Buried treasure
My office at home is frequently home to piles of disorganized pages of guitar chords and lyrics of songs I’m learning. Well, they’re not really disorganized; it’s just that they are organized in about a dozen different ways, so the end result is disorganization, anyway. So bad has it gotten that half the time I cannot lay my hands on the piece of music I want, and end up rifling through page after page. I decided to look into one of those digital sheet music displays I’d heard about, but when I learned they ran $900, I decided on plan B: I would just make sure all the music I had on paper was on my laptop, and I would fire that up to read my music. Everything would be organized alphabetically, and searching would be effortless. And it wouldn’t cost me a cent. I spent the greater part of my Saturday evening working on that.
I find a lot of my chords and tabs online and save them to my computer anyway, so I had most of them. But they were scattered here and there on a flash drive and a back-up hard drive and on the laptop itself, and there was a lot of other stuff mixed in between them, much of which I had to take a look at to figure out what it was.
I ran across “Manhã de Carnaval” and when I opened it to see if it was just lyrics or lyrics and chords, I found something totally unexpected. It was lyrics, and a screenshot photo I’d taken of A as we’d chatted on April 4, 2005, at 9:17:34 p.m. That moment in time had been recorded with such precision.
He was smiling as he looked at the screen, and I can only assume I put that smile on his face with my extreme wit. I was totally delighted to find this picture. It’s something of a miracle to receive a “new” picture of someone who died over 2 years ago. I don’t know why I put that screenshot there; all I can guess is I’d been working on finding those lyrics as he and I chatted, I needed a place to put the screenshot to get it off my clipboard, and that was the file that was open.
I was giddy to have found it. It felt like a gift, and still feels like one two days later. Photographs and memories…that’s really all I have left; everything else was lost or withheld. So one more picture is a real treasure.
Sunday morning in the shower, I was thinking about the photo, and how truly pleased I was to find it. It was then that it hit me that the reason those photos are so valuable is because he died. When he was alive, I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at photos when I could look at him directly. But that hadn’t figured into my emotional reaction when I found it; when I found it, all I felt was excitement and joy. It didn’t cause me even a moment of pain. And I realized then that, evidently, I have accepted the reality of his permanent (at least as far as this lifetime’s concerned) absence. Because if I had not, I would’ve been upset about having only had a photo unexpectedly restored to me instead of him. My pleasure in finding the photo tells me, I think, that I accept my world as it is now, and that is a world where he is only here in spirit, and a new photograph of a dead man really is a gift.
I don’t know if I’m making any sense. I guess I felt it was significant that the picture was a treasure I could appreciate for what it was, rather than to feel disappointed about because it was a vastly distant second to what I’d rather have and cannot. I am still a little ambivalent about this acceptance business, but healing was ever the goal, and I have to think this shift in perspective is a good thing.
I’ve gotten a bit giddy, too, when I’ve gotten a “new” memory from/about Charley, especially as it’s gotten further and further from his death. A little vignette about him told to me by a friend, which I’d totally forgotten about. A note I ran across from him 1-2 years after he died, that I hadn’t seen in years. Pictures of him from other people that I hadn’t seen (or pictures that I hadn’t really previously liked so never looked at again when he was alive) that are new to me.
They’re all precious to me. Somehow it seems to impress upon me that I can still receive and have new experiences with him, even though he’s dead. Certainly they’re not the type of experiences I’d prefer to have, but I can’t make him undead so they’re all I have.
Although as I read this post (and could hear myself saying virtually all the same things too), I had a different thought too: do the “new” memories make me giddy because it feeds to that mostly-dormant-but-still-sometimes-there part of my brain that wants to delusionally, magically believe that somehow this was all a big mistake, that it never really happened? That if I get these “new” pictures of him, that it must means he must still alive somewhere if I’m getting them?
I know it’s not what I really think, but the thought surprised me, nonetheless.
Glad to see a new blog from you again! I seem to be going through a drought period on mine too….Any news on the cyst front?
I read your comment at Alicia’s about signs; personally, I experience and believe in the truth of them. I’m not sure A sent me that picture, but my past self sent it to my future self. There’s something going on there. I do believe he’s alive somewhere else…or rather, somehow else.
On the cyst, I’ll be having surgery probably the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, maybe the week before. I’ve yet to hear from the schedulers.
You know, I think the reason I *can’t* believe in signs is because, in life, Charley thought they were a load of crap. In life he would have been the last person to believe in them, or to initiate one. It’s hard to believe in an afterlife, in psychic connections, when the person who died believed in none of those things. If he was given a choice of what happened after he died, I have a hard time picturing that he would have been able to accept that he was wrong and that he would have been able to start sending me signs.
But really, I think it’s just my attitude toward him; if it was someone else close to me who’d died who did believe in the possibilities of those things, then I think I could–and probably would–believe in them. But if he didn’t believe in them in life, I have a hard time imagining what he might have tried to use in death.
Darn you (and Alicia too)–you’ve gotten my brain thinking about things I can’t really get a good grasp on. =) I was having a really hard time even trying to write a coherent, correct response right now…and I don’t think I’m even came close to saying what I meant. If I had more time today, I’d say there was a blog post in here for me…but alas, it’s too busy of a day.
Thanks for making me think more! Gonna have to ruminate on this….
A was an agnostic, having given up the Catholic faith of his youth when his father died and A was just a boy; the church had no answers for why God would take away his daddy, and they didn’t particularly care for his questions, either.
I was what I’d ultimately termed an “atheist mystic.” I’d had some unusual experiences, and learned about others, that couldn’t be rationalized away, but I didn’t know what to make of it. I suppose that term is still apt, as I do not believe in the God other people do, but I do believe that what I believe in is the same concept that other people attempt to describe when they refer to “God.” But I do not go in for the idea that God is just an omnipotent dad.
A and I didn’t believe in an afterlife, but we were willing to be wrong on the point. One night as we talked about it, we agreed that whoever died first, if s/he discovered we’d been wrong, would try to let the other one know. I do believe he’s done this in spades. When I talk about it to people who want to know, I say I was not given faith; I was given reason to believe. And I needed that.
I was a believer in signs before, though the experiences after A died were far more intense than any I’d ever run across and solidified my belief. I don’t believe in coincidences. When we were planning to move out here, we got all kinds of signs–songs on the radio, sometimes literal signs–indicating it was the right choice for us, though we were unsure of that a decade ago.
As Einstein said, you have 2 choices: you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or everything is. I’m in the latter camp.
Speaking of signs…A always used to thank me for making him think. So you provided my sign today, Candice.
Thanks.