Soulshine, a Work in Progress

Chip loved reading. Our shelves and his bedside table are filled with books. I frequently teased him about how many books sat around gathering dust, while also buying more books for him to read. I often joked with him that I don’t read, even though I know how to read, and he would laugh at my bad joke every time.

Reading has always felt too passive and not interactive enough for me. When I read, other people’s words it can be hard for me to remain focused. I end up having a million thoughts, feelings, visions and remembrances when I sit passively and read what others have written. So, I write rather than read.

I also write because it is cathartic. The medium doesn’t matter. I just need to get "it" out of my head. Sometimes the words fall onto the page (paper or digital) in a creative manner, in the form of poems and vignettes (for that novel I will self-publish one day!). Sometimes they reveal themselves in basic, modern ways: texts, emails, comments or responses on social media (especially regarding politics or observations about the world around me). Occasionally, I write philosophically, and think about how to “save” (or at least change) the world, my community or myself. I often write to disseminate knowledge as I understand it as well as to share stories.

The summer that my marriage of 19 years began falling apart, an idea for a story came to me out of nowhere while visiting a college friend at her beach house on the north shore of Long Island. As I walked down the beach alone on a chilly, misty, gray morning ( a rare moment of aloneness with 5 children aged 2 to 16 years old at the time), a flood of thoughts came into my mind about a female character in search of herself. When I returned to my friend's house, the story ideas poured out of me onto paper. I had had no formal creative writing or fiction writing experience or training (I still haven’t), but I had to get the words out of me. That’s all I knew at the time. Over the course of the story that developed in my head, the character discovers her deepest self by coming to understand her past selves and the past lives of important people in her life. She comes to know that she had lived a past life as a child in war-torn, WW2 Britain, as an unfulfilled socialite in New York City at the turn of the 19th century, as an ingénue in Revolutionary France, and as a princess/falconer in 15th-century Poland. She comes to realize that those around her (e.g., her husband, a student of hers, her children, her friend) had all traveled previous lives with her. After Chip received his pancreatic cancer diagnosis at the end of 2016, I couldn’t work on the story anymore. There was a part of it that I had written way back in 2012/2013 that eerily hit too close to home. I share this part now in my blog in order to get the vignette out into the Universe, with the hope that it doesn’t weigh on me anymore. The weight of it has blocked me from writing more of the story. From “Soulshine” (working title):

Sophia sat in Derek's hospital room, her heart dragging. The doctor gave him hours, maybe less. What had started as the size of a pea months before was now the size of a large tangerine. There was no treatment, no cure. Although she had known the course of his cancer for weeks, the hunched-back pain in her heart thickened hourly.

Her heart sat somewhere between the top of her throat and her chest. It seemed to be attenuating, willingly allowing more of her to feel the painful heartache of the loss when it would eventually happen. In losing Derek, she knew the shape of her heart would forever be changed. Like the molecules of clay she was so used to pulling at and tugging in her home studio and her classroom at The Corcoran, her heart and soul molecules were being tugged at by the Universe as it began to tear him from her.

Derek was at peace when he suddenly spoke. "It's OK, my love. I'm going where we'll be together again."

“What if I don't make it to Heaven?,” she asked. She thought of all the things she had done in her life that broke the rules of her Christian faith. She thought briefly of Lukas.

Derek smiled. "We're all going to the same place, regardless of the sins defined by our religion. You know that deep down, Sophia." He was out of breath.

She did know it. They had talked about it so many times. She had learned so much in the time she had been his wife. Her human existence weighed her down, engrained ideas in her head and distorted her view of the Beyond. Derek, being the advanced guide and soul that he was, helped her stay focused on the lessons she was to learn and her purpose in life, rather than reminding her how imperfect she was in his or God's eyes.

"Please don't go yet," she begged him, sobbing into the thinness of his hospital gown.

"It's my time, Sophia. My work here is done." He used every bit of energy to lift his arms and hold her while she lay on his chest. He stroked her hair, concentrating on the curves of her skull under his tired bones.

She wanted to respond, but her sobbing was choking her airflow. She wished she could go with him to the Beyond and considered how she might end this life.

"You have much more work to do, My Soul." He chose his words deliberately. He knew that calling her “My Soul” caused something deep in her to resonate. He knew the name gave her comfort and reminded her that they were almost one and the same soul since they had traveled in so many lives over time with each other. He also knew that the teacher in her would hear his words about inspiring more students, finding and touching more souls, and revealing more Truth to the world. He now had her full attention.

“I will wait for you,” he told her in one of his last few breaths. “And the children,” he added with the slightest smile he could manage. “I will be in the Beyond waiting to be reunited with all of your souls.” Her tears salted her face and lips while she listened.

Before he took his final breath, he opened his eyes wide and smiled directly into hers. As if given one last gust of air from the Universe to speak to his beloved, Derek told her "I am yours forever since I am not coming back. My work on earth is done and now I will work only in the Beyond. I will never know another woman as I've known you. I will never love another in the earthly way I have loved you. You are my final earth love and I am eternally grateful to you, Sophia, for guiding me towards my goal of Junior Guide in the Beyond. I am so grateful to the Universe that you were my final love here.”

As the gust of air that the earth had given him dissipated into the room, he closed his eyes and took nothing more from life as his soul departed.

Her eyes filled. She wanted to stand up bravely and carry his words out of this space of death, but she was choking on her heart. She was frozen there, with her soaking wet face and hair on his chest, completely devoid of air to breath. She thought she might drown in her grief and be able to join him today in the Beyond, but then, like an electric shock, she thought of the children, her students, her friends, and all the other souls who needed her. She knew it was Derek, sending her the first of many reminders that she had a specific life purpose this go-around.

She stood straight up. She held his hand one last time, storing the feeling of how it fit perfectly into hers. She kissed him on the lips and stroked his hair with her free hand. The pull to stay here with him had been so strong, but now that his soul had departed, the pull was no longer. She merely needed her humanness to touch his a few last times.

Sophia left the hospital, forcing her way into the brisk breeze that burned the inside of her nose and stung her cheeks. Her eyes wanted to water, but there were no tears for them. She walked alongside the gray day that Mother Nature painted for her. She believed that Mother Nature did so knowing that the world had one less amazing soul in it today.