I go to visit her gravesite almost every time I’m in Saratoga now, which confuses even me because we were not really friends when she was alive, here.
We knew each other in elementary school, junior high and high school, but after graduation we went down different roads, staying connected in the faintest of ways: the ether of social media where one can keep track of other peoples’ lives, if one chooses.
When she got sick it felt like the red flag of our high school graduating class went up, which makes me proud, to know that in spite of the forty years that have passed since we all left that awful building and mostly unpleasant experience, there are invisible threads of kindness and caring that still hold us together.
I watched from a distance as she went through treatment, relapse, more intense treatment, fatigue, disease. All the while encouraging the rest of us to live fully and with gratitude. The one who needed love and support the most had taken up the pom poms of cancer and was trying to get it through our thick heads: don’t take your health for granted!
Then she died and some of us did the wait in line and file past the closed casket thing. Dinner afterwards, heads shaking wondering how we got here. Weren’t we, just yesterday, running this town with our vibrant, tireless youth? Our derring do? Our belief that we would live forever, wrinkle-free and omnipotent?
So I go see her now, at the cemetery across from our old high school. As one of the new kids on the block she has a spot in the very back row. I went the day after her body was buried and saw the flowers from her service strewn on top of the dirt. I watched the space evolve: the next time the flowers were gone and there was grass seed on the top. Then came the headstone with her birthdate and her husband’s name and birthdate. Each time I draw a little heart in the earth. Usually I bring my coffee and just hang out there with her. A couple of times there were other folks visiting other people’s gravesites nearby. I’m getting to know the neighborhood. The mom of one of the dead guys told me about her son: how he was a hockey player, a twin. He died of some form of addiction. She told me about the family buried near him, two kids, also addiction, then the mom, heartbreak, probably.
I went the other day and there was snow on the ground, so I drew a heart in the snow. It was the morning after I had had an asthma event and ended up in the ER, unable to breathe well. My poor parents, I had to wake them up in the middle of the night to drive me to the hospital; I was staying at their home. The scene in the ER was horrible, as was the “care” I received. But I saw the fatigue, the overwhelm on the faces of the nurses and intake people. I saw that no one wanted to work in those circumstances anymore. I couldn’t breathe that night and yet no one looked me in the eye and said I would OK. I knew exactly what I needed: one puff of albuterol, which I had forgotten to pack, but no one cared. They had their protocols they had to follow even though a single shot of oxygen would have gotten me out of my crisis and their way in minutes.
It was awful, but let me tell you this: it was great, too. Because I wondered, when I couldn’t get a deep breath and panic set in in the middle of the night and the panic made the breathing even worse, I wondered if it was curtains for me, if I would die gasping for breath, something I feel fairly certain has happened to me in another life.
It was great because I had to touch that place again, that moment of truth: am I done living?
And if not, then what?
Not, it turns out. So here we go.
What’s left?
I had been chewing on this idea of pulling together what I’ve learned in a decade or so of being a medium. Then I realized that I’ve spent a decade as a pastor, too.
As a pastor I’ve tried to help people figure out how to live.
As a medium I’ve tried to help people understand that it’s OK to die.
I have no idea how my life came to be this way: that I would be here to teach people tenants of living and dying, because it feels like a heavy load, right? Why didn’t I come here to be a grocery cashier or a librarian? I was obsessed with the sounds their machines made when I was a kid: the click of the round keys on the cash register; the thwump of the machine that imprinted the due date on the book card.
No, no machinery, other than this keyboard. A microphone on Sunday mornings.
Why are any of us here and some of us not here anymore? I think about this a lot when I’m standing by her grave. Why are you there and I’m here and who has the better deal?
Her cancer ordeal lasted years: my breathing struggles just a few hours. I tasted death, again; she is already there.
I like to watch the trees and birds and the light near where her body is buried. It’s so quiet there, even though the cemetery is on a busy road. From what I could tell she was kind and funny and wild in that terrific way when she was alive. I remember her that way when we were kids; it’s no surprise that she was all that as a grown-up, too. In death, for me, she is peaceful and gentle. Sitting there at the burial site of this woman I knew then didn’t really know somehow grounds me in this weird life, almost like I’m getting to know her all over again. Each time I go what I find I want to do most is thank her for having chosen to live well, for having chosen to teach people what living well looks like, even when her cancer was killing her.
I go to express my gratitude.
Most of the time I leave her grave and go down the road to the honor system farm stand. There is everything there you could want to eat well: spinach, bacon, maple candy, potatoes, cheese, bread, all local grown or made or raised.
From there I go back into my life, wondering, sometimes, when I’ll end up where she is or how she is, I guess. Until then, breathing well today, I’ll keep doing the work, trying to help, eating my spinach, stopping by her snowy grave to say hello, draw a heart, and raise a cup of coffee to her good life.
xomo
Melissa can be reached via email here. She holds office hours at 112 Spring Street in Saratoga Springs: spiritual care, life counseling and spiritual mediumship. She holds a microphone in front of the Peru Church in the quaintest Vermont town you have ever seen, every Sunday at 10.
Thank you
Glad you are ok. Big Love to you Melissa.