DMV Part 4: Car Wax

“I’m not sure how much to believe,” emailed my mom, about the dead ex-husband blog series.

There’s no need for you to believe anything. It's still a good story. (And if you are wanting to skip these  musings for the good story, scroll down to "The Car Detailing Groupon.")

“How do you know it’s him?” asked a friend.

I don’t know. I just know.

How do you know it’s me when I call you? Because your phone says it’s me and I sound like me…but there’s still a level of belief involved since you can’t see or touch me. With texting, even more so. Indeed I am more comfortable in the energetic/esoteric realms than most people, but for me, this heavenly communication does seem to be only a step beyond cell phones.

The way I know it’s him?  --is that I am moved to tears.  Something in the physical world reminds me of him. Then I feel or (silently) hear him. There is a timing involved, and a visceral sense. Some level of trust. A wave passes through me, a wave of relief and connection.

“Oh, hi!” (And guilt. Every time.)

Incidentally, that is all a guru is: someone who mirrors you back to yourself. Shows you what's inside. A guru is not all-knowing (“he’s a computer guru”). That’s an Americanization of the concept. A guru is simply someone who lights up the darkness—inside you. So I am going to go way out on a limb and say that Barrett is a guru to me now (he was when he was alive, too, but I was too blinded by my projections to see). Without the immediacy of his physical form to remind me of our shared past, I can now clearly see my internal self, my projections that I heaped onto him, my judgments about his life, and the residue of all that, which presents itself in the form of guilt. I can see it all in a way I couldn’t, when he was alive.

Preventing death is the American way. How could I have prevented his death? That question assumes there is no God-force, no meant-to-be, no greater Universal force that has its own Divine Timing no matter what…and I do “believe in,” because I have experienced, all of those; although I see that it was his departure time, the human part of me does still feel that “I could have done more.” We American people fear death, dread death, want to prevent death, and feel that death is a failure. But “death is bad” is just a point of view--such an ingrained point of view that we don’t even realize it’s a point of view; it is a TRUTH, to us! Death is bad! Everybody knows that. Don’t we?

We feel guilty if we think we could have helped prevent it. In addition, in my case, I feel guilty that I wasn’t nice to him in life.

“He totally doesn’t care about that anymore, Mom,” Lily assured me, when I mentioned that two days before he died he’d asked me to have dinner with him and I’d said no. I didn’t feel guilty for saying no; I felt guilty about how I’d said it, as if he’d asked, “Do you want to dine on grasshoppers?” I hadn't felt the least bit guilty at the time I'd said it.

Through my guilt and the thick enculturation of death-is-bad beliefs, my experience of Barrett is that he is happier now. That death for him was not bad. In every communication we’ve had with him, there’s been an inherent message: life after life is great! 

This does have a soothing effect on the guilt.

Many of the people I’ve talked to about death since Barrett died have a level of guilt attached to the death of a loved one. People whose loved one died a slow death, however, do not seem to have this guilt factor; they had time to make amends. Frankly I’m not sure that even if Barrett had died a slow death, I would have actually made amends. I can more realistically imagine myself at his death bed, saying, “You should have taken better care of yourself,” and, “You should have listened to me when I said to drink green juice.” I needed to experience the finality before I could truly see the invisible box I had put him in, the box called “No matter what he does or says, he's wrong.” Everything he said to me in the last ten or 15 years had to penetrate my projection of: this man has disappointed me. And my projection was thick with resentment. Until the minute he died, I thought he deserved my resentment.

I can't thank him enough for helping reveal that to me.

Whether or not anyone else agrees that it’s Barrett, my experience is the same, as are the results.

Even if it's not a Cosmic Wink from a deceased person, if even just the memory of Barrett reminds me, or Lily, to be conscious in that moment, to see and feel what's inside us—does it matter if his presence is “real”? Either way, it has opened us to a bigger perspective on life, has opened me up to more gratitude for each living breath, has added a really cool mystery to our life.

That reminds me.

THE CAR DETAILING GROUPON!

It was only a month after Barrett’s departure. I’d been wanting to get his car detailed. Even with his deep and abiding love for the Jetta, he didn’t get it waxed nearly enough, in my opinion. Black cars need to be waxed often! They soak it up!

I didn’t want to get Johnny detailed just anywhere. I had a certain place in mind: River North Hand Car Wash (call two weeks ahead, because they are very busy waxing people’s Porsches), unless they didn’t come through with a Groupon, which, why would they? It is a high-end car wash and it’s always full…and expensive. So not unlike a bikini wax, I needed the car wax to be half price. It was somewhat of a reach to think this ONE car wash would send out a Groupon, but stranger things have happened (see DMV Part 1), and I was willing to be patient. It’s not like car wax is an emergency. Unlike a bikini wax.

So I set the intention, back-burnered it, woke up one morning, and much to my surprise and delight there was a Groupon for River North Hand Car Wash! And the date of this Groupon was not just any date. It was April 12...our wedding anniversary! Could not help but notice. (Would this be considered my present to him, or his present to me, I wondered.)

Our anniversary interaction over the past ten years since we divorced:

Him: Happy Anniversary!

Me: Grrrrrr.

I held on to the anniversary Groupon for a number of days, pondering when it would be most convenient to not have a car for a few hours. When a gap surfaced in my schedule, I called the elite car wash.

“Sorry,” they said, “We are fully booked all week. Our first available opening is…a week from Friday.”

“I’ll take it!” I said, grateful that there was any opening at all. I hung up and entered it into my calendar…noticing that this "first available opening" for Barrett’s car, two Fridays away, was going to occur on…Barrett’s birthday! (My present to him, apparently.) Happy Anniversary, Happy Birthday, and thanks for the really clean fast car that hold so many memories and sports such fascinating, cosmically winking numbers. Jai Guru!

By the way, if you would enjoy more stories about signs from departed loved ones, you can read about our friend Joe, the dad of a boy in Lily’s Waldorf class. Our families met at Waldorf when our kids were a year old, before the word 'blog' existed (it was coined in May 1999). Joe died unexpectedly three years ago and not in a million years would I have thought Cole’s mom Katybeth and I would both be writing blogs about our kids’ dead dads and their invisible hands in our kids’ lives.

SPEAKING OF JOE, when Lily and I were living in New Mexico, Cole came to visit his grandparents in Albuquerque, so we made plans to see him. He was on winter break and Lily wasn't, so I planned to pick her up from school and head to ABQ. She got in the car.

“How was school?” My inevitable question.

“MOM.”

Me being silent. Sometimes with a teenager, this works better than guessing.

“MOM. Is this the day we’re going to see Cole?”

Affirmative.

"Today, for sure?"

Yes.

“Ok, so today? In algebra? We were plotting three coordinates? And guess what mine were?”

No idea, not sure what coordinates even are, or how to plot them.

“J., O., and E!!”

This!—on the very day we were meeting Joe’s much-loved son. I had read Katybeth’s blogs avidly and knew Joe was not gone-gone. I’m not sure what kind of proof other people want, but I needed none. He had always liked Lily. Joe (and whatever powers-that-be orchestrate these things) was blessing the adventures of Lily and Cole with what we now call a “Cosmic Wink.”

<Go to Part 5!>