That Time

Use the song, Amanda suggests to me, again. This time, she’s flanked by someone else.

It’s Me. Past Me. It’s hard to grasp, even in this spirit world. But it’s clearly a younger, more handsome version of my body than I had been most recently acquainted with. He (I?) stands next to Amanda, with his trademark smirk.

Remember what you did to get through that time, Past Me says, and the tone of voice carries a hint of pain, so wispy I might have missed it, if not for the speaker being, well, Me.

I’m puzzled, because I know this Me well. It is the Me I was before that time. It’s the Me who smoked cigarettes and stayed up late with my undiagnosed ADHD and created plans for my life. It is the Me who fell madly in love with Nora. He is charismatic, wild-eyed, and a dreamer…but not a beholder of caution. Not yet.

I’ve tried whispering to her, I tell Amanda and the handsome, young version of myself. I’ve tried screaming, singing. I’ve moved objects…I’m getting good at that, have you guys noticed? Here, I stop to grin a bit.

They nod obligingly. Amanda, obviously, has been here for a long time, and I’m not sure how Past Me being here works out, quantum physics-wise, but he seems well-versed in ghost things also.

I can’t reach her, I tell them. I think of when I was alive, in a dying body but still in good spirits, and Nora made me promise to give her signs. Big ones. No lazily floating monarchs, no winter birds perched on a feeder, no pennies in the bathroom. Nora wanted the full stop grand gesture. The eagle landing in the birdbath, a raptor that would arrive in our suburban back yard, a red-tailed hawk gliding parallel on a dusty mountain road.

Got it, I’d told her, a large bird, acting crazy. We joked then, because even though I was dying, I wasn’t quite on my way yet. Having humorous and spiritual conversations about what I was coming back as was one of many ways of gripping to normalcy. In the end, we decided birds were too mainstream.

“Just play our song for me,” Nora had whispered as I floated in that thin space. And I’d tried. Our wedding song, which was in every playlist on her phone, which I tried to play as often as possible. But it would come on, and she wouldn’t even react.

Whisper words of wisdom, Amanda says, and she’s been like a metronome between this and use the song. Amanda and Past Me leave then, and I pick a place to be while I think this over. I pick where I always pick, lately. The study, warm and cozy, where Nora has been spending most of her winter days this year, her first year of mourning me.

I kick off my metaphorical shoes and curl up opposite her on the loveseat. Maggie, the golden retriever, sees me as plain as day and stretches out to lay her head on my lap. The new “retro” record player is set at a low volume, soft jazz playing. Nora’s reading the news on her iPad instead of poring through photo albums, so I know she’s having a ‘good day’.

I can’t reach you with jazz, I say to her, as if maybe she will hear me. She doesn’t even look up, only reaching out one slim hand to mindlessly scratch Maggie’s back. You need to go outside, put in your air pods, take Maggie for a walk. That would make this easier for me. At the word ‘walk’, Maggie’s head pops up, but I give her a look that says we’ve been over this and she flops back down with a sigh of disappointment.

In the fall, right after I perished, Nora blindly took Maggie for walks in the woods behind our development. She would blast music, and I was super excited, gearing the shuffle algorithm to our wedding song over and over, but it didn’t resonate with her.

“Where are you,” she’d say, her voice laden with thick sorrow. I’d been right there, but she was looking at Maggie, or the dirt packed path. The same thing happened when I knocked her wine glass over. (And that was way harder than messing with a music playlist.) It broke, red liquid running like a river onto the carpet, and she’d simply sighed and blamed Maggie, who was known for her lethal tail swipes. Maggie gave me a look that said, I cannot believe you, and I gave her one that said, I know, sorry, my bad!

In the study, today, I think back to how we got through it. Whisper words of wisdom…I know that. I know the song, which conjures up a visual of John Lennon (inexplicable since it had no more ties to him than any other Beatle) because I played it for Nora during that time. But it was a song we filed away in that box where we put everything that had to do with that time. If it came on the radio, we would not make eye contact, though one of us might sigh and the other might reach over and clasp a hand.

It was gut-wrenching, that time. Why would I try to reach her with such sadness?

And yet, the further away we got from that time, the smaller it became. Life rewarded us karmically for having survived, that was how I saw it. That time took our innocence, our belief that just being a good person was enough to prevent suffering. Because what happened in that hospital in the summer of the year we were only twenty-three wasn’t supposed to happen to good people.

It was awful. First, the impending labor that began with so much excitement turned into a nightmare. There was bleeding and a terrifying color change in Nora’s face, a small female doctor who gripped my wrists to keep me anchored while she asked me who she should save, Nora or the baby? I know she didn’t say those exact words, but she put it some way that I knew the scenario of having to triage one over the other was looking pretty fucking likely.

“My wife,” I choked out to her, looking over my shoulder as they wheeled her off with alarming speed.

And so the doctor saved Nora and not the baby. And after she saved Nora, it was touch and go for a while, at least a week. And then, when Nora became entirely aware that she had almost died, and the price paid for her life was the baby’s, she sunk into a depression that would lead to not one, but two suicide attempts in the next year.

Like I said. That time was big and terrible.

Back to the day I told the obstetrician to save my wife. After, I was wracked with guilt. I was flooded with it, on top of the layers of worry about Nora (would she pull through? Would she be angry with me? What was she going to do when she realized the baby—it had been a girl—died?)

At some point on the evening of that terrible day, I found myself in the hospital chapel. There was a man there, and he was so recognizable—I knew that I knew him from somewhere. He was a pastor (or a priest? A rabbi? I wasn’t sure, but he felt holy.) He sat down beside me with the familiarity of an old friend, but I was too depleted to figure out where I knew him from. I started telling him about Nora, about the baby.

“Your baby’s soul is safe. Please don’t worry about that.” The man put a hand gently on my shoulder, and his voice felt like love. I broke into violent sobs for the first time in that long, hellish day.

“Your wife needs you,” he said. “More than she ever has before. This will be hard, but you will be able to do it. And there will be joy again, you’ll see.”

I could not see. All I could see was an endless black tunnel, a place with no baby, a wife who was in critical condition, and a nursery at home that would never be used.

The pastor/priest/rabbi suddenly stood, clapping me on the back like we were bros. I was about to ask him where I knew him from when he spoke again.

“You’ll see. Whisper words of wisdom.” And then he left.

I didn’t think that I, the young father of a dead child, had any wisdom to give, but I knew the lyrics to Let It Be, and they seemed powerfully full of surrender. In those first days, when Nora was drowning in her loss, I played that for her on our tape deck (dating myself here). It seemed to calm her the same way it calmed me, stilling her body to tranquil tears. When the final harmonious note concluded, she would whisper, again. And I would rewind the tape and play it again.

Eventually, one day, she told me to stop. She’d had one unsuccessful suicide attempt at that point, and she would have another in a few months, but she was inching forward.

I can’t listen to it anymore. It just pulls me back to…that time. I never even got to see her.

I hadn’t seen her either, so I had no response for that. But I stopped playing the song.

Nora ebbed and flowed through tides of depression and eventually found her footing in a sandy foundation that was not sure but seemed to hold her up as well as anything—another pregnancy. We held our breaths as if any bodily movement might shake the alchemy of the developing baby. Precautions and monitoring took place to prevent the problems of before, and a c-section was scheduled. On a wintery night in December, our first son was born. Our redemption baby, we called him. We were still grieving, but we deserved this.

Two years later, another strapping, screaming baby boy.

That time, which once encompassed the whole of us, grew smaller. Our lives became babies and toddlers. Little boys who played ball, countless hours of countless summers spent on fields, then sunburnt teens cementing friendships. We reveled in something we’d once lost—parenthood. Our boys were so physical, so healthy. So alive! We would think of the baby girl, privately, but we rarely spoke of her. That time became more distant each year, as if we were backing away from a telescope. Only recalled when we heard the name we had picked out for her, or when the anniversary rolled around.

This is how it went, right up until the point where both of our boys married. They began their own families, each giving us a grandson six months apart. And then, the announcement of a third grandchild that had come after my cancer diagnosis.

Yes, cancer. That’s what took me out. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But, sitting behind the closed doors of my doctor’s office, which is never a good sign, and hearing him tell me that he wanted me to head to the hospital right away…well. I was surprised. I had genuinely, over the years, lost my fear that bad things happened to good people. I never quite went back to the innocence that Past Me wears so well, but I concluded that Nora and I had done our time.

“Honey, we were always going to die,” Nora had chided, lovingly, cupping my cheek the night the impending third grandchild was announced. Nora had me settled in bed, and I was sobbing. I had held it all night, toasting with the family, but now it was coming out in buckets. I wasn’t going to be around to see this little one. I knew it and Nora knew it and the boys probably did too even though I tried to be vague with the very specifically short timeline I had been given—three months.

Nora had been phenomenal during that time. We laughed a lot. She did everything in her power to give me dignity, comfort, and fulfill all my last wishes, which were few. I mostly just wanted to spend my days with her. I didn’t want the boys to see me so frail, to be so sad, when their lives were on the cusp of the best part. I bargained with God—he was taking me, so nothing would happen to that new baby. Fair’s fair, right?

***

I’m back in the study, the walls climbing with books, most of them never read and only purchased to fill the shelves. Nora and I were music people, not readers. Today, she is cross-legged on the floor, putting together an empty scrapbook to give our son and his wife for the new baby, which they know is a girl. She is surrounded with scraps of pink cardstock and white lace, Maggie snoozing amongst the piles.

I have a big plan today. I can see that she has Pandora playing through the wireless speaker that sits on the top shelf, the one that also holds all the records—the new ones we purchased just last year for the “retro” record player, and the old ones from a lifetime ago. I’m going to make that Beatles record fly off the shelf. Maybe Amanda is right and it’s the private meaning behind Let It Be that will tell Nora it’s me. Behind me, Amanda nods assuredly. She’s going to help me.

I make kissing noises so Maggie will move out of the way, but she only wags her giant feathery tail, a gesture of affection Nora assumes is for her, absently reaching out to rub Maggie’s head. Fine.

Yesterday (how fitting) comes on, and I decide this is my moment. I concentrate my efforts on that high shelf, on the Let It Be album. It’s an old one we obviously never played after that time, and it’s wedged tight. I concentrate and absorb Amanda’s pulsing energy. I guess I’m concentrating too hard, because it’s like something explodes behind the records, and the entire row of albums blows to the floor, some of them covering Maggie, who looks at me and inwardly cringes as if to say, dude, you’re not good at this.

Well, Nora notices this! In the silence of the room, only the melodic voice of Paul McCartney filling the corners, Nora jumps back. She looks at Maggie, and looks around the room, and then looks up. Amanda winks at me and floats away.

Pick up the album, pick up the album! I say, focusing all my energy on the tattered Beatles record, lying half covered by a few others.

She doesn’t. Instead, she picks up the one that was laying face down on top of Maggie, soothing the dog with sweet words, and flipping it over. When she looks at the title, she lets out a gasp of some sort and gazes heavenward even though I am next to her.

“Patrick?” she whispers, holding the album to her chest. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you!” When she released the album, I see what it is and wonder how I’ve done it. I didn’t even know we owned that single; she must have purchased it after I was gone? I don’t even really know the song. But I sure knew the name.

Amanda by Chris Stapleton. A cover, I presume. Amanda, the name we would have given the baby girl, the one who nearly broke us. The one who had told me, the second I crossed over, that my guilt at picking Nora over her was unnecessary.

It wasn’t my time, Amanda had said, and my love for her had rushed out, free to be as loud and strong as it had always been. You’ll see.

In the midst of Nora's tears and her clutching the album, her phone rings and it’s our son, telling her that they are at the hospital—the baby is coming, and fast! I follow Nora and sit in the waiting room, just as excited as everyone. Amanda is with me, radiating. Past Me is there too, and in the familiar context of the hospital, I recognize him.

It was you, I say, suddenly, and he smiles. The pastor from the day she—you—came! I look at Amanda.

Past Me smiles, snickers. Definitely not a pastor. Just a wiser version of you. Sometimes we have to go back, or forward, to let you know everything’s happening the way it should. You see now?

I glance between him, Amanda, and my family. Yes. Yes, I say. Amanda smiles, but she looks different here. Quieter, like a faded photograph.

Moments later, my son bursts into the room shouting, “It’s a girl!” His brother and Nora and I all jump up and hug, and I swear they can feel me.

“Her name’s Amanda,” my son says. “After that song we love, the one we gave you the record of, remember Mom?”

In that moment, Nora pauses for a half second, and I swear her eyes meet mine. I swear we lock gazes across the realms of earth and spirit, between that time and this time until happy tears return her to the present. We’ve never spoken about the name, but I know that Amanda must have something to do with it. I turn to ask her.

But she’s gone. She, who has been my spirit buddy and by my side since I crossed over, is nowhere. And yet, I still sense her. As I follow my family into the hospital room to meet the newest member, I have a feeling I know exactly where she is.