Dreams

I remember seeing Akira Kurosawa’s sublime film, Dreams for the first time in 1990. The film was a series of vignettes, dreams the fabled Japanese filmmaker actually had. They alternate between unworldly, hair-raising, breathtaking, sumptuous, and transcending celluloid dreams that only a great master could create.

I haven’t seen the film in many years, but in my dreams that followed my mother’s death, I thought about how much the boundaries of all physicality are thrown aside during the deep unconscious adventures our mind and spirit take during the sleeping moments. Waking moments often pale in comparison, but as I look back upon the images, thoughts and feelings experienced during long sleep-filled nights after physical and emotional exhaustion, I reflect on the dreamworld experiences I had with my mother, the things she wanted to tell me, and the comfort she wanted to offer after a time of great loss and sadness. I don’t think you have to believe in an afterlife, a spirit, or soul that lives on to appreciate what I write. Take what you want from it, even if you think I created these things in my own subconscious to comfort myself. Either way, my heart’s sorrow is lessened and I have a renewed faith in the boundless soul in each of us that is connected to what Native Americans call the Great Spirit, or what I like to call the Source of Being.

The first dream came to me as I finally slept on the night after my mother’s passing. I’m not sure exactly what happened in the dream, but I remember my mother’s face looking at me. She was as I remember as a child when she was in her late forties – a riant smile and a big nest of gray and white hair. I was born late when my parents were forty. I didn’t know my mom in her blonde bombshell 20s and 30s. I do remember walking into the bathroom after she finished fixing her hair. I was embraced by the foggy, lingering fumes from the industrial strength, value-sized, mega can of Aqua Net hairspray. Between my three sisters and mom, the can lasted about a week. On the refrigerator door was posted my mom’s weekly shopping list: chicken, ground beef, frozen corn, peas, Aqua Net. When I woke up from that first dream I felt better, a bit of relief being stoked in the fires of the sadness that burned white-hot inside me.

The second dream was a lot of fun. My mom, during her expansive lifetime, was renowned far and wide as an avid shopper. Avid is an understatement. She was the Mario Andretti, the Indiana Jones, the Michael Jordan of shoppers. She appeared to me and said, “I wanna go shopping one more time.” The clanging bell of truth and humor rang out and suddenly we were in an endless mall filled with death-defying escalators that reached up unknown heights and levels of shopping bliss.

My mom never moved so fast in her life. It was as if she was on jet-propelled rollerskates. I had difficulty keeping up with her as we buzzed around to various shops. She helped me pick out a pair of pants and a shirt to match. We stepped into a vast Barnes and Noblesque bookstore and filled our cart with voluminous books.

In the third night’s dream I found myself in an almost empty room except for a table on which an moldering rotary phone rested. It rang. I picked it up and proffered a feeble “hello”.

“It’s Mommy,” the voice said over the static.

“Hi, Mommy.”

“I’m very…far away right now, Timmie…I can’t be with you right now…but I want you to know that I’m okay…everything is all right…don’t worry about me…I’ll always be with you…always.”

We talked for a while, but I can’t remember what our conversation entailed. I wish I could. I can only say that, again, I felt a deeper sense of peace about her passing. She told me she was happy, not to worry about her, that she was with me no matter what.

Before the fourth dream I talked with my childhood friend Brandi. She and her family moved to California when we were both in first grade. We’ve been in contact ever since and occasionally visit each other. Her mother died of cancer several years ago so she can empathize with me. I called her to talk about my mom’s passing – we hadn’t spoken yet since Mommy died – and she shook my world by telling me about her sister Michelle’s dream.

I must preface her dream with the fact that Michelle knew nothing of my mother’s imminent death. The night before my mom died Michelle dreamt that my mom was in our old house in New Jersey, sitting at a huge table in the dining room. Michelle remarked to Brandi that the house was bigger than the one she remembered as a teenager before they moved, but that it was definitely our house. Mommy looked beautiful, radiant, and was celebrating with many people, eating, laughing, the center of attention at a banquet that I can only infer was a celebration feast of my mother’s life.

Michelle has had dreams of other people before their deaths, so it only makes sense that her sensitivity and receptiveness to this was picked up by my mom. In her own way, Mommy was letting me know that her death was a time for celebration, not sadness, and for this I am grateful.

In the fourth dream, I woke up inside my dream and saw Mommy standing at the end of the bed. She had no semblance of a physical shape, though. She was a blazing, pulsating light, alternating between shades of white, yellow, and orange. The vague shape of a body was discernable inside the light and I knew it was my mom.

I called out to her and she said, “Don’t be scared. Every person that dies has the responsibility to come back when their loved ones die to help them, to guide them through their transition from death into a new life. I’ll be there when you die.” With that she floated above my bed and then I woke up.

Upon my return to school after Spring Break, one of my favorite teachers at Grace gave me a book that helped her when her mother died. The book is titled On Life After Death. It’s written by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the pioneer of hospice care and the foremost researcher of thousands of near-death experiences. She writes, “It is interesting to me as a psychiatrist that thousands of people around the globe should share the same ‘hallucinations’ prior to death, namely the awareness of some relatives or friends who preceded them in death.” She goes on to cite examples of people involved in accidents who didn’t know their loved ones were dead, but saw them in their near-death experiences. She also points out that although 99% of terminally ill children when asked who they would want to see when they die respond “mommy or daddy”, they never see them because their parents aren’t dead. It’s always a loved one or friend that’s died before them that appears to comfort them.

My mom’s appeared in a few dreams here and there since that fourth one. She’s simply there with me either going out to dinner in one dream, or climbing up a steep rocky slope, me helping to push her up. I did have a dream last night that I thought was extraordinary: My mom and I were in a mammoth park and as we walked there were various large symbols cut into the landscape – mandalas from Tibet, the flower of life, Celctic designs. My mom turned to me and said, “Isn’t this wonderful?! All these symbols from all traditions and religions together in one place?!”

There used to be a time when people believed in a life after death, in a heaven. Then there came a time when this belief waned. I feel like we’ve returned to a time when at least the belief in our infinite spirits has been reignited. The word “spirituality” is thrown around quite easily nowadays like a basketball, but Kubler-Ross sums up the word more beautifully and succinctly then I could ever write: “Spirituality is an awareness that there is something far greater than we are, something that created this universe, created life, and that we are an authentic, important, significant part of it, and can contribute to its evolution.” Brilliant.

It’s not my goal to prove to you that these dreams were real. Well, maybe real isn’t the right word. How about that my mother’s communication with me, her presence in my dreams, was enough? It was for me. The dreams were for me and I only share them now because I don’t want to forget them; by writing about them I won’t lose them. They are a part of me forever and if ever I do forget I can look back on this little ditty and say, “Yes, it did happen, and Mommy’s spirit is ‘alive’ and well. She’ll be there for me when I die.” And in that, I find an eternal peace that passeth all understanding. I fear my own death a bit less knowing that she’ll be there to guide me through my own magnificent transcendence. My transformation will not be on my own. For all that have gone, for all that will die, we will never be alone when we die, no matter if we’re in the Mojave Desert, an icy cave, or on a mountaintop in Nepal. A loved one will be there to help you make the great transition back to your own source of being. Amen.

Sailboat in the Cellar - Part Two

Mommy and her father with the boat he built in the basement.

(This is the last half of a short story based on a true story. The only true thing is the fact that my maternal grandfather built a boat in the basement of the family house. My mom remembered it and told me what happened. I’m currently working on a novel about the experience, but it’s about a father and son building a boat. I wanted to write a story about a father and daughter. It’s an exercise in writing, like a pianist doing his B-flat minor scales, a painter throwing acrylics on a blank canvas, a sculptor sinking her fingers into a soft piece of clay…Tim.)



“Why are you crying?” asked Evie. “What’s wrong?”

“I hate my friends.”

“Well,” Evie said, “if you hate them, then they probably don’t deserve to be your friends.”

“They said Pappa’s crazy, that he’s dumb for building the stupid boat.”

Evie held Elsie close to her and rubbed her shoulders. The big sister, she did her best to do what her mother would have done.

The neatly-appointed, but austere kitchen was imbued with the smell of simmering chicken soup – their mother’s recipe. Glen Miller’s In the Mood suddenly rang out from the kitchen radio.

“Let’s dance,” Evie suggested.

Elsie put her feet on her sister’s and the two jitter-bugged, turning and gliding around the room like two ballerinas that popped up when a jewelry box is opened.

Klara walked into the kitchen, home from school, and asked. “It’s getting around town pretty fast.”

Evie and Elsie stopped dancing.

“What is?” asked Evie.

“Dad and the boat. I got an earful today. Even one of my teachers asked me about it.”

“Who?” asked Evie.

“Mr. Wigglesworth.”

“I never liked him anyway. He doesn’t know history from a hole in a ground.”

“That’s just about what I told him, so he sent me to the office.”

Evie sat on the vinyl kitchen chair and pulled Elsie onto her knee. “Are people talking in town?”

Klara laid down her books and poured a glass of milk. “I overheard Mrs. Perkins in the candy shop talking to Mrs. Bartholomew about it.”

“Then it’ll be all over town by tomorrow,” Evie sighed.

“What will be?” Primus asked.

The three girls turned around, startled to see their father at the top of the cellar steps, sandpaper in hand.

“Pappa,” Evie said. “Where did you come from?”

“I got home an hour ago. I finished da new wall for da Lippincotts early. What’s wrong? What will be all over town by tomorrow?”

Elsie jumped down from Evie’s lap and screamed, “Your stupid boat, your dumb boat in a bottle that you’ll never get out of here, that’s what!”

She threw her arms against her sides and ran out like a gale force wind.

*****

“Do you really think I’m dumb?” Primus asked.

Elsie lay back on her bed and looked up at the ceiling, avoiding her father’s steely gaze. “Sometimes,” she said.

Primus sat down on the edge of the bed so that it shifted to the right. Elsie held her body tight so as not to move with it.

“Do you really think I’m dumb?” he asked again.

Elsie let out a long exhale. “No, Pappa, you’re the smartest person I know.”

“Then why do you listen to your friends?”

“Because I can’t get away from them.”

“That’s not the same as not listening to them.”

Elsie pushed herself up on her elbows. “You mean ignore them?”

“You could try.”

“You try.”

Primus nodded. “I’m sorry they’re so mean.” He pulled out a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket, put it to his mouth and lit it. He exhaled a long plume of smoke and asked, “Do you know why I’m doing this, why I’m building this ship in a bottle as you call it?”

Elsie sat up in a cross-legged position. “No, why?”

He tapped the ash into his hand. “Your mother wanted a boat.”

“Really?”

“Really. And I never built one for her. I taught it was dumb, stupid, to build a boat that I would never sail in. ‘Why should I do it?’ I asked her. ‘Because you can,’ she said. I can build a boat, Little Elsie, and that’s why I’m doing it: because I can.”

“What’ll you do with it?” she asked.

He took a long drag from the cigarette. The gray smoke hung over Elsie’s head like a still winter cloud she had observed over the schoolyard earlier that day.

“Sell it.”

Elsie sat up straight. “Sell it? You can’t sell it. It’s yours. You made it.”

“And it’s mine to do with as I please.”

“Don’t you want to ride in it? We could sail down the coast and visit all the beaches in the summer.”

“That would be fun,” Primus conceded. “But I don’t like boats. I don’t like the water. I’ll never sail again.”

“Don’t like boats?! Don’t like the water?!” Elsie threw her head back against the pillow and laughed for the first time since her mother had died. She couldn’t stop laughing. Evie and Klara walked in and asked what was so funny. Primus shrugged his shoulders. They watched as Elsie laughed, doubled over, bouncing on her bed. Soon, the girls, and even Primus, were laughing.

*****

“What are you doing now?” Little Elsie asked.

Primus popped his head up from the stern of the boat. “What is this, Little Elsie? I like radio quiz show, but from my daughter?”

“I wanna know.”

Primus scratched his head with the pointy end of the hammer and said, “I build the transom and glue it.”

Elsie picked at a dried piece of pancake batter on her doll’s face. “What’s the transom?”

Primus stood up and stretched with a sigh. “Evie!”

Evie immediately appeared at the top of the stairs. “Yes, Pappa?”

“How’s about a cup?”

“It’s brewing.”

“What’s a transom?” Elsie repeated.

Primus walked over to the step and sat down below his daughter.

Amanda of Honeymoon Hill, a daily radio soap, played on the radio. Even though Primus disparaged the soaps, he never missed an episode of Amanda.

"We bring you now,” the announcer’s clear voice uttered, “the story of Amanda of Honeymoon Hill…laid in a world few Americans know.”

Primus always laughed after this opening announcement and Elsie never knew why. He composed himself and replied, “The transom is da planked area of da stern.”

“What’s the stern?”

“Da back of da boat. Da bow is front, da port is left, da starboard right. Förstå du?”

“Huh?”

“You understand? Repeat it.”

Elsie flung the piece of pancake batter on the floor. “The stern is back, the bow is front, the port is left, the starboard right.”

“Riktig. Now…let me build in peace.”

Evie brought down the coffee.

“How’s it going, Pappa?”

“Would be better if Little Elsie wasn’t quizmaster.”

“Elsie,” Evie said admonishingly.

“I wanna know what he’s doing. What’s wrong with dat?”

Evie let out a tremulous laugh, glanced at her father with a raised brow and walked back up the stairs.

A sudden knocking on the metal cellar doors.

Primus carried his cup of coffee over to the step that led up the doors. He took a step up, turned the latch, and pushed up on one door.

“Primus!” a voice bellowed.

Elsie saw that it was their neighbor, Mr. Tomlinson. He tipped his grey fedora and took the pipe from his mouth. The smell of cherry tobacco wafted across the basement on the frigid February air. Elsie sniffed.

“Ja, Milton, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Tomlinson said, stretching his neck down to take a peek at the boat. “What is it?”

“It’s a boat.”

“So we’ve heard.”

“We’ve?”

“Everyone in the neighborhood, Primus. What do you think you’re doing?”

“What does it look like.”

“It looks like you’re building a boat.”

"You're pretty smart."

Elsie walked to the door and peered up.

“Little Elsie,” said Mr. Tomlinson, tipping his hat once again. “What’s your pa up to?”

“Just what he said,” Elsie said obstinately.

“That’s nice, real nice, Primus, but how the heck you gonna get it out?”

Primus sipped his coffee. Mr. Tomlinson looked like he wanted to be invited down, but Primus wouldn’t have it.

Answer him, thought Elsie. For cryin’ out loud, answer him or they’ll all think you’re crazy.

Primus took another sip and narrowed his eyes. “For me to know, for you to find out.”

Mr. Tomlinson guffawed.

“Anything else?” asked Primus.

Mr. Tomlinson shook his head and walked away. “Nothin’ else, Primus, nothin’ else.”

Elsie was sure she heard him mutter, "Crazy Swede."

*****

During the next few weeks, Elsie did her best to avoid the children’s stares and chiding at school, along with the neighbors and townsfolk who watched the Martinson family with curious eyes. On the street, in the grocery store, in the soda shop, everyone was talking, and they were conversing loudly enough when the children or Primus were around so that their gossip was plainly overheard. Primus appeared immune to the talk, saying nothing about it, but the girls had a tougher time.

Neighbors and busybodies would stop by once in a while, knocking on the front door, asking how everything was going, was there anything they could do, were the children all right, a guise of transparent concern, their ulterior motive curious derision.

Once, a local newspaperman showed up in a wool coat and brown herringbone tweed suit. He wanted a story on Primus and the boat. The girls were stunned when their father agreed to the interview. He told the man about his wife, that he was building it for her, and that yes, he did know how he was going to get the behemoth out of the basement, but nobody would know until they saw it sitting in the backyard free from it’s basement prison. The story ran the next week and after that, nobody bothered the Martinson family anymore.

As Primus worked away during the nights and weekends, the radio singing, Little Elsie watched, asking questions now and then, but becoming more silent as time and the progress of the boat continued passing on to the moment when Primus would somehow have to extricate the boat from the cellar.

Side planks were placed, the keel and skeg were attached. Primus explained to Elsie that the keel is the plank running fore-and-aft on the bottom of the boat that ties the bottom planks together. “It gives da boat directional stability when moving through water,” he said.

“What’s the skeg do?”

“Helps direct da boat, too. It’s da fin underneath the boat, like a fish.”

On a bitterly cold Saturday, the girls helped Primus turn the boat right side up. They watched as their father used wedges and blocks to stabilize the boat so that it wouldn’t twist on the sawhorses.

“It looks like a real boat,” Little Elsie said, awestruck. She ran her hands down the smoothly-sanded side planks. It was the one thing her father allowed her to do to help out – sand the planks. He had shown her how to use the sandpaper to take out all the little inconsistencies in the wood so that it was, as he said, “smooth as your mother’s peaches and cream face.”

Evie and Klara circled the boat and admired their father’s handiwork. It didn’t seem possible to any of them, except to Primus, that there was a boat sitting there before them, taking up almost every inch of basement.

“What’s next?” asked Klara.

Primus scratched his head. “Da seat frames and a riser to hold dem up.”

“How many seats?” Little Elsie asked. She had held true to a secret hope that before her father sold the boat he would take it out for a test run and she, Elsie, would sit in the bow, salt air dampening her hair, the sun wanting desperately to dry the water that splashed into the boat from the assailing waves. In the stern, Primus would sit, guiding the boat over the grey Atlantic waters, smiling at his daughter with eyes that said yes, it was good, and that yes, they would keep this boat.

“One seat in the bow,” Primus replied, “one in the stern, and a long bench across the middle.”

“That could hold all of us,” Elsie said.

“It could, but it won’t, Little Elsie,” Primus said firmly.

Elsie seethed. It’s our boat, she thought, it’s ours, ours, ours! She threw her doll against the port side. The head broke off once again, and once again she traipsed up the stairs with heavy, livid feet.

*****

“What do you want, Little Elsie? What do you want that I should do?” asked Primus as he sat on the bed, his hand on his daughter’s.

“I want that you should keep da boat," she huffed.

“I cannot. I will not. I will never sail again.”

“But why?”

“I told you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want.”

Primus lit a cigarette and exhaled the weighted smoke over the bed. Elsie regarded the cigarette longingly, thinking it looked like the mast of a ship, and the smoke a swirling ocean.

*****

A Saturday morning in March. Elsie woke, rubbed her eyes, and looked out the window to see snow lying on the branches of the tree outside, sparkling in the early morning sun that graced its rays upon the scene.

The house quiet. Her sisters slept. Her father was probably in the basement.

Elsie opened the refrigerator door, grabbed the glass jug of milk and poured some into her mom’s favorite bone china tea cup. She walked to the back door, sipping her drink, and looked out to the sparse backyard. Was it real? Was it true? Is it a dream or am I still in bed?

There in the yard, sitting on sturdy planks, was the sailboat, free from the confines of the cellar - liberated. Standing by was Primus, hands on hips, walking around it as if it was the most normal thing to find in one’s backyard on a Saturday morning.

Elsie ran out in her pajamas and screamed, “You did it! You did it!”



Primus smiled a rare smile and nodded. “You didn’t think I could.”

“I never knew how.”

“Well,” Primus said, pointing towards the back of the house with his cigarette, “now you know how.”

Elsie turned and suddenly realized that her father wasn’t crazy, in fact, he was truly the smartest man in the world. Nobody was smarter. Nobody could have guessed. Nobody would ever impress her more. She couldn't wait until the neighbors woke up and swarmed around the boat, flabbergasted.

Where there used to be part of the concrete foundation of the house was a hole that was the exact width of the boat, a few inches to spare.

The black Buick Century sedan was parked on the grass behind the boat.

The realization washed over her like warm, comforting ocean wave on a hot summer’s day. It all made sense. Everything. She had no more questions.

“You knocked out the cellar wall,” Elsie said.

“Ja.”

“You dug a ramp up from the hole.”

“Ja.”

“You pulled the boat out up the dirt ramp with the car!”

“Ja. How else could I do it? I wanted to build a boat for your mother and I always wanted to have an indoor garage. I got both. It’s good, ja?”

Primus smiled again. Elsie regarded the wrinkles around his eyes as he handed her the doll – the head returned once again to its neck.

“It’s good, ja?” he asked again.

“Ja,” Elsie said, holding the doll close to her face, shivering as a March wind blew across the yard. It was okay. Ja. Jo.

Sailboat in the Cellar - Part One

(This short story is based on a true story. The only true thing is the fact that my maternal grandfather built a boat in the basement of the family house. My mom remembered it and told me what happened. I’m currently working on a novel about the experience, but it’s about a father and son building a boat. I wanted to write a story about a father and daughter. It’s an exercise in writing, like a pianist doing his B-flat minor scales, a painter throwing acrylics on a blank canvas, a sculptor sinking her fingers into a soft piece of clay…Tim.)

He never said much. He said even less after his wife was inexorably eaten alive by cancer. The children and he watched until she finally drifted into unconsciousness and went to the place that mommies go when they die.

Did he say so little because he was Swedish? thought Little Elsie. But then, her dad’s Swedish friends were gregarious. They smoked filterless cigarettes with their yellow-tipped fingers and drank beer and laughed at jokes she didn’t understand. They rarely spoke politics, but when they did it was with reverence for Roosevelt. They spoke of their sons, especially Mr. Holquist whose boy drove a tank in North Africa against Rommel’s stolid force. No, she thought, it’s just Pappa. To an eight-year old girl, he could do nothing wrong.

His wife and he had three girls. The last one, Elsie, was born in 1932 in Glassboro, New Jersey when both happily surprised parents were 42-years old.

Little Elsie didn’t mind having older parents. Her father’s hair receded over a furrowed brow and the wrinkles around his eyes shot out across the sides of his face like a spider’s web. Her parents were older, yes, but she was aware that she could get away with things her sisters couldn’t when they were her age.

Perhaps because he was the firstborn of eight children or maybe because he grew up in a patriarchal society (or was it simply because of his nature?), but whatever the reason, Primus assumed he would have at least one boy in his lifetime.

Primus Viktor Svenson. Son of a fisherman in Hällaryd, Sweden. His father, Martin, was a harsh, vindictive, physically and emotionally abusive man. Primus’s mother was a stoic Lutheran, so much so that he never picked up a Bible after leaving Sweden.

“Da house always smelled of fish,” Primus once told Elsie. “I hate fish. Dat’s why Mamma never cooks fish.”

Because of his father, 17-year old Primus ran away and immigrated to America where, on Ellis Island, his surname was changed to Martinson because he was the son of Martin Svenson. The immigration officer said, “There’s enough Svensons running around this country.”

Primus’s father died in 1923. Primus heard two weeks after the fact. He never shed a tear.

Little Elsie – “Little” because her mother was “Big” and there is no junior addendum to a girl’s name – knew all about this because her father, when he felt particularly talkative during his nightly beer by the radio, in between commercials, would share the story of his life, his journey, his dreams.

*****

“What are you doing?” asked Elsie. She ran her hand over the rough wood planks stacked on the cellar floor. A tiny splinter entered her pinky. She sucked on it until it came out, unwillingly. Damp and musty down there, Elsie hugged herself to fight off the consuming chill.

“Building a båt.”

“A what?”

Primus scratched his head. “A boat.” He and his wife had agreed not to teach their children Swedish. In America they wanted their girls to speak English and nothing else.

Elsie pulled at her blonde braids and let out a little bleat of a laugh. What else could she do after hearing something as preposterous as building a boat in the basement? Her father never said something he didn’t mean, so she knew he was serious.

“Down here?” she asked.

“Down here. It’s winter. It’s cold out and warm inside. No snow or rain. No wind inside.”

Elsie loved his accent and was never embarrassed when neighborhood children made fun of it. He was different, unique; nobody sounded like Primus, and for that she never lowered her chin in chagrin.

“But how?” she asked.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “I measured. It’ll fit.”

Elsie shook her head and swung her doll in the air. “No, no, I mean, how are you going to build it? How do you know how to build a boat?”

“I was a fisherman. I built boats with my father when I was young. It takes brains and time. I’ve got some brains, but a lot of time, so I hope time will make up for the brains. I built dis house, no?”

Elsie stamped her foot on the concrete floor. “But why? I don’t understand.”

Primus shook his head slowly and walked towards the stairs. “Why doesn’t matter. Why is a silly question. Why did your mother die? Why did dis happen, why did dat? Why do we do anything? Why is a stupid word and anyone who uses it is stupid.” With that he walked up the stairs.

Elsie threw her doll at the stack of wood. It bounced and landed on the cold floor. Its head broke off and rolled towards the stairs. She picked up the pieces and brushed them off, sighing a young girl’s sigh that says to anyone listening: I don’t understand.

Upstairs she heard the radio announce the beginning of World News Round-Up. Edward R. Murrow reported from London with a tobacco-filled voice that Elsie thought was mesmerizing.

She ran up the creaky stairs, into the living room, and sat on the floor between Primus’s legs as Murrow began his report on the current London Blitz. She held onto her father’s loose wool trousers as German bombs dropping on London echoed through the meager living room.

Primus reached down and took the doll and its head from Elsie’s hands. “Let’s see what we have here.” He tried to fit the head back into the neck socket. “She’s a tough little ting.”

Elsie looked up at her father. She could hear her sister, Evie, cooking busily in the kitchen while plates clinked together as Klara set the table.

“Are you going to fish in it, like when you were little?” Elsie asked.

Primus stuck out his lips and pushed the glasses up from the end of his nose. “Hate fishing. Always did. Father made me do it. Had to for money.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“With da boat? Don’t know.”

“Can we go sailing in it?”

“Don’t know.”

“How you going to get it out?”

“No idea.”

Elsie grinned. She knew her father well enough to know that there was always a reason for everything he did. There was no chance for randomness; no room for the unexpected. Perhaps that’s why his wife’s death took him by surprise. It never entered his reality as a possibility, therefore, he never thought of it, never spoke of it. If he thought of it, how could he talk about it? Not talking about it was better than admitting it – that was his rationale. And if he did none of these, then his wife couldn’t have died. Any emotions remained bottled up inside the man.

*****

“My pappa’s building a boat,” Elsie told her friends Cookie and Edna.

“Huh?” they both said.

The girls stood in the vestibule of the one-room schoolhouse and hung up their little coats on pegs. Elsie pulled at the one wool dress she had. Clothing had been rationed in the last year. Nothing new was to be produced or bought. Every resource was going towards the war. She had more spring and summer dresses. She longed for the warmer seasons.

Elsie stuffed her stocking cap into the sleeve of her coat. “He’s building a huge ship and we’re going to sail on it to Sweden.”

Cookie eyes her dubiously. “The German U-boats will blow you out of the water.”

“No they won’t,” Elsie said. “It’s going to be fast. Nothing will catch us.”

“You dad knows how to build a boat?” Cookie asked.

“Yep, he was a fisherman and he and his dad built boats for all the fishermen in Sweden.”

Cookie laughed. “All of them?”

“Yep, and he’s already started on it.”

“He’s crazy. It’s too cold out,” Edna said, pulling down her blouse collar.

“He’s building it in our basement.”

“Now I know he’s crazy,” Edna declared.

“He is not crazy!” shouted Elsie.

“Wait’ll everyone here’s this one,” said Cookie.

*****

“The kids at school think you’re crazy,” Elsie said as her father wiped away the little bit of caked blood on her lip.

He threw the washcloth on the floor. “Who hit you? I want to know now.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Elsie said. She thought that she had already caused enough trouble for herself at school; she didn’t need to be ostracized anymore for being a tattle-tail.

“It does matter if someone hits a little flicka like you.”

Elsie knew enough Swedish from listening to her parents to understand the word “flicka”.

“It was another little flicka and I probably deserved it.”

“You told them what I was doing?”

“Yes.”

“You talk too much, you say too much. You brag. It’s none of people’s business. You keep to yourself. You say nothing about this, you understand?”

“Yes, Pappa,” Elsie sighed.

*****

The frame of the boat had quickly taken shape. It was bigger than Elsie imagined. It displaced everything from the basement, taking up every inch of space. Primus stored everything – except the wood and tools – in the outside shed.

Elsie sat on the cellar steps. She held her doll and stroked the hair on its head, which had been returned to its former graceful neck.

Primus had brought down the portable radio from his bedroom so he could work and listen uninterrupted. The opening theme of The Adventures of Superman blasted across the diminutive speakers. The show was new and came from New York City’s WOR, sponsored by Kellogg’s.

“Dis is a good show,” Primus said. “You like it?”

Elsie nodded.

“I like superheroes, day can do anyting,” he said ruefully.

The announcer rallied around the microphone and rattled off the opening that would soon become familiar: “Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound! Look ! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!”

Elsie watched as Primus fit each long plank along the long frame so that the form of a boat began to appear before her eyes.

“How are you going to get it out?” she asked.

Primus nailed a plank onto the frame and then cut off the access. He planed the ends so that they appeared seamless. “Don’t know.”

Elsie glared. “You do, too. Tell me.”

“Can’t tell something I don’t know.”

“Pappa!”

“How would you get it out?” he asked as he laid the last plank along the port side of the frame.

When she thought her father wasn’t looking, she stuck out her tongue at him.

“Use your tongue for talking not sticking out.”

Elsie groaned. “I don’t know how I’d get it out. I probably wouldn’t have built it down here in the first place.”

“You don’t know how because you don’t tink.”

Tink, tink, tink! You tink about it!

He asked again.

Elsie said, “I guess I’d take it apart in pieces and put it back together again outside.”

“Too much work. You make it complicated.”

“But it is!”

“It’s not complicated. Very simple.”

Elsie crossed her arms. “So, you do know.”

Primus shrugged. “No, but it can’t be difficult. Give me another solution.”

Elsie tapped her feet on the step and thought, How would I do it? “It’s too big for the cellar doors.”

“Ja, jo, doors too small.”

Elsie smiled, “You could fill up the cellar with water.”

“I could also put fish in the water and never have to leave the house to fish, but I hate fishing. Bad idea.”

“You could keep filling it up with water until the top of the house floated off.”

“Good idea. I’ll do it.”

*****

“How’s your dumb dad gonna get it out?” asked Oscar Jenkins, his big ears sticking out from under his wool hunting cap.

“Yeah,” said his partner in crime, Steve Bonino. “It’s ship in a bottle. He’ll never get it out.”

Cookie and Edna laughed as they all followed Elsie down Zane Street towards the Martinson house.

“He will too get it out!” Elsie shouted. “He’s not dumb!”

“I wanna see it,” Oscar demanded.

“Me, too,” Steve said.

Elsie stopped and turned to face them. “No, you don’t deserve to see it.”

“I bet there is no boat,” Edna said. “I bet you just made it all up.”

Cookie shook her head. “That’d be just like her.”

“I’m not lying!”

“Oh yeah,” Cookie said, “how about that time you told us your mom –.” Cookie looked down at her shoes.

The children were silent.

Elsie turned and walked away.

Home Again, Home Again: Part 6

(This is the last entry of my journal during my mom’s transformation. I’m sure there will be further thoughts and meanderings about the experience to come over the next year. I know that I want to write about the dreams in which my mom has visited me; they are important and like Brahms’s Requiem, they give comfort to those who are left to mourn…Tim.)

Saturday, March 8, 2008
9:02am
Kathy, Daddy and I are sitting with Mommy right now. We’ve been up for 29 hours. It’s horrible. It’s incredible. Yesterday, she was in a coma for 12 hours, but then, suddenly at 4:30am, she opened her eyes wide and smiled. We called to Sandy, who rushed in immediately from the kitchen, chewing on a cinnamon bun. Mommy was back for perhaps the last time. There was no way to know if this was it: the end.

We talked with Mommy, said we loved her, told her it was all right to move on, to go if she wanted to go. I whispered in her ear: “I love you.” Her half-opened eyes, like a mist has set over them, looked into mine. What was she thinking? What does the mind think while dying? She replied in two short breaths: “Love you.”

I whispered again in her ear: “It’s all right to go, we’re going to miss you, but this is a happy time. We’re sad because you’re leaving, but we’re happy because of the transition you’re making. If you see a light or angels go towards them.”

Is she hearing what we’re saying? I think she can because sometimes she’ll respond. She’s gotten to the point that yes is an almost inaudible “uh-huh” and a no is “uh-uh”. She’s been mumbling, too. I wish to God I knew what she was saying.

We were thrilled and excited and scared. My heart was beating against my sweater as a racehorse’s nearing the finish line might. My face was hot. Was this it – the moment she was going to die? It was exhilarating as I saw an awareness in her eyes; they told me that everything was okay. Part of her was there, shining out through her eyes to us, gleaming from her smile, telling us that it was all right. I thought the magnificent time for complete transition had come. She was leaving. We were bawling, laughing, crying our “love yous”. I’ll never forget it, and all those heart wrenching, gruesome, indescribable moments that are a part of life and death were coming to a climax at this time, building, but they were belayed by the magical moment when she smiled, said I loved you, eyes glowing bright.

That moment of consciousness, the brief glimpse of our mother out of her coma wasn’t the first and last one. During a few hours she came out of her deep sleep two more times with bright eyes, sparkling. Three times we were given the gift of mommy’s consciousness, her awareness that we were there and that she could hear us and respond mostly with only her smile and eyes. I truly understand now how the eyes can speak because my mom’s eyes said many inexpressible things to me, words that escape me right now because they’re inexplicable feelings that only I can know as a son.

After the third time, she fell into another very deep sleep. Her chest gurgled like water going down a bathtub drain for twelve hours. It scared us. It was a horrible sound that came two times in a row every thirty seconds. Although I didn’t want to leave the bedside – none of us did – the incessant, almost interminable sound of her breath was like sandpaper being rubbed across my eardrums. At one point, terrible as it sounds, I wanted her to pass just so I wouldn’t have to listen to it anymore. It’s selfish and I hate that I thought that, but I did. It’s over. It’s been thought. I’ve apologized and let it go. I don’t know what else to do.

Her breaths have slowed down now. They’re short, shallow, a little cough now and then. Cindy’s holding her hand. She’s having a terribly difficult time with it.

I have a real peace right now, although that doesn’t mean I don’t cry. The peace came days ago and it has remained steadfast and true. I feel a presence with me, a comforting hand. Perhaps it’s my mom’s and her angels.

Twenty-six hours by her bedside. No sleep. I know we don’t have to do this, I know there’s no obligation, that it’s something Mommy wouldn’t necessarily want us to do because she’d want us not to bother; she’d want us to be in our beds sleeping peacefully.

Daddy’s kissing her hand right now. He lays his head down on the pillow next to her head. Right now we’re not really talking loud every time she opens her eyes. We feel that we’re keeping her up. We’ve said everything we wanted to say – I love you, you’re precious, you’re an angel. Everything.

She’s a fighter. A stubborn Swede.

5:12pm
It stormed here this afternoon – thunder lightning and rain that overflowed in the gutters, streaming down like mini waterfalls past the windows. It suddenly cleared and the sun came out across the patchwork, quilt-like patterns of green, russet, and copper-colored fields. Kathy stood up and said, “I wish there would be a rainbow.” She went to the kitchen sink and later, after what happened next, she told us that a voice inside of her said, “Kathy, look for the rainbow.” She walked back into the bedroom, but couldn’t see a rainbow through the window. Sandy felt compelled by something (a voice again, perhaps my mom’s, an angel’s, God’s?) to turn around and when she did, at her viewing angle through the window she saw something. She screamed, “A double rainbow!”

It was a miracle, a blessing, and it was for my mom. Nobody will ever tell me otherwise. As she lay there gurgling each breath, turning ashen, veins starting to pop out across her legs and face (an almost marbling affect like the hospice nurse said would happen, a telltale sign that the end was drawing closer), her feet grey; there she was and outside were two rainbow arcs of shimmering colors, one on top of the other, filling the sky outside our house from one end of the horizon to another. I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life and I wonder if I ever will.

The experiences of the last few days have been underscored and brought to a magnanimous denouement by this breathtaking appearance of a natural phenomenon with clear spiritual overtones. It’s made me think: What is a rainbow? It’s God’s promise after the Great Flood in the Bible that the world would never again be destroyed by a deluge. In Greek mythology, the rainbow was considered to be a path made by a messenger between Earth and Heaven. In Norse Mythology, a rainbow called the Bifröst Bridge connects the realms of Ásgard and Midgard, homes of the gods and humans.

In literature, the rainbow inspires metaphor and simile. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf highlights the transience of life and Man's mortality through Mrs. Ramsey's thought, "it was all as ephemeral as a rainbow." Wordsworth's poem "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold The Rainbow" begins:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!…

Throughout the Tibetan Buddhist advanced practices of Dzogchen (the natural, primordial state or natural condition of every sentient being), accomplished practitioners can bring their lives to an extraordinary and triumphant end. As they die, they enable their body to be reabsorbed back into the light essence of the elements that created it, and consequently their material body dissolves into light and disappears completely. This process is known as the "rainbow body" or "body of light", because the dissolution is often accompanied by spontaneous manifestations of light and rainbows.

My mom’s body hasn’t died and transformed into rainbow light – perhaps her spirit has, though? – but the rainbow was there and I think it was for her, for us, to know that there is a promise of transcendence after death, that life and death and beauty and ugliness are inseparable, that unseen colors which suddenly appear in a rainbow after a storm are around us all the time; they are there to remind us that the our source of Being is intact and will take care of us in life and death. We don’t have to fear either one.

After the rainbow, a terrific wind tore across the hill. Trashcans and lids on the side of the house launched into the air. I love wind, so I threw on a coat, slipped on my sister’s diminutive clogs, and ran outside. I wanted to feel the force of it ripping through my hair, striking my face, sending my shouts high up into the ozone. I felt like the wind was blowing my burdens away, lifting the sorrow and pain off my shoulders and sending it all back into the universe. It was a cleansing that I needed, like how a shower feels after not having one for a week.

A trashcan lid flew over my head, up into the air like a paper plate and almost hit the hospice nurse’s car as she pulled up. It flew down the road out of sight. My dad ran out of the house and looked up at the roof. “We’re losing shingles!” he shouted. And so we were. The fierce wind tore a handful of shingles right out by the nails, gusting up to what we thought was probably fifty miles per hour.

My mom is going out with all the forces of nature being conjured by her and God. What a great pair they are. Mommy has always had a sense of the dramatic and good timing from all the movies she watched while growing up. Her mom let her go to the movies three times a week in the summers. Whenever we screened an old film, Mommy had inevitably seen it and always had some vague recollection of it. Mommy: cinematic to the end.

8:21pm
It started raining again, storming terribly.

Jan, the hospice nurse, said that Mommy’s death is imminent. “Really imminent… like tonight,” she sighed. Yep. My mama’s body is going to die tonight. I don’t really feel like her soul is here anymore. Her spirit left on the rainbow, the last bit rode it out, and it’s all well. I’m happy she’s gone, free, and that her body will soon expire. I’m sad that I won’t get to laugh with my mom anymore, hold her hand, kiss her on the cheek, have her throw me one of those knowing smiles from across a room that said everything was okay. It is okay, it’s just so indubitably crazy.

Sunday, March 9, 2008
2:42am
The storm has stopped. The lights went out for an hour, so we lit oil lanterns and placed them around the bedroom. The oil light basked the room in a warm glow that was a comfort. We felt like pioneers on the prairie, sitting vigil by oil lamps, singing songs like a royal hootenanny, and talking to Mommy because we knew she could hear us. Mommy always loved the oil lanterns lit.

I feel this is our last night’s vigil around my mom’s bed. This isn’t just because I feel it in my heart, but also because my brother-in-law the doctor, Nick, came up this evening. He was a welcomed, calming influence on the night’s events. We were thankful for his professional, but also endearing, presence. He loves Mommy dearly. A second generation Italian who doesn’t always express his emotions, he was teary-eyed as he sat with us, checking her pulse, heart rate, her breathing, assuring us that physical death for Mommy was coming tonight or tomorrow morning.

We were all there, including Cindy. Daddy sat by Mommy’s head, stroking her cheeks, whispering “I love yous” in her ear, kissing her now and then.

Mommy now has to have morphine every three hours instead of four. I’ve become the unknowing minister of morphine because everyone else besides my dad has passed out on the floor. I’m sitting here with him. He nods off every few minutes. My laptop is in my lap and I’m writing about all this because I don’t want to forget. I want a written record of what’s happening so that my memory doesn’t try to imagine things that happened or romanticize the experience.

Cindy’s sleeping on sofa cushions by the closet doors. Kathy is on the floor by the end of the bed. An hour ago Sandy was awake, but when I returned from a bathroom break she was also on the floor on the other side of the bed, passed out. We all deserve a rest.

Daddy and I talked for a bit, sharing experiences we remember, moments we cherish that we had with Mommy, knowing that she can hear us. We want her to know that we remember these times and we hope she enjoys hearing us remember them. I know she does.

Daddy just leaned over to me and whispered: “You know, people say that these are the Golden Years, but they’re not. My golden years with your mom were when we were young, raising you kids. This is not a golden time.”

But for me, I think it is a golden time, a time for my mom to bask in the pleasure, the radiance, the joy of the light that she created on earth, and to return to it after a long battle with cancer.

With everyone passed out, it’s up to me to administer the morphine. I measure out the 10mg in the dropper, put it under my mom’s tongue, and tell her that I’m giving her the drug so that she’ll feel no pain, that she’ll feel good.

Her breathing has changed. It’s no longer a death rattle, no longer a deep gurgling, but rather coming more often in a softer inhalation and exhalation, like a content kitten after imbibing a warm bowl of milk. Mommy’s getting ready to go. I know it. She’s been preparing for that moment for eight and a half years, meditating on it, praying about it, contemplating her life and inevitable death. She’s lived well beyond her original prognosis of two to three years, a walking, talking, living, breathing miracle; a fitting example for all those who have met her that life can go on joyfully amidst a debilitating disease filled with painful medical treatments, vomiting, the radiation burning her throat to the point that it feels like a razor blade had slashed it to threads. During her well-fought battle she was a model of serenity, and now in death she is the same.

Everyone should know that death is a beautiful thing. It is as natural a process as being born – a normal and completely human experience. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the pioneer of hospice and near-death research, writes that the dying experience is almost identical to birth – it is a birth into a different existence. Mommy is a butterfly in a cocoon and she is about to spread her wings. It’s a blessing to be here by my mom as she dies. Dying doesn’t have to be this horrible experience. For me, right now, it is a moment of beauty, wonder, and love.

11:30am
My mom’s body is dead. We were there. We saw her last breath, heard it, watched it all, holding her hand, Daddy with his arms around her head, kissing her, all of us crying, holding on tightly, wanting one more second, one last moment with her.

I had a chance this morning to lie down after everyone woke up. I stayed up until about 8am, giving Mommy her morphine on the three-hour mark. When the girls woke up, they told me I should go rest. I didn’t argue.

I lay down and slept for an hour and a half and then woke to find Jan, the hospice nurse, in my mom’s room. She asked me questions about the nighttime vigil, when the morphine was given, how Mommy’s breathing had changed.

Jan then asked my sisters if they wanted to help her give Mommy a bath. Not knowing that this would be the last bath Mommy would ever have, they agreed. I think Jan knew what was happening and her offering of the bath became a last rite, a ritualistic bathing of their mother, culminating in the rubbing of chamomile and lavender lotion onto her body, dressing her, performing it like she had done when we were all babies, making us comfortable in our beds, tucking us in, saying a prayer, kissing us, and whispering, “Good night…don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Jan then called Daddy and me in because as she said, “I think these are her final breaths.”

We sat down around our mother, held her hands, her arms, her head and watched each slowing breath, and with each one the energy in the room became more peaceful until at last the breaths were short, sweet, and then no more. Like a light switch turned off, a flower easily plucked from the ground, a record player slowing down, Mommy drew her final breath, exhaled softly, and it was finished.

2:30pm
Cindy’s dog Kaja loved Mommy. Mommy always said that inside Kaja was a human peeking out. When the funeral director arrived in his van to pick up Mommy’s body, Kaja came bounding down from Cindy’s house, sniffing around the van. I looked out the window with Cindy and saw the dog walk up the steps to the house. We all heard her whimper. I opened the door and Kaja walked inside with a face I had never seen. She’s always a happy dog, but this was a sad face – she knew Mommy had died. So help me, her whole demeanor, not just her face, was one of loss and sadness. In turn, she came to each one of us and rubbed up against us, even to Sandy, whom she never went to in all these many years.

She gave each of us her condolences and as the body bag on the gurney came rolling through she followed it. Cindy’s husband, Jim, opened up the bag so Kaja could see Mommy’s face one last time. The dog’s tail wagged wildly back and forth, her voice whimpering once again.

As they rolled my mom outside and into the van, Kaja followed. When the van turned around and drove down the driveway she followed until the end of it, escorting my mom’s body from the place she called home.

Monday, March 10, 2008
11:30am
I’m on the train pulling into Philadelphia right now. My mom didn’t write much, but I bought her a journal in 1997, and from that time until the end of 1999 she filled it with her thoughts, memories, hopes for herself and her family. I just finished reading it. She wrote about me a lot and her prayers and concerns for my success in everything I did and tried to do in my life. She was always thinking of her children and others around her.

Towards the end of the journal she writes that her whole body aches and that she is going for various tests, including a bonescan. By the end of the journal she writes: “Cancer has come back from having breast cancer.” She never writes how she felt about being diagnosed with cancer again. It’s something I didn’t have to read. I talked with her about it many times and she always said that she wished she didn’t have it, but she did, and it was in God’s hands. She never complained and was always “doing fine”, even though she was often in much pain.

Mommy writes on the last page of her journal, after finding out about the fateful return of the cancer: “I am so thankful for a loving family and prayers. I will end this book with much happiness and gratefulness. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.”

I have to process the horror of the disease, the things I saw, my sadness at not being able to call my mom up anymore to just say hi. She’s gone. The house is empty. My dad is taking it all with much difficulty. Who can blame him? Fifty-five years in a faithful marriage with one woman, one best friend, one sweetheart that filled the house with love and light, laughter and tears, pain and suffering, love, love, love. I could write a book about the memories of the times with my mother. They could fill volumes, but I’ll save those for myself because they mean too much to me to share them with anyone else. They’re mine.

I also have a photocopy of her prayer list. It’s filled with close to 150 names of people she prayed for every day. When I say she prayed for these 150 every day, I mean it. Freiman is on the list, as are my “NYC Friends” as Mommy notated them. The list is filled with people of all races, religions, and backgrounds. I just turned the paper over and read the list of names on the back, and when I got to the end, do you know what I found? This one name, the person she prayed for after everyone else, was written in parentheses at the bottom right-hand corner of the page: (Me). She prayed for herself last. That says everything about Mommy's life here on earth.