How old is October anyway with its too many ghosts and witches and hauntings and how will you show up this year in the month when you first became ill? There are layers of sadness some of us haven’t even started to dip our toes into but you will watch us through the eye of an owl and the first frost on the coldest night and sometimes you will play jokes on us through nature.
This year my mom’s tomato plant finally burst with fruit. After years of planting and trying, this year she had a bounty too big to keep up with. Tom would make fun of the measly plants every summer when tomatoes are supposed to grow in Jersey - thick and red, golden and green, there is no shortage of those ripe orbs in New Jersey in the muggy summer months. But my mom’s poor plants wouldn’t produce. This year though, 6 months after Tom’s passing, here was her tiny tomato plant buckling from the weight of its fruit. My mom sent me photos, just in case I didn’t believe her telling me, 10 tomatoes, and then 20, and then so many she couldn’t keep up. “It’s Tom!” she exclaimed. “He’s messing with me! He did this.” And I believe her. Because it’s something he would do.
How do the dead talk to us after they leave? If you ask my mother it’s through nature. It’s the signs that keep her going and she has no time for anyone who does not believe. But I believe her. I send a photo of a big scraggly crow following me on my walk through Golden Gate Park. Keeping just enough distance to not make me too nervous but enough so that I am very aware of his presence. “It’s Tom.” she replies, matter of factly, “he’s following you.”
The dead show up wherever they want when they leave us and Tom is lingering around all of us. Time and space stop existing when you die and if energy can’t travel without a passport what hope is there for any of us?
Andre checks into the hotel and there is a pigeon on the windowsill of our room, fat and concrete gray staring at him with little black eyes. He takes a photo which I promptly send to my mom, “That’s Tom”, she replies “checking him out”.
If our energy just shifts into wind and dust and cloud when we die then he is everywhere - in the first dusting of winter snow, in the dew on the back porch at dawn, in the fog hovering over the bridge at the end of a long day. In the beads of water that cling to the ripe skin of those tomatoes on my mom’s back porch.
“He always took me on the best dates, and he still does. Only now it’s the galaxy, outer space, groves of woods painted in oranges and purples, majestic and unreal.”
My mother describes these dates to me in great detail, proving that it happened, showing how real it was, “we were sitting on the edge of the galaxy and he was pointing out clusters of stars, dark matter, it was so vivid, it glowed.” And I can see it, the celestial orbs in blues and purples floating all around them.
I didn’t ask how he took her there, or what they were sitting on as they stared into the abyss of the galaxy.
But I believe her. And I find myself longing for this, hoping that when one of us dies we still visit each other at night, to take the other on a tour of the cosmos, to show each other around the other side, to keep a seat saved, a spot warm.
I have multiple occurrences of both parents. Sometimes so obvious it’s hilarious.
My father passed less than a year ago and I hope that he's visiting me too. I thought I saw him in a hummingbird recently. <3