She's not that dead

Sandy was a force. If she was in a room, you knew she was there. She changed the dynamics of any group  she entered, even when she didn't say anything. And it was rare that she didn't say anything.

As she died, that force faded. I was even a little bored the last afternoon of her life. As I sat next to her, still holding her hand, I felt restless and reached for my email, read some blogs for the first time in weeks. I felt guilty about it, and mystified, but I realize now that most of what was interesting about Sandy had already started to leave. After her heart stopped beating, I was surprised that I felt no connection with the body that remained. It wasn't her. She'd become so dehydrated, so weak, and she'd lost all of her hair after the brain radiation -- she looked like a parody of herself. Her energy had already gone. It left the building before her body was carried out.

But her energy didn't just disappear. The next day, July 20, as I was putting the trash out, I found a neatly folded, clean copy of The New York Times. Dated June 15. A little background - it was on June 15 that our lives fell apart, that things skewed off the plan. I'd said repeatedly that I wanted to go back to June 15; I wanted our lives back. So it was clear to me that this magical newspaper was a message from Sandy. She wanted our lives back, too, and I should focus on our life before June 15 and not all the trauma that followed. I treasured it, beamed, boasted, and wanted MORE!

Other messages followed in different forms. Small children who sought me out to beam at me, turning 90 degrees to say "hi" while gazing into my eyes. It's not that kids usually avoid me or anything, but these were some extremely personal encounters.  I felt Sandy in them.

When I created her estate account, it went smoothly. But when the nice man at the credit union went to close out her checking account and move the funds to the estate account, he wasn't able to access her account. Nor could the back office. Nor could the IT folks. There was a problem with the underlying software that captures images from driver's licenses for identification - but the problem was only with Sandy's account. She didn't want anyone taking her money!

As weeks passed, she hasn't interacted as much with the larger world to communicate with me. Instead, I feel her in the house with me (or not, when she's gone somewhere else), and sometimes she replies to me with thoughts in my head. I'm sure I appear crazy to some people, but I know Sandy's voice and speaking patterns and they differ from mine. Some thoughts are mine; some are hers.

A few weeks ago, I had a dream in which Sandy was back, and she'd just gotten off the phone with her best friend. I asked whether it had freaked her friend out to talk to a dead person. Sandy looked at me, exasperated, and said, "I'm not that dead." She was right. She's not that dead. Her body is gone, reduced to the ashes that sit in a blue bottle on our bedroom dresser. But her spirit, the part of her that was uniquely Sandy, lives on. I am immensely grateful for that.