Staying on the Old Road, Part 1

If you should not leave the old road for a new one, does that mean you need to spend years in therapy rehashing your past? And do we really spend the first half of our lives becoming dysfunctional? What do I mean when I use the word “dysfunctional” anyway?

The three blog posts on not leaving the old road for a new one elicited comments and questions, some on the blog, others on my Facebook page (to which I copy my blogs), and still others in e-mails and conversations. One reader asked if “dysfunctional” was the correct word to use. She suggested that you live your life and realize at some point that it isn’t working quite the way you planned. You may even feel as if your life is falling apart. You build a road with the wrong materials, keep adding to it with the wrong materials, and even go back and repair potholes with the wrong materials.

Are “the wrong materials” the equivalent of “dysfunctional”? Well, I believe we build the road with the materials we have on hand. And those materials on hand include everything that has gone into making us who we are. We develop strategies to help us navigate our way through life. And some of those strategies become barriers between the persona we create for ourselves and our authentic selves. And that, in my vernacular, is dysfunctional.

If our future becomes our past unless we do something other than keep repeating it, why aren’t a few years in therapy a good idea? They may be for you. My attitude is this: whatever works. But my preferences are clear, based on how I’ve lived my own life. I’m educated in the field of psychology. I have respect for it. I even worked as a therapist for a while during and after graduate school. But I found my way to shamanism and stayed there because I found it a more useful approach . . . for me.

The work of becoming a shaman is very much about working your way back to your authentic self by staying on the road you arrived at to “here” rather than simply leaving the old road for a new one. It is the work of courageously facing yourself as you are, accepting it, healing whatever needs to be healed within you, and making a choice to live a life of integrity—and by “integrity” I mean the kind of completeness you achieve with harmony of mind, body, spirit, and emotions. As it happens, that kind of harmony seems to support “integrity” as most people think of it—a fundamental incorruptibleness.

We so effectively keep ourselves wrapped in the comfortable cloak of our persona that it takes serious excavation to face ourselves as we are. And if you go looking for something buried somewhere other than where you buried it, what do you suppose your chances of finding it are? Exactly. So you stay on the old road.

I’m not going to delve into shamanic practices like recapitulation here. At least, not yet. It’s helpful, I think, to take a look at how we construct a road that takes us away from our authentic selves in the first place. And to do that, I’m going to borrow a concept from Buddhism as I, a non-Buddhist, have come to understand it: the cocoon.

To be continued.

Copyright 2013 by Melanie Mulhall

Don’t Leave the Old Road for a New One, Part 3

By the time we’re in midlife, if we’re lucky, we’re so exhausted with maintaining the persona that we want to find our way back home. And back home is to that body we thought was dead, but isn’t.

I’m not simply speaking about all of this from the standpoint of observer. This is not just intellectualization. I have experience with it from the inside out. I had my own version of a dysfunctional childhood. I was a good student because, at least in part, “being smart” was a very helpful persona component. I created such a good persona that my own family didn’t know just how bad my first marriage was until I left it—ten and a half years into it. My persona attracted friends and male companions. My personal defenses against abuse, abandonment, poverty, fear of incompetence, and the suspicion that I would be found seriously lacking if I wasn’t perfect contributed to my achieving some useful things, like a couple of swell degrees and some business success. But they also made me a little brittle and a little less than consistently fun to be with for friends, lovers, and those supervised by me. Among other things, I could be moody, insecure, and a demanding boss.

I began my journey home—my journey back to myself—at an age when some people are still running down the road away from the dead body. Still, it took years to get as far away from myself as I was, and it has taken years to make my way back to myself. I’ve often speculated that we spend the first half of our lives becoming dysfunctional and, if we’re paying attention, we spend the second half of our lives undoing that dysfunction.

The admonition to not leave the old road for a new one is, as I have come to understand it, a wise bit of guidance to find your way back to yourself by facing, clearing, and healing everything within that is dysfunctional and inauthentic. That means stripping the persona down, dismantling the inappropriate boundaries, and rediscovering who you are at your core.

But what would leaving the old road for a new one be like? It would be an attempt to recreate yourself (often at midlife) by dismissing the ways in which you have made yourself up to this point—more or less trying to sail right over them—and simply trying to walk a more functional path without a backward glance at the path you spent all those years traveling down.

It’s temping, to be sure, and it’s what we think about when we speak of “starting fresh” or “starting over.” But according to my friend Jorge Luis Delgado, Peruvian chacaruna (“bridge person”—essentially, shaman), the Inca view the future as behind them, not in front of them. Why? For at least a couple of reasons, actually. First, we humans have eyes that face forward. We can see what is in front of us, but not what is behind us. And since we cannot see the future, it can be considered behind us. But perhaps more important, the future will be our past if we become enmeshed in our past, disdain our past, or otherwise refuse to accept and deal with it. And that is why we should not leave the old road for a new one.

Copyright 2013 by Melanie Mulhall

Don’t Leave the Old Road for a New One, Part 2

Life gives us plenty of reasons to flee. Mostly, we flee from ourselves. Almost everyone has one version or another of a dysfunctional childhood. If they don’t, they make up for lost time as young adults. It isn’t just that we flee an understanding of our own capacity for evil, or small-mindedness, or our baser instincts. Our lives chip away at us and by the time we’re adults, most of us have devised some pretty effective strategies for protecting ourselves and managing our way through life. We put boundaries in place—a functional and necessary thing, but some of the boundaries are not simply between “I and thou,” they are between “me and me.” That is, we work hard to create a persona and we often forget that the persona is not the real thing. It is not us.

We don’t just work hard at creating the persona, we work hard at maintaining it. There is a certain amount of presenting ourselves in the best possible way that comes with that, a certain amount of being just a bit less than honest with others—and with ourselves. We build lifestyles to support our personas. We build defenses—against being abused again, against being abandoned again, against being taken for granted again, and most important, against being “found out.” If we’re not careful, we don’t just defend against perceived threat, we become all too ready to attack, often in subtle ways we don’t even recognize.

But one of the most sacred—not to mention useful—things about being human is that who we really are is always still in there. As Buckaroo Banzai and many others have said, no matter where you go, there you are. The “you” in “there you are” isn’t just the persona. Who you are may be buried beneath the persona, but it’s there. You carry it with you on the journey.

In many ways, we are all like that shopkeeper. We all flee the dead body on the threshold. That dead body is, after all, us. Except that it is not really dead. God knows, it may feel like who we started out as when we slid down the chute into this life is long gone by the time we’re twenty or thirty, but it’s still alive and well within. It may feel dead and we may even wish it were dead because owning up to the human part of being a human being is not something most of us are thrilled to do. We’re afraid the body will be found. That is, we’re afraid we’ll be discovered for being exactly who we are. So we flee.

To be continued.

Copyright 2013 by Melanie Mulhall

Don’t Leave the Old Road for a New One, Part 1

Some stories stay with you for a long time, having their way with you, becoming integrated within you as you become more integrated within yourself. “Solomon’s Advice” has been one such story for me.

I first read this story in David Whyte’s wonderful book The Heart Aroused. He’d heard it from Angeles Arien, who got it from Allan B. Chinen’s book, Once Upon a Midlife, who may have gotten it from Italo Calvino. The story can, in fact, be found in Calvino’s book Italian Folktales. Clearly, this story has made the rounds.

I’ll let you track down the full story for yourself and give you a very abbreviated version because it is one part of the story that has been opening within me for a time. As the story goes, there is a shopkeeper with a wife and sons. One morning he finds a dead body lying across the threshold of his shop. Afraid he will be accused of the murder, he flees.

Yes. He abandons his family and flees.

Miles from home, he takes work as servant to a wise man by the name of Solomon and works for this man for many years. Ultimately, he decides to return home. Solomon gives him three pieces of advice before he leaves. He charges his faithful servant handily for the advice, too. The first piece of advice is this: Don’t leave the old road for a new one. As annoyed as the servant is about paying for such a simpleminded piece of advice, he does use it. And he saves his own life in the process.

Chinen has an opinion about what this bit of advice means within the context of midlife. So does Whyte. I wasn’t quite satisfied with either—though that might simply be my lack of scholarly attendance to what they had to say. But the notion stayed with me for many years. What did it really mean to not leave the old road for a new one?

Yes, yes. Plenty of people have midlife crises and go off in new directions to their detriment. I didn’t think that part of the story was a symbolic admonition to stick with tradition, or the known, or what society thinks we should do. And anyway, many other people in midlife leave the old road and blaze new trails to their betterment. There was something more there.

Then, in that early morning state of intuitive understanding we all sometimes have before we’re fully awake, a sense of its relevancy to me dropped right into my consciousness, more or less fully formed. It was simple. It fit so completely with the work I do as a shaman. It made sense within the context of my own life. And this is how I came to understand it.

To be continued.

Copyright 2013 by Melanie Mulhall

Life Lessons from the Super Bowl

Super Bowl XLVII is over and, hopefully, friends with loyalties on opposing sides have shook hands and made up. Now that the dust has settled and the commentary has been wrapped up, I’d like to offer an observation about the game—and it’s one you may not have heard.

The next time you are tempted to roll your eyes at the idea of stopping the whirling dervish antics, getting quiet, and taking a deep breath (an idea usually served up by shamans, yoga instructors, and mothers), consider Super Bowl XLVII. The game looked like a runaway, right through the first half.

Do you know what a group of ravens is called? A group of crows is a murder of crows, a group of owls is a parliament of owls, a group of larks is an exultation of larks . . . and while a group of ravens is sometimes called a constable of ravens (apparently dating back to their crowding around the Tower of London), these days, it is more often called an unkindness of ravens or a conspiracy of ravens. The 49ers might have given that some thought.

But whatever conspiracy was afoot and whatever unkindness had been served up during the first half, the Ravens’ momentum was brought to a halt when the power went out in the stadium. And they did have momentum before that. The players retreated to the sidelines. The smart ones stretched to keep loose. When the play resumed, the 49ers seemed to have absorbed the momentum sucked right out of the Ravens by the outage.

So what does this have to do with stopping the whirling dervish antics, getting quiet, and taking a deep breath? Everything. Moving at twice the speed of life has become the norm instead of the exception in Western society. Accompanying that warp speed lifestyle is a level of distractibility that has made sound bite, techo idiots of so many that, put on an island with their ilk, they might die before it occurs to them to rally together to build shelter, find potable water, and hustle up something to eat. Why? Because they’d all be trying to text their buddies back home or tweet the experience.

It’s hard to persuade folks to stop long enough to become aware of the world around them. Pausing is a major life skill, and a critical one if you’re in a fix. Momentum will keep you going, often down a road that has a Mack truck coming straight at you from the opposite direction. But if you pause, take a deep breath, and become aware of the natural world around you, something quite magical just might happen. You might be able to gather in a bit of energy and move it for your own behalf.

Shamans do this all the time—consciously. Of course, shamans have also usually done the hard work of clearing and healing their internal landscapes, which makes for a place to actually hold that energy. And, of course, when the shaman talks about power, she’s talking about energy. When the shaman needs to accomplish something, she pauses, gets still, becomes centered and grounded (more or less instantaneously), consciously harnesses a bit of energy, and changes the energetic dynamics around her.

I’m not an expert on Shambhala Warrior Training (for that, I suggest you search out Cynthia Kneen’s very fine audio series by the same name), but what I am describing is, I believe, sometimes described as “riding windhorse” in that system of spiritual warriorship. We all have the capacity to experience the world around us directly. That includes taking it in, responding to it, and initiating action. This capacity is what is known as basic goodness. Windhorse is the energetic nature of that capacity and riding windhorse is to consciously tap into this energy. Which, as I said, is exactly what a shaman does.

It is difficult to sense the energetic quality inherent in all things when you are unconsciously moving for the sake of moving and when you allow yourself to be jerked from one thing to another, changing directions endlessly, drawn by the next shiny thing . . . and the next . . . and the next. It takes a moment of pause. It takes the kind of conscious interaction with your environment you get from placing your attention on your breathing (if only for a moment).

The 49ers got that chance when the power went out. Have they been in Shambhala Warrior Training? Stranger things have happened, but I rather doubt it. Still, very good athletes have always understood, at a visceral level, that they can place themselves in a heightened state of consciousness and tap into the energy of . . . something. So whether they understand what shamans do or what Shambhala warriors do, they have been known to step into that same stream of energy. And when they do, magic happens.

Unfortunately for the 49ers (and fortunately for the Ravens), they didn’t ride windhorse to victory. But the next time you’re in a fix, exhausted from the lack of results associated with whatever you’ve been doing, try pausing for a moment. Take a deep breath or two. Become aware of the natural world around you. Maybe even do a few stretches (like the players did). And then gather in a bit of energy and make a tiny shift. You might find yourself shifting the energy of whatever has gotten you into the fix. You might make a little magic for yourself.

Copyright 2013 by Melanie Mulhall

How Others Responded, Part 2

“Counseling wisdom is that it takes five years for life to start feeling normal again after the loss of a spouse,” a woman I knew said.

How do you respond to a statement like that? My husband had been gone for more than fourteen months at the time. Her statement was not unlike a curse. It came hurtling across the internet and into my email inbox as a prison sentence she seemed bent on imposing: three years and ten months more before you will be okay.

But I already felt okay. I’d experienced an energetic shift at the anniversary of Howard’s death. There were still moments of sadness (as there always are in life), but I was back. The concept of “normal” seemed ridiculous to me, not simply because I’d never aligned with statistics for the “normal” person, but because what normal is changes with major life events. Including the death of a spouse.

Actually, there was something more to her pronouncement than a sentence. It felt like a judgment, a way of saying, “Don’t try to fool yourself. You’re in denial and you’re suppressing grief if you think you’re okay. I’m a member of the psychology community. I know better than you.”

Of course, I’m overeducated in the field of psychology, with two degrees in it. Psychological generalizations and labels had been among the things that had disenchanted me with psychology. Too much of the field seemed divorced from the “psyche” in psychology—the soul of it. When I became a shaman, I realized that while I couldn’t deny the impact of psychology on my thinking and life, it was shamanism that spoke to the soul-based way I lived.

That woman’s reaction was a bit more blatant that others after my husband’s death, but it was one of the classic reactions I got: Know that you will be devastated for a long time. In fact, you may never get over it. There were four other reactions: Discomfort over the death; heartfelt sympathy for my loss; surprise that I wasn’t over it yet; and, genuine acceptance of however I was dealing with it. It was a relief to be with people who were grounded in that last response and could radiate it. These four basic reactions remained the fundamental reactions I got from people throughout the first eighteen months after my husband’s death.

Many people expressed heartfelt sympathy when they first heard of Howard’s death, and they expressed it again when they were face-to-face with me. A few people avoided me. A few rallied to support me. But over time, it seemed to me that the fundamental mindset that a person had about life and death came oozing out when I responded to their question, “How are you doing?” Some people seemed permanently fixated on the pain of loss. The woman who pronounced that it would be five years before I felt normal again appeared to me to be one of those. Others projected a kind of fearlessness about life, an understanding that tragedy happens, but life wins out for the survivors of death—if they let it. Maybe because I fall into that latter category, I appreciated that reaction from others most.

It wasn’t that this latter group pushed me to be perfectly fine when I wasn’t. On the contrary, as a whole, they were better at assessing exactly how I was feeling and accepting it more than others. More than anything, they didn’t lay a judgment on me about how I “should” be responding to the death. Their response to my response allowed me to relax into exactly who I was when I was with them.

If there is something to be learned from all of this, for me, it is that we cannot really make assumptions about how anyone will handle the death of a spouse. And the person who has experienced the death cannot make assumptions about how others will respond to them, as survivor, or to the fact of the death.

So what can any of us do for another when they lose a loved one? We can bother to pay attention to how they are and what they need—reading it in what they say, what they don’t say, and what they project—instead of making assumptions. And we can send them waves of love, from our heart to theirs. Does anything else really matter, anyway?

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

How Others Responded, Part 1

Terminal illness and death are topics that elicit interesting responses from people. I found that many people simply didn’t know what to say when they heard the news that my husband had metastasized prostate cancer. Others seemed to assume that my experience would fit some model based on what they had read or experienced themselves. A few made no assumptions and were just there for me.

One close friend had lost her husband to cancer many years earlier. When I first told her the news of Howard’s illness, she seemed to assume that things would become dire quickly. That had been her experience and she assumed it would be mine. Every time I saw her, she asked, “How is Howard?” in that voice that radiates the expectation of bad news. When month followed month and he was still alive, still on his feet and carrying on with everyday life, she seemed confused for a time, then settled into a kind of watchful waiting.

I love this friend and she proved to be one of the strongest, kindest supporters I had during Howard’s illness. But her early responses to his illness, while quite human and understandable, were more focused on expectations based on her own experience than curiosity about mine. What I needed was for her to serve as witness to what was actually happening in my life. She eventually stepped into that role, and in doing so, gave me an invaluable gift.

Early on, I found I had no desire to tell most people about the drama unfolding in my life. Howard didn’t want his identity to be prescribed by the cancer and I didn’t want mine to be fixed by my role as “wife of a man slowly dying of cancer.” Once, while with a group of Boulder Media Women colleagues at a potluck, the conversation among a small clutch of us turned to residential writing retreats. I wistfully admitted I would love to apply for one of the programs that offered room and board for a month in a quiet mountain setting. When one of the women encouraged me and I said it wasn’t an option at the moment because my husband was ill, she replied, “Maybe he’ll be better by the time the retreat is set to start.” I didn’t respond. I couldn’t without admitting that I didn’t believe he would be getting better. That would have been the equivalent of a sharp left-hand turn in the conversation, and the road we would have been traveling was not one I wanted to take them down in that moment.

I did go down that road with people, but some joined me on the ride sooner and others later. “I can’t imagine what this is like for you,” some admitted upon hearing the news. I told them it was like having a slight fever . . . all the time. You adapted. It became your new definition of “normal.” But there was no denying that it sucked a bit of the life out of you, was impossible to ignore, and changed your focus.

As the months wore on and Howard became more fragile, I became more open about his condition. And it never ceased to amaze me that many people responded by immediately lapsing into their own experience with the illness and death of a loved one. Sometimes the loved one was a spouse, but more often a parent or friend. Occasionally it was a pet. It was as if their own undigested emotions over their loss surfaced as soon as I mentioned Howard’s illness and their need to process their experience took over. No doubt, some of them just wanted to show that they could have empathy for my situation, but often their own story supplanted the story unfolding for me in the moment. And there is a need, for those in the midst of terminal illness—their own or that of a loved one—to be able to include the fact of it in conversation without finding that the conversation has jumped from their own present to someone else’s past.

By far the worst of those experiences were the stories of grief at the loss of a pet. While I’m no stranger to the depth of love for and grief over the loss of a beloved pet, it is fundamentally insensitive to draw a line between the terminal illness of one’s spouse to the illness and eventual death of a pet. It made me wince internally and because my internal states are often transparent to even the most casual observer, I’ve no doubt that wince was visually perceptible.

Many people seemed surprised that I was “handling it so well.” Some of them bluntly stated that they believed I was feigning strength and bravely playing at stoicism. Others looked at me with curiosity, searching my eyes for signs that I actually loved my husband because they couldn’t quite grasp the idea of living with what is and just savoring what little time you actually have with a loved one who is dying. More than a few shook their heads and said they didn’t know how I was keeping it together, as if expecting me to come unhinged and fly apart at any moment—a little unsure of whether they feared I would do so or be disappointed if I didn’t. A few wanted to cast me as some enlightened human, a model for taking life on the chin with equanimity. In truth, of course, I was just another pilgrim going down the road.

The response I found truly helpful mostly came from an inner circle of very close friends who were willing to walk with me on my road for a little while, shoulder to shoulder, as fellow pilgrims. They could be with me without looking for signs of structural fracture. They were empathic without being cloying. They asked how Howard was doing and really did want to know the answer, whatever it was. They didn’t tiptoe around me, but cut me exactly as much slack as they always had, no more and no less. They stayed present with me when I needed to talk—didn’t flee mentally, didn’t try to change the subject, didn’t doubt my self-appraisal . . . but did energetically hold me in a loving embrace.

It was that response that helped carry me through.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

Shedding Energetic Debris

The beginning of the end had happened at the beginning of Thanksgiving week in 2010, so it would have been a fair assumption that the holidays were going to be difficult for me in 2011. But by October, I thought I was going to be fine during the holidays and planned to spend them alone.

That was October.

November 1st came and I was not so fine. The idea of being alone Thanksgiving seemed like the plan of a crazed woman. Howard had almost died the night before Thanksgiving in 2010 and I’d spent Thanksgiving cooking a huge turkey with all the fixings while he slept through the day. The cooking had kept me occupied. At the time it seemed a better idea than, say, drinking Jameson and pacing the floor. A year later, I suspected I might be drinking Jameson and pacing the floor if I was alone Thanksgiving of 2011.

When Cindy Morris invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her and her roommates, it was like a postcard from God informing me that my plight had been noted and taken care of. Cindy had been such a solid friend during Howard’s last days, not to mention the months that followed, and here she was, turkey baster in hand, looking after me one more time. Being looked after by someone else had been such a rare occurrence throughout my life that she seemed like some combination of Mother Earth, Mrs. Santa Claus, and all of the Greek goddesses, all rolled up into one person.

It was one of the best Thanksgivings I’d ever had.

But right around Thanksgiving, I began having problems with my gut. Since my gut was reliably healthy, it got my attention. What in the heck was going on? I might have had little experience with being taken care of by anyone else, but I was very good at taking care of myself. I got plenty of sleep, ate healthily, exercised, meditated . . . leaped over tall buildings, bent steel with my bare hands . . . . Okay, maybe I didn’t do those last two things, but I took good care of myself. And my gut was suddenly the gut of a sedentary, junk food eating, hyper-stressed burnout.

As I meditated one Sunday morning, right before going to my massage therapist (David Kochevar), I was told that the problems with my gut were coming from debris in my energy field. And it wasn’t even my own energetic debris. It seemed I’d somehow accumulated some of Howard’s energetic debris during his last six weeks of life. It had been time-stamped to come into my awareness for release a year later . . . and it was now time to dispatch it. I was told by guidance to have David work on my midsection. That would do part of the job.

Fortunately, David is a kindred spirit. Our appreciation for the workings of Spirit—if not the specifics of our personal theologies—tended to dovetail. He had not only been my massage therapist for most of his career, but he had become one of my favorite people in the world. I knew he would take what I’d been told in stride. He did. And I walked out of his office a new woman.

But I knew his work on me was only part of what needed to be done. I wasn’t quite sure of what constituted the rest. I decided to do a shamanic journey, and while I was quite capable of journeying myself, I wanted Antonio to drum for me. Journeying with Antonio was always a richer experience than journeying on my own, just as those who came to me for shamanic journey work had a richer experience journeying with me than they would have attempting to journey on their own. I always likened it to massage: You can massage yourself, but the involvement of another person’s energy makes being massaged by someone else a very different experience than massaging yourself.

I scheduled the journey with Antonio, only to cancel it within a week. I told myself I was crazy to think I could fit a journey into an already over-booked December. But it was more than that. The timing wasn’t quite right.

During another morning meditation, I asked my “council” (a council of spirit guides I often meet with in meditation) what I needed to do to clear the remaining energetic debris, and I asked for their help. They not only agreed to help, they wanted to accomplish the deed right then and there. I was a bit taken aback. Excuses raced through my mind, but really, I wasn’t sure if I was ready. I had no idea why I was balking. What, exactly, would make me ready? When did I think I would be ready? I took a deep breath and told them to lead the way.

And they did. When we were done, I knew that the debris was gone. I felt clearer, more myself, than I had felt all year. And I realized that I had postponed the journey because it was not to take place until the anniversary of Howard’s death had passed. I scheduled it for December 30th, the day after the anniversary.

I spent Christmas alone, at peace. I wasn’t quite so serene on December 28, the day before the anniversary of Howard’s death. The death ceremony, his final hours, the coma he lapsed into . . . it all occupied my mind and surrounded my heart like an old memory, both painful and beautiful. The 29th felt less constrictive, and it seemed fitting. Howard had been released from the constriction of his failing body a year earlier on that day.

I was ready to journey on the 30th. It was a beautiful, profound journey (and, perhaps, a story for another time). When January 1st, 2012 came, I felt ready to reclaim my own life . . . a life richer and deeper because of my travels with Howard as he made his way from life to the great life beyond, a life I embraced fully because I was happy to be among the living, happy to continue my Earth walk, thrilled to see time spread out before me like a carpet of flowers. I was back.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

Visitations

Some dreams are more than dreams—they are visitations. Numerous times, I asked Howard to visit me after he died. That request was sometimes made in jest, but even then, I had no doubt he knew I really wanted him to make an attempt to contact me once he crossed over.

Just a little less than six weeks after he died, he visited me using a dream as the vehicle. This was certainly not the first time I’d dreamed of him since his death, but his appearance in the dream was so vivid, so real, that once I drifted up from sleep, I knew he had contacted me. And it was more than contact; he gave me a sweet and wise piece of advice in the form of a question.

In the dream, I am trying to find a man’s telephone number. We had met and been attracted to one another. He’d suggested we get together and we’d made plans. It is now the day we’d arranged to meet. But I don’t know what time we are to meet or any other details. So I want to contact him. My friend Cindy has taken a call from him but hasn’t given me his number. I realize that it is too early to call her for it, so I am online, trying to find contact information on the man.

As I sit at the computer, I sense that someone is in the room, to my left. I look up and to the left, and I see Howard standing nearby. We just look at one another for a moment.

“Do you always wake up smiling?” he finally says.

The question gives me pause. I cock my head to the right and think. Have I done that? Did I do it that morning when I awoke? I decide I like the idea and realize that I usually do wake up happy.

“I guess I do,” I reply.

I turn back to the computer. Some part of me feels guilty about looking for the telephone number of another man, especially with Howard right there, but I realize that Howard is dead and it is actually okay for me to be doing this. I turn to look at him again and he is gone.

When I drift up from sleep, I realize that this is no ordinary dream, but a visitation from Howard. I also realize that his question is really not so much a question as a statement: Wake up with a smile on your face. Be happy. Carry on with your life. I suspect he is also encouraging me to wake up and accept the possibility of romance at some point when I’m ready.

His fundamental message is simple, but very important to me. It becomes a kind of mantra: Wake up smiling.

Later in the year, in October, I have another visitation during a dream.

In the dream, I have been sleeping and awaken. I’m troubled by something that happened before I went to bed and get up, deciding I won’t be able to return to sleep immediately. I walk through the house, noticing that some things are out of place, not put away by me before I’d gone to bed. Worse, I see that I have inadvertently left the front door open with my keys in the lock. I pull out the keys, shut the door, and return to bed, admonishing myself for my carelessness. Someone could have walked right in. I return to sleep.

I awaken (in the dream) and realize that I’d actually been dreaming earlier and hadn’t really gotten up. I can sense that someone is in the house. I get up and go into the guest bedroom. The light is dim, but I can see a form on the bed. I walk over to the bed and realize that it is Howard lying there. I lightly touch his chest and realize that he is solid, not ghost-like. He rouses.

“What are you doing here?” I ask. Then I bend down and kiss him on the lips.

“Soon I’ll be going into stasis,” he replies.

Without his saying anything else, I realize that he is telling me that when he goes into stasis, he won’t be able to contact me again. Somehow, I also know that “stasis” means that he is transitioning into a new form and will be going somewhere new.

When I drift up from the dream, the sense of how physically close I have just been to him is still palpable. I consider the word “stasis” and realize that the meaning of the word in the dream visitation is not any definition with which I am familiar, so I pad down to my office, pull out the dictionary, and look up the word. Sure enough, I see a definition that is consistent with this concept of being between one form and another.

But . . .

Time passes. I have recounted the dream to a few people—including Howard’s sister, who has a BS in nursing and, therefore, understands the concept of stasis. No one has ever heard of the definition from the dream. I find it all curious, so I eventually return to the dictionary and look up the word again. The definition I’d seen that morning in October is simply not there. I know I was fully awake when I looked for the word. I know what I saw. But now it is not there.

I laugh and shake my head. It seems that Howard was very clear about what he meant when he used the word. And he was not going to let the mere fact of a waking reality definition get in the way of his dream visitation definition. So when I looked up the word that morning after the dream, I saw what he wanted me to see in the dictionary.

It was so Howard, so like him. I knew he’d managed to hover nearby for just a bit that morning, even after I awoke.

He may be off somewhere, in another form, but he still manages to whisper words of encouragement now and then and he still gives me his opinion when I ask for it. But . . . there have been no more dream visitations.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall

The Things I Missed

By fall, I had grown accustomed to the word “widow” and to the fact of widowhood. I found myself referring to Howard as “my late husband,” a term I was sure would make him double over in laughter on the other side. In his best Jack Benny imitation, his left hand cupping his jaw and his right hand supporting his left elbow, I imagined him saying, “Well!” in mock frustration, then arguing that his timing had always been impeccable.

I missed “my late husband” in many ways, and not the least of them was his goofy humor. He didn’t pull out the Jack Benny often. More often it was his East Indian guru—an irreverent imitation of Deepak Chopra—or his Transylvanian vampire version of the song, “You Do Something to Me.” I may or may not have had the power to mystify him, but he had the power to make me laugh every time, without fail, with his Transylvanian vampire rendition of that song. He’d done a little standup comedy in his youth and he not only chose to look at life with humor, he chose to take the events and happenings of our everyday lives and use them as material. My job was to roll my eyes and fight to keep from cracking a smile. A tiny drawing of an egret would be accompanied by “Egrets? I’ve had a few.” He was willing to do slapstick but preferred taking the ordinary and putting a little twist on it. If all else failed, his answer to practically everything was, “Let’s all get naked.”

I missed our conversations. He was erudite, smart, and philosophical. We agreed on many things and disagreed on many others, but we never lacked for interesting talk. His head for facts and my head for concepts gave us one nicely balanced mind between us, and he was one of the few men I’d ever been close to who could keep up with me intellectually. The fact that I didn’t want to talk politics and he didn’t want to talk metaphysics didn’t hamper us. There was always something to ponder aloud and roll around so we could get a good look at its many sides. And we were always as happy talking about the birds at the feeder or the flowers coming up in the garden as we were talking about the meaning of life. In fact, it could be argued that we viewed the birds and flowers as inherently meaningful components of life.

I missed having a companion who was at much at home at the opera as at a Rockies game. I missed dinners on the lower deck, under the flowering crab. I missed trips with him to bookstores and antiques stores, and I missed having a beer or glass of mead with him at Wynkoop Brewing Company.

I missed his unique stride, which was just a tiny bit bow-legged and always taken with the kind of casual confidence that made him look as if he owned the turf on which he tread.

I missed our morning ritual. As I put on makeup and styled my hair, he would stop outside the bathroom or dressing room door and wait until I paused what I was doing to turn to him. Then he would say, “You’re gonna look pretty today, aren’t you?” or “Are you putting on your fascinators?”

I missed his calling me “Little One,” sometimes emphasizing the word “One,” as if to say, “Forget the first three wives, you’ve always been the one.”

I missed that particular brand of loyalty and integrity he shared with a few other remarkable men I’d known, a commitment to what was right and true, with no apologies for loving America or staying true to his friends or being just a tad bit conservative. Well, okay, maybe more than a tad bit conservative.

I missed the fact that he knew as many lyrics as me and I even missed his annoying habit of playing fast and loose with lyrics, changing them at will if he couldn’t quite remember all of them or if he just wanted to be perverse.

I missed his native view of the world, a way of seeing things so different from mine that it was sometimes startling to me.

Often, something would flit by on the screen of my consciousness, something that caught my attention because of its absence, or caught my attention because it called up a fond memory, or caught my attention because a sight or sound or smell or internal sensation reminded me of that particular uniqueness that was him . . . and was gone.

That the particular uniqueness of any human cannot be replaced became something I came to understand in the same way we come to understand the uniqueness of a sunset or a spring day. That uniqueness is there and then it is gone. Nothing can replace it. It, and everything else, is fleeting and gorgeous and just a little sad . . . because it is fleeting and gorgeous.

Copyright 2012 by Melanie Mulhall