G3- Growing
Learning about Relationships

GROWING: A crone keeps growing emotionally and intellectually. Right now I am spending a lot of time thinking and reading about relationships, both those with people around us and those on the other side of the curtain. I want to understand what makes relationships work. I am also interested in learning about meditation.

        Today I am wondering about relationships with those who have died. Don’t misunderstand. I am not talking about séances. I am thinking about what ends and what continues.

       “Your relationship with Paul isn’t over,” my friend Beverly McBride told me after my husband of thirty years died. Beverly, who has been my close friend for more than fifty years, serves pro bono as my therapist. I’ve been pondering her statement off and on for nearly fifteen years. Yes, I am a little slow to form conclusions.

         Beverly would say that Paul still affects my daily life, and, of course, he does. We married in our twenties, in many ways growing up together. We have three children and seven grandchildren, and I am grateful that he lives in them. There were times during those first days without him that I felt his presence so strongly I tried to turn quickly enough to see him. I still feel him with me sporadically, but I no longer hope for a glimpse.

        In April of last year, I was at a dinner where my son, Dr .Benjamin Myers, received an award for his first book of poetry, *Elegy for Trains.  Tim Tingle, a Choctaw storyteller and author, happened to sit beside me. I told Tim a little about Paul, that he was also a poet and about his pride in his children. I did not tell him that I felt Paul’s presence intensely. At one point, Tim whispered to me, “I feel your emotions, leaving your body and passing into mine.” I smiled and said that I was very proud of Ben.

      Turns out, it was not my pride Tim felt. When I said goodnight to Ben that evening, I could not resist telling him that I felt his father with us at the dinner. Ben’s answer shocked me. “That’s what Tim Tingle told me,” he said. Ben went on to quote Tim as saying, “I never met your father, but I can tell you he was at the table tonight.’”      

   

    Does Tim’s Choctaw heritage give him an ability most of us lack? If you read his book, How I Became a Ghost, published by Roadrunner Press, you may think so. I do believe Tim has some very special gifts.  Is it his birthright that sets him apart, or is it simply his sensitivity, his ability to feel? I don’t know, but I want to, as my grandmother might have said, “study” on that.

    Let me tell you another story. Last year I was riding with my husband, John Calvin, through Shawnee, Oklahoma, a town about twenty-five miles from Chandler where we live. I’ve been in Shawnee thousands of times, the first time shortly after I moved to Chandler when I was fifteen.

      Suddenly on that trip with John, my father’s words flashed through my mind. At first, I thought it was a memory, something that happened when I was fifteen and going to Shawnee with my parents. You need a little background information about my family. My parents had eight children. Their second child died when she was seven months old. I was child number seven. My parents never spoke about Ramona, but I did know that my mother more or less had an emotional breakdown after the death. Over the years to come, my older sisters and I frequently discussed Ramona’s death. We wondered about the obvious effects that loss had on our parents and therefore on us all. Shortly before my mother’s death at almost 85, she called me Ramona all day as I sat beside her hospital bed.

     The words that came to me driving through Shawnee were, “This is the town where Ramona died at the ACH Hospital.” For a time, I thought my father must have said those words to me when I was fifteen. I know he would not have said them in front of my mother, so I supposed she had gone into a store, leaving us in the car. Maybe that is what happened. However, if he gave me that information, why did it never cross my mind again during the next 55 years? Why did I not repeat the facts to one of my sisters? Why did I not think of it during one of the thousands of trips I made to Shawnee to visit Paul’s parents or when I sat beside my father before his death in a Shawnee hospital?

      That day of the flash I called my sister Shirley to ask if she knew where Ramona died. She answered Seminole, a town several miles from Shawnee. Shirley said our parents lived on the other side of Seminole where our father worked in the oil fields, and Shirley remembered hearing that Ramona had been taken to the hospital there. I’ve always deferred to Shirley’s knowledge of family history, but I couldn’t let the question go.

       At home, I looked up the history of Shawnee on the computer. Sure enough, there had been a hospital in the city in those days called ACH. The next day I obtained a copy of Ramona’s death certificate. She died in Shawnee, after being under a doctor’s care there only a few hours.  My sisters and I pieced together the facts and believe Ramona was taken first to Seminole then moved to Shawnee. The information for the death certificate was supplied by an uncle, and I doubt that my mother could even remember the name of the town.

      Did I forget the conversation with my father for 55 years, only to have it flash into my mind when I was not thinking about Ramona, about my parents, or about Shawnee? I don’t know. Maybe the message was somehow received from beyond that thin curtain separating us from those on the other side. Maybe someone there wanted me to think about the baby girl whose birthday was only the day before the flash came.

     Elizabeth Barrett- Browning said, “*and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.”

     What do you think? Do relationships continue after death? Does communication? Please let me know your thoughts.   

          *Elegy for Trains, Ben’s first book, published by Village Books Press, Book number two, Lapse Americana, published by the New York Quarterly Foundation.

        *from Sonnets from the Portuguese, #43