindergarten. I practiced my calm-mother breathing and tried to focus on the fact that maybe we were supposed to stop for this train.
I said, “Well, Aunt Linda was a real helper in life, a real guide to lots of people, so maybe she’s still doing all kinds of good love work up there.”
Sophie cocked her head to the side in the rear view mirror. “What’s that, Aunt Linda?” I focused on the trains again. I like seeing them in the daytime. At night, when I hear the train whistles in the distance, I know where they’re going and where they’re coming from.
“Oh, I see,” Soph said, and laughed again. “Aunt Linda’s not working.”
“No?”
“No. She says she’s playing. That you do a lot of playing in heaven.”
“Wow. That’s good to know.”
“Maybe I should ask Aunt Linda to make the caboose hurry up and come along so we can get to school.”
The last car immediately came into sight. “There you go, Soph,” I said. “I think she heard you.”
I wish I knew Linda heard me. I’ve been chatting up all the dead relatives lately, and I’ll tell you, the dead are very quiet, in my opinion. Too quiet. It’s not natural.
{ 19 comments }
You are very calm. See, when my son starts talking about the dead and their hobbies, I kinda freak out. Maybe I’m just afraid that he’ll be like the kid in the Sixth Sense and, really, I just don’t need that right now. I don’t have time to take him all over the city to visit the families of the dead. I am a busy woman…
i don’t have a strong relationship with anyone who’s passed away in my life, so i don’t know what it’s like, but my co-worker ali who is the ultimate nonbeliever in some ways always things of her grandmother when there’s a pink sunset. apparently, it was her favorite and she is filled with a strong sense of grandma’s presence. i’ve also heard that from other people — where they feel such a strong sense of someone close to them that they literally look around their house for them. this has never happened to me however. and i admire your adult restraint in naming a language the angels speak. i would’ve said spanish.
At least Sophie waited until she’s old enough to carry on conversations with you about it to start in on the dead reelatives! John was staring off into space one day and just started laughing his head off. I asked him if his Gramma was being funny (my mom passed in 2003) and by the look he gave me I’m pretty sure he was answering in the affirmative. Freaky. Knida reminded me of that old Robert Downey Jr movie “Heart & Souls” … much MUCH less traumatic than thinking he’s going to be like the Sixth Sense kid!
My kids never talked to the dead, they just channeled the dead. My father-in-law died before I even knew I was pregnant with my son. After my son started walking he would hit his ear with his palm and cup his ear when we spoke to him, exactly like my father-in-law did when he was trying to adjust his hearing aid. I told my husband that if he started asking for smokes or Kentucky Fried Chicken, I was going to arrange an exorcism.
we now wave hello to all the dead people whenever we pass the cemetary b/c of you, so my girls say thanks to you and your girls, they find this delightful.
My husband, not so much.
My 6 yr old is very curious about all that right now too, in our house there is” the”(this is how the girls put it, not sure where it came from) God and “The” Goddess so for obvious reasons to me, the girls are mostly interested in the Goddess. The 6 yr old has begun talking to the Goddess in the Here and Now context of granting wishes. Or things like, Please Goddess, make my little sister stop ANNNOYING me.
My husband has requested equal time for God, but the girls are all like “yea, yea, we know, but what did the GODDESS do?”
I love kid-hearing. I wish I still had it.
I absolutely love how you wrapped that one up. That last little line you added – perfection!!
I’ve only heard from a dead relative once. My grandpa was there for me in a dream. It was 5 years ago but it’s as sharp and vivid as if it happened yesterday and I still see his loving, encouraging, lop-sided grin when I think of the dream. He didn’t speak, he only communicated by his eyes. But it was enough.
I wish I was a little girl and open to hearing such messages like Sophie. I would like to hear more.
By the way, my 2 year old’s best friend is named Sophie. My little one can’t pronounce all her letters well yet and it comes out Dopey which makes it 100 times cuter even.
Be well…
What a fantastic post. As always, you wow me.
I think Sophie is going to grow up to be someone seriously amazing.
You have an amazing family! And you capture it all so brilliantly in your writing.
Sophie sounds like such a fun kid.
I’ve been thinking about starting a blog and then I read yours. I’m alternating wildly between pure envy and timid inspiration…your insight and writing are breath-taking (not to mention tear-jerking in a feel-good sort of way). Thank you.
Well, since I’ve been spending way too many hours downloading oldies and lyrics instead of doing anything remotely practical or productive, I’ll share this with all and sundry…it might just be my anthem for 2007 to jump into the water with the likes of you and the many other talented women out there blogging their brains and hearts out (and nods to Jimmy Buffet for his “Deperation Samba” lyrics):
“..I wonder how in the hell I got here
Without a disguise
Should I take this last step
Or turn myself around
Or follow my intuition into that border town
Don’t know where I’m goin’
I don’t like where I’ve been
There may be no exit
But hell I’m going in…”
At least Sophie enjoys chatting with the dead. Maybe that comfort level will go a long way toward helping her assimilate the concept of death when she needs to. My five-year-old, Jack, had hysterics the other night because, “I don’t want to die when I’m old. I won’t know what’s coming next!” And this on the heels of last month’s worry: “How can the universe go on forever? That’s just not right.” Sophie seems at peace with existential issues like these, which I think is a lovely way to be. And so much better for your cardiovascular system than Jack’s way.
I’ve been wondering about this a lot lately–lost a good friend in August. I think about him a lot–probably more than is entirely healthy and sometimes I think I hear from him as well in signs, not actual voices.
But how do you tell the difference between a sign from Beyond and a coincidence on the radio play list?
Now see, the BETTER response would have been…
“You couldn’t be talking to Aunt Linda. Aunt Linda is a zombie. We’ve got her locked up in a box in the basement. You must be talking to someone who just sounds like her.”
The bonus to this plan is that you’d never have to worry about her snooping for Christmas presents in the basement.
I am continually brought to my knees by the ability children have to unlock the part of me I most treasure. I am faced all too often with the hideous side of adults (mom told me high school and the hateful shenanigans of girls were just a phase…I’m in my 30′s, wtf?) and to be able to be reintroduced to the spirit and wonder of belief, to the unjaded me, it’s nothing short of miraculous. Between the mater and your girls, it seems that you are in a most tender and enveloping embrace of sensibility and fancy. It’s quite an amazing place to be if you think about it.
I give the PC disclaimers for everything too, and I wasn’t raised a Catholic. I just want them to know there’s always more out there and IF they choose something at all, it should be something that feels right for them.
As far as seeing the dead, I was like that as a child in my dreams and in deja vu. Not sure if I wish I could still do that or not!
Jenn – I seem to recall you hearing my mother speak to you years ago. When you were drawing a picture of her as a child. You told me she would gently correct you when you made “mistakes” that did not look right. That picture always looks like it could just come alive. I can almost hear her childish laugh when I look at it.
Spot’s comment made me laugh and I think I heard my mom laugh, too (yep — the same one who died in 2003). When I was about 2 1/2 or 3 years old, you see, she was kissing me good night at one point and said “Good night my favorite daughter.” I, being the only girl child in the house replied with a hearty “But I’m your ONLY daughter.” To which she, being typically cute and funny and forgetting that I was the most literal child ever, said “No, there’s Daisy, too, but she was bad so we keep her locked in a closet” without giving it a second thought. Closed the door, went to bed, and didn’t think about it again until a couple of days later when my father asked her why I kept tearing apart every closet in the house …. “Oh, I think she’s looking for Daisy…”
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