Tom had been unusually quiet in the last year or so. It was 2013, he’d died in 2010, and I hadn’t gotten a phone call about him since late 2011, early 2012. Before that, I’d heard from him plenty.
The first time was the day he died. He appeared briefly in my sister’s house, yelled at her to buy the piece of property she and her husband had been looking at, and threw a book to land open on a page with words she needed to hear at that particular point in her life. He also, “Told me to go write the damn lyrics and give ‘em to you so you’d know that he knew what you were feeling. I didn’t want to give them to you because I knew you wouldn’t want to hear them then, but he insisted.” She was right—I didn’t want to hear them. I read through them once, choked on the emotion, and put the piece away. But our three-way connection didn’t end there.
Sis called one day out of the blue to tell me she’d heard from an empathic friend/acquaintance of hers, because someone named “Tom” was trying to get a message to his wife and said Sis knew her. Her being me, obviously. Message: “I’m still here.”
Well, shit, I already knew he was still in the house because it was July, and I tend to walk around barefoot in the summer. Tom’s dresser was still in his office, which I was still clearing out, and his metal music stand was still shoved up against the end of the dresser, where he’d always kept it when he wasn’t using it. But every single morning as I stumbled from bedroom to kitchen to feed our clowder, I’d stub my toe or outright trip on the damn music stand. Even though every single night I pushed it flush against the chest of drawers as I went to bed so I wouldn’t. Every night. And every next morning it was pulled out into my path, which, yes, I would have clearly seen if’n I had both eyes open. But that bedroom-to-cat-food stumble was typically done with eyes half closed, hence the non-notice, hence the toe stubbing, hence knowing it was him letting me know he was still in the house.
It went on until I got on the phone with said empath and told her to tell him I knew he was hanging around. “Tell him it’s okay to move on,” I said.
“He not ready yet.”
“Then tell him to leave the damn music stand up against the dresser!”
Pause.
“He says okay.”
End of stubbing. But not of messages.
One of my former students had a friend who had a friend, yadda yadda, who was studying to be an akashic reader and needed to do sessions with three more strangers to get her certification or whatever it was. I had no idea what an akashic reader was, but the student had become first a friend, then a fan, and finally my public relations guru, so I said yes. Always happy to help people I don’t know accomplish things I have no clue about. I’m nothing if not dumbasfuckedly consistent.
The friend-of-a-friend-yadda-yadda calls me at the appointed time, explains she’s going to contact my shit-I-don’t-remember-her-terminology, and asks my name. I give it to her, she goes quiet, then says she can’t find me. Do I ever use another name?
I tell her my stage/pen name, the one my mother gave me for when I became a movie star. Bingo—there I was.
“Okay, I’m going to connect to your spirit and… uh, wait a minute—someone’s here.”
“Someone’s there? Who?”
“Hang on, he’s talking…
She talks to whoever is talking, lots of uh huhs, okays, and okay, buts, as if she can’t get a word in edgewise.
“I’m sorry, he’s still talking,” she apologizes in my ear.
“It’s my husband,” I say. “He talks a lot.”
“He says he’s your husband.”
“Like I said….”
“Hang on… wait… Listen, can you tell him to go to the light? I can’t get a reading with him talking to me. He just wants you to know he’s still here, and that he loves you.”
“I know he’s still here, and I know he loves me. ‘Tom, if you can hear me, go to the light.’”
“Oh, good! He’s leaving. That was amazing. I’ve never experienced anything like that. I’ve heard about it, but none of my teachers ever actually saw it. One of them said it was just a myth!”
“What, that a guy who had a million words in his mouth when he was alive still has half-a-million left in the afterlife?”
“No—that he has a piece of your soul in him. I saw it. And you have a piece of his soul in you. The two of you are true soulmates!”
I almost said, “So tell me something I don’t know,” but I figured that’d be too snarky. She was so young and earnest. I let her rattle on with whatever she was saying. She verbed the word “grace” quite a bit, but nothing beyond that stuck in my database. Still, there it was, as if I needed third-party verification. Tom and I were/are soul mates. He loved/loves me. Huh.
Realize, that had been a thing between us for a long time. I always knew he needed me, even though he didn’t want me. I took as given that he loved me because he said so a lot, and because, well, I loved him—more than he did me, which we both knew and, yes, mutually accepted. But he did love me. Oh, not the way the fairytales describe love. I didn’t “feel more beautiful in his presence,” as the poets claim.
It was more like the line in Shall We Dance[1] when Susan Sarandon said people get married because they need a witness to their life. Yes, exactly; Tom and I were each other’s witnesses. More than mere caring or even love, I mattered to his life, and he mattered to mine. What’s that old saying? “People come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” I’ve known since my mid-twenties that folks regularly came into, through, and out of my perimeter: “I’m an easy person to leave. People get tired of me after awhile. Better enjoy it while I’ve got it.” And while those individuals were important to me at the time, their weight was ephemeral. I did my best to absorb the lessons while they were present and release their presences when they moved on. Some, probably many, have forgotten me as easily.
But even at our worst, Tom and I could never move on. We could never psychically get away from each other, even when we were lying, hiding, and denying right to the other’s face. Soul mates. Enmeshed. Alphabet-soup-after-their-name therapist types call it co-dependency; some of those I ghosted for gave me dire warnings about pathologies and urgent protocols to cure us, but hey, that was just their limited learnin’ clouding their mind.
Toward the end, in that last set of in-and-out hospital stays that checked all the boxes on the hospitalists’ forms so they’d conform to non-malpractice protocols and insurance requirements, Tom very much wanted me to know that he really did love me, so it’s no surprise that he still wants me to know.
And I do know. I never logged or tracked it, but sometimes I feel my wedding ring on my finger, which I haven’t worn since a few weeks after he died. Some might chalk the sensation up to a jangling nerve radiating from that old thoracic-disc permanent-injury, but if so it wouldn’t pass as quickly as it comes, especially when I don’t change position.
No, it’s just Tom, letting me know he’s around, giving me the one thing I miss more than anything else: a hug.
My last mediated interaction with him happened just a few years ago. An author/friend who had channeled a book about spirit offered to do a reading for me, and, surprise, surprise, Tom appeared in her consciousness.
I said, “Yeah, we still can’t get away from each other.”
“No, that’s not true,” she replied. “He says you choose to not get away from each other.”
I can hardly dispute that. As I type these words, I feel my ring on my finger.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Hoatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”[2]
[1] Shall We Dance, 2004 screenplay by Masayuki Suo, Audrey Wells, directed by Peter Chelsom, based on the 1996 Japanese film written and directed by Masayuki Suo.
[2] Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1.5.168