Knowing where to look

When Sandy was alive, I never questioned her existence or her presence in my life, whether she was at work, out with friends, working alone in the garden, in another room of the house, or two inches from me. To find her and talk with her, I just needed to know where to look. 

She's in the back corner, working on bindweed on the fence.

Increasingly, I realize that hasn't changed with her death. Now, she often comes to me in visitation dreams, dreams that are different from ordinary dreams. And whether the encounter is sweet or cranky, I feel less alone and comforted when I wake up. Sometimes I just sense her presence; sometimes she drops things or otherwise uses inanimate objects to communicate with me. Sometimes, very rarely, I believe she interacts with me through young children or dogs. And sometimes she just inserts her words into my head, with word choices and cadence that aren't mine.

I never know whether people are humoring me or believing me when I talk about communicating with her now. But I've been doing some research, and it's clear that this isn't an unusual occurrence. It seems that the way to communicate with one who has died is to be open to it and to know where to look. I've always been unusually (and often unfortunately) sensitive to others' moods and energy, and I'm learning now what to pay attention to.

We took dozens of photos of lavender fields, and
then suddenly there's a photo with her standing in one.

In a visual sense, that's been true with many photographs. When she first died, I went through photos obsessively, treasuring every image of her. There were many I passed over quickly, because she wasn't the subject of the photo, and only later realized she was there, present, just not obvious. That's very much how she is now, much of the time: present but not obvious. I have to pay attention and know where to look.

See her? She's keeping score.