"What I don't understand," I told Silas a few days later, "is why dying has to be so unpleasant. Why does it have to hurt so much?"
"Doesn't always hurt," Silas said.
"But it usually does, doesn't it?" I asked.
"Yeah," he conceded. "I guess it does. Getting born is pretty rough on the body, too. Especially for the mama. Transitions are like that, though. Hard to go through changes without some groaning."
"Why is that?"
"I'm not sure," Silas answered. "I haven't lived long enough to know."
"And it seems like we're always in the middle of something when we die, always loose ends. Do any of us ever die when we're ready?"
"Who's to say what being ready means?" Silas asked. "Life's not tidy. It's got ragged edges. The only people I've ever known who weren't doing something when they died were in a coma. Sometimes the coma's physical. Sometimes it's just spiritual. Sometimes people quit living a long time before they quit breathing."
"And the other thing I don't like about dying," I said, "is that a lot of times you don't get to say goodbye. I mean, to the person who dies."
"Yeah," Silas agreed. "That's real frustrating. 'Course there are many ways of saying goodbye. And when it's real, real important, life has a way of slipping in and helping out. Like in visions or some seemingly peculiar event. We do tend to minimize these things, though. We call them dreams sometimes, or maybe coincidences. Sometimes, when you're alive, it's hard to see the truth."
"For example?"
"Well," Silas said with a tiny clip of impatience in his voice. "The world is full of examples."
"Just give me one," I smiled, and he smiled back.
"Fine." He cleared his throat. "This one woman I met a few years ago, I'll tell you about her. She had a little boy named Sam who died when he was eight years old. Some kind of cancer, I don't remember exactly. Well, naturally, she was devastated."
"Naturally," I said.
Silas continued. "One night, about two weeks after Sam's funeral, she has to go to the store for some milk. Just before she walks into the building, she sees this old man. As she passes by him he says to her, "I've been waiting for you.' Naturally, she was startled," Silas said.
"Naturally."
"She looks at the old man, but doesn't know what to say, so he continues. 'I just wanted you to know that Sam's okay.' Well, the woman starts to cry, covers her face with her hands, and runs into the store. She stops all of a sudden, rushes back outside, looks all around the parking lot, but the old man's gone."
"Was the old man really there?" I asked. "Did he really speak to her?"
"What do you think?"
"Sounds pretty fantastic," I said.
"Well, you have to decide for yourself. I've got to go pick up the mail." And he headed out across the bluebonnet field.
I walked in the opposite direction, and as I walked I remembered.
Michael died in June 1976. I was in college in Tennessee that summer, and he was living in Texas. He was killed on a motorcycle on his way back to work after lunch.
I didn't have a phone at that time, and it wasn't until the next morning that I learned he had died. I drove the five hour drive back to Elizabethtown in two and a half hours. The next week was a blur.
I was very close to Michael's parents and stayed at their house until I returned to school the Sunday after his death. That Saturday night I had the first sound sleep I had had since Michael died.
Suddenly, I shot up in the bed. Without thinking, without deliberating, I walked across the room, down the stairs, through the living room, around the corner by the kitchen, and opened the basement door. I walked down the steps and stopped.
His casket, the one that he had been buried in three days earlier, was in the middle of the room. The top half of the lid was open, and he was lying very, very still. His eyes were closed.
And then Michael opened his eyes, sat up rather casually, and looked over at me. "Well, hey, Kitten," he smiled. Michael was the only person who ever called me Kitten, and he never called me that in front of anyone else.
Michael climbed out of his casket, walked to me, and we sat down on the stairs. We talked for a long, long time. I don't remember the conversation, but I remember we laughed, and I remember he held my hand.
After a few hours a gray fog of morning sun began easing through the dusty basement windows. Michael looked over at me, smiled, and said, "Well. Gotta go."
"Do you love me still?" I asked.
"Better than any other way!" he smiled, and we both giggled at the old joke we had shared with one another since high school.
Michael stood up, hugged me, walked back to the casket, climbed in, and closed his eyes. His face dissolved into a mask.
When I opened my own eyes again I was lying back in bed.
A dream? I always wondered.
What muddied the whole story up even more, though, was when Michael's dad Ted got sick twenty- two years later. When I learned he was in the hospital, I left my home in Massachusetts and came back to Kentucky. I visited Ted every day, though he was only semiconscious, and I doubted he even knew I was there.
About two weeks after I returned to Kentucky, Ted developed a low-grade infection that went unchecked by the hospital staff and his doctor. His gall bladder ruptured, and they prepared him for emergency surgery. I took his wife to the hospital to visit him less than an hour before the operation was to begin. When we walked into the room, Ted was sitting up. He turned and looked at me with clear eyes, and said, "Well, hello, Kitten!"
Ted never regained consciousness after his surgery and he died of peritonitis two weeks later.
Sounds pretty fantastic?
Well, you have to decide for yourself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR