Peering through the Curtain

I can tell when I have been processing something in my sleep.  I wake up early with thoughts fully formed and insisting on expression.  I live these days at the boundary between worlds, the liminal area between this life and the next.  It is like a porous membrane, a diaphanous curtain.  If I wanted, I could just push through and find myself on the other side.  I don't have any wishes to move just yet from this life to the New Life.  I have no dark thoughts of suicide or self-injury.  But the dead seem so close, fill my thoughts, form my vision.  The living often seem to be the ones who are not quite here any longer.

Perhaps that is why we who mourn are distant, unfocused, hardly "here" at all in conversation.  We can see our dead loved ones.  We spend time with them and energy on them.  We talk to them.  We envision them with one another in a little community of the newly deceased, holding and comforting one another on our behalf.  I sit in the family room with Anne's cremains on the mantle, and I talk to her.  I rush to assure you that she does not speak audible words in reply (although that is only my experience).  Yet it is true that even when people die, relationships do not.  So insights, hints, clues, signs, and encouragements come my way in these conversations.  Does my longing for her simply create this dialogue or does she from time to time reach back through the curtain?

I don't know, and it really doesn't matter at this point.  I live on that boundary where the New Life is sometimes visible in vague outline.  And that vision gives comfort--not only to me but to so many others who have lost the dearest one of their hearts.  I find it to be one of the ways God has made us so that this amputation of the soul is not fatal to the mourner.  Anne died in a moment, in that final sigh of what was likely a giant breaking of her heart.  But she leaves me and our home only gradually, passing through the curtain bit by bit so that I am not torn to shreds in the process.

In many cultures those who have lost are treated with great honor.  They are regarded as people with special connections to the New Life, the next life, the other side.  They are both comforted and consulted, regarded with awe and curiosity.  I understand this better now as I gaze through that curtain and touch that soft membrane of mortal love now and again.  Painful as it is to do, it is also beautiful to lay fingertips on a remembered intimacy and the future hope of reunion.

I hope this life at the boundary doesn't go away too quickly.