Signs of Life & Love & Angel Wings

My daughter calls March 1 Christy’s angel wing anniversary. It sounds better than the date of her death. Each passing day through a year of firsts without my wife brought me further away from the most painful day of my life, only to be right back to the day my journey through grief began a year earlier. That is the circular nature of grief and life.

Throughout this year long journey there were always reminders of the life now lost to me. In our social media dominated world, Facebook reminds me of what Christy and me were doing 1 year ago, 2 years ago and 3, 4 and 5. Memories preserved and served up on precisely that day years prior. There are also memories friends and families reposted on their timelines of time shared with them. There will be no more new memories; at least the type we experience in this realm.

I want to believe that Christy is an angel, a soul waiting for me on the other side of this life. She gave me reasons to believe this is true. This year I experienced signs of life, love and angel wings. Memories. New ones of an otherworldly kind.

Believe

The morning of her passing, we remove all of signs of what our life became; a constant battle to keep pain and death away. The medical devices, the boxes of supplies, and the myriad of medications congesting the hallway leading to our bedroom. I want it all gone; every reminder of her illness. And while we push ourselves through this chore, the home screen on my iPhone flashes a song from the music app. I ignore it and numbly move through the day.

The next morning, the same song pops up on my screen. This time I pause. It has my attention. It’s not a song I’ve downloaded, or purchased, or included in a playlist. Was I too raw the day before to notice? There were no conversations between the two us regarding Christy sending me signs from the afterlife as I had asked my mother to do when she was dying. I stare at the song name on my phone – Believe.

St. Louis Lucky 7

The number 7 is our number. We met on the 7th day of a month. Christy’s birthday is the 7th day of a month. We married in the 7th month of the year. On the 7th of each month one of us would say “happy anniversary” evoking a smile from the other. On March 7, the first 7th day of a month without her, the same monthly calendar notification that has been reminding her for years appears on her phone. Anniversary is all it says. It’s a gut punch. I collapse into my desk chair in our office and turn on my computer. I sit back and stare at it for awhile. The lock screen is the St. Louis Arch. St. Louis, Missouri is Christy’s place birth and home town. Believe?

Birds of a Feather

My home office is in the front of our house. A robellini palm filters my view into the front yard. It’s a comfortable place to work. Thank goodness for work. It keeps my mind busy on other things besides my grief. On this morning a persistent tapping sound on the window demands my attention. A bright red male Cardinal sits on the other side of the window pecking at it as if he’s trying to get my attention.

I swivel my chair around to look and as I do he flies up onto one of the palm fronds. As he bounces on the frond, I see his less brilliantly colored female companion flitting about, flying from the palm frond to the ground, making numerous round trips. And then my eyes catch the object of her persistence. Perched upon one of the fronds is a fuzzy Cardinal chick. New life. The male and the female are encouraging it to fly. I call my daughter into the office to enjoy this amazing sight with me.

There is a belief among many that when Cardinals visit us, it is a sign from heaven. Maybe. But on this spring morning, as we watch the family of three, the same size as our little family, my daughter says to me, “These are St. Louis Cardinals”, a nod to Christy’s hometown and the baseball team she enjoyed as a fan growing up there.

An Angel Somewhere Over the Rainbow

The Smoky Mountains in June offers us a change of scenery and vacation opportunity that doesn’t involve crowds. Daily we head down the mountain where we’ve rented a cabin to our outdoor playground in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. On our third day, we stroll down a gravel road headed to a trail we will hike. My daughter, her boyfriend and his mother are a few paces ahead of me. I talk softly to Christy, “Walk with me, please”. A few hundred yards ahead we walk into a rainbow that appears to have three orbs trapped inside it. I’m covered in goosebumps.

Are You Listening?

“Make sure she doesn’t talk politics”, Christy says to Courtney the day before she dies. It is one of several requests she entrusts to Courtney during that conversation. In her waning hours, she is thinking about my life without her. In this era of political tribal division, if my political views are different than others, she doesn’t want this to be a wedge between us. I will need love and support not partisan driven separation.

After she passes away, I sometimes tune into one of the channels airing political chatter. Within minutes, the television loses audio. Turning the TV off then back on revives the audio. It works for awhile but continues losing audio every few minutes. It’s exasperating and eventually I tire of turning the TV off and on and change the channel. When I do, the problem goes away. This goes on for months on multiple televisions. One evening, the image on the outdoor TV turns upside down. One day I finally say aloud as if she is standing there, “Christy, is that you?” After asking that question, the problem goes away and the audio stays on regardless of the channel.

Thanksgiving Visitor

The turkey is out of the oven and ready to carve. Dinner will soon be served. While I am busy carving the turkey someone knocks on our front door. Three distinct knocks. It’s dinner time on Thanksgiving Day. Who could possibility think this is a good time to stop by? My daughter and her boyfriend open the front door. Then they go outside, shutting the door behind them. From where I’m carving the turkey, I can’t see who came to our door. I’m getting annoyed. Carved turkey is filling up the platter and we’re about ready to sit down to eat and Courtney and JJ have disappeared outside.

What I couldn’t see from my place in the kitchen is that when they opened the door no one was there. They walked outside and looked around for awhile trying to see if there was anyone around. Whenever someone comes to the door it sends an alert to my phone and records video. When we check the Ring video, the only thing it captured was the video image of the two of them walking outside to look around and coming back inside. Although not captured on the Ring device, we all heard three knocks on the door and over dinner talk about our angelic visitor.

A New Normal

I don’t know what my post Christy life looks like. My new normal. What is normal anymore? There was nothing normal about this past year. Not for me. Not for you. Christy’s death coincided with the start of a global pandemic and the vast limitations put on the communal way one normally grieves and lives.

Covid stole many things from all of us, but this moment in history also offered something. Time. We all had more of it. It wasn’t time we desired, but here was, so I took it and invested in it. It was a cocoon I could wrap myself in. I wrote more. I read more. I prayed more. I cooked new recipes. I organized. I meditated. I researched. I learned. I reflected. I grew. I grieved. And I healed.

So here I am one year removed from Christy’s death. I’m ready to emerge from this cocoon and find my new normal; to continue the journey. And perhaps along the way I will be fortunate enough to experience more signs of life, love and angel wings.

Cardinal photo by Robert Woeger on Unsplash

Blog feature photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash