Hunger

I have emotional issues around eating. Almost every diet I went on was at my mother’s urging, from the first one at age 17, when she had me lose 20 pounds so I could be a model. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if that first diet wasn't the beginning of a road to hell. Because I gradually gained that weight back when I decided modeling for my mother's minuscule agency was a dead end and another way for her to control me. And I added a little bit more weight on, as well. So I eventually dieted again. And the same happened. Over and over, a classic yo-yo-dieting routine. Gain it, lose it, regain it and then some.

What if I'd never started? My eating habits then were so much better than the ones I've subsequently formed through the confusing welter of diet programs. But then, America wasn't the land of the obese back then, either. 

Anyway. Not dieting became a form of rebellion against my mother. Stupid and self-damaging, maybe, but true. I want to eat whatever I want to eat! Screw you!

It took therapy for me to understand that Eating (with a capital E) wasn't just about rebellion and diets. It was about equating Food with Love and compensating for Loss; and it came from my earliest years…

Being a Navy family, we traveled a lot, of course. Every two or three years, we’d all pick up sticks and move to my dad’s—or stepdad’s—new posting. My three brothers and I would be parceled into the car along with the family dog and spend hours in relative inactivity, waiting to be let out for food or the restroom.

Moving so often meant that I got good at leaving things behind, whether it was school, home, friends, pets, cherished possessions, outgrown clothes, whatever. Sometimes Mother, who wasn’t sentimental about childhood possessions and had none from her own, would give away books or toys that I really cared about—without asking. She believed in traveling light. I don’t have my high school yearbook or my Beatles paraphernalia or the boxes of things I wrote as a teenager because somewhere, sometime, those mementos were perceived as superfluous by my mother and tossed out just before a move.

I mention in another blog how—years later—my mom's moving van caught fire. (Bad brakes.) That's when the slides of my childhood went up in flames. Pictures of me in my Easter dress, the trip to the Chicago zoo when I was two, the matching bathing suits mom and I wore at the beach, the ranch my grandfather ran as foreman…all gone. Fragile paper and celluloid. I have a half dozen photos of me at various ages in my baby book, which was with me at the time. That’s all.

So back to Eating. It turns out that people often have trouble losing weight when they have lost a lot of other things in their lives. This revelation smacked me between the eyes. I’ve lost more than most people own; some through process, like constantly moving and sloughing off relationships; some through my own choice, such as my two divorces or living in another state from my family, or keeping potential friendships at bay; and some through death.

My inner child is still compensating for those losses by eating whatever feels good at the moment. Not only that, she's asserting her control over her own life.

Then there's the Food=Love equation, something that—ironically—originated with my mother. Food was the social interaction I enjoyed most Mom. She was ahead of her time, raising a family and running a business when most women were waving their husbands off to work in an apron and pearls. She didn’t have to work, she just had too much energy and drive to sit at home, and domesticity was never her thing. Decorators, painters, seamstresses, housekeepers and nannies—these were the troops she was made to lead. Once a home was painted, furnished, unpacked and planted, she was not interested in being constrained inside its shell. The military life gave her outlets as an officer’s wife, and she often ran events for the O Club. Or she might get a job as a local radio celebrity, gossiping about social events. Or run a newsletter. Or start a charm school. She was the object of my childhood admiration: independent, glamorous, in the public eye. But she was also elusive and absent. Whether Dad was home or at sea, she had her own schedule. As children, we never knew when she would be home. The hours between the end of school and her appearance seemed interminable. We pestered the current housekeeper with questions about her schedule and return. Sometimes the housekeeper would cook our dinner, frying pork chops and onions in a black iron skillet, served at the kitchen table with biscuits and applesauce. Other times Mom would be home in time for dinner. The housekeeper would leave and we’d have to wait for Mother to have her cocktail before cooking would begin.

Having lunch out with my mother meant that I received a concentrated amount of her time, focused on me and her and whatever delicious dishes were being enjoyed. Sometimes she picked me up at school for a lunch out—then let me play hooky for the rest of the day! I really didn’t enjoy school that much once I was past third grade, so this was a tremendous treat. Having lunch out, school or no, was one of the ways Mom and I enjoyed life. Salads piled high with crabmeat, eaten looking out on the ocean (Atlantic or Pacific). Sautéed abalone. She crab soup. Sourdough bread with butter. Chopped chicken liver. Hot pastrami on pumpernickel. Chinese chicken salad. Shrimp tempura. Ice cream. Cheesecake. Iced tea and, when I was older, wine. Alone or with my mother's friends, these lunches were explorations, social occasions, hedonistic pleasures. (My brothers were rarely included in these girl outings.)

But if lunch was Pleasure, dinner was Deprivation, and it explains some of my frantic need to avoid hunger. As toddlers, we were fed early and gotten out of the way so our parents could have their nightly pre-dinner cocktails and then eat "adult food" later in the evening. As children/adolescents, this pattern continued—only without the early feeding. Mom made us wait until she'd had her cocktail(s) and got around to cooking.

Parties were the worst, and ours was a party house. Years of peering through railings or around door jambs, watching people laugh and drink and waiting for our food. The fug of alcohol and cigarettes. At some point my mother would throw open doors and windows to let out the smoke—no matter the time of year—and to those smells would be added currents of cold air. From outside would come the odor of heating charcoal and later the smell of sizzling steaks. Or, if it was Mexican food, the pervasive indoor smell of hot fat and tortillas and chiles.

Mother would laugh and say that the reason people thought she was such a good cook was because by the time they ate, they were so hungry anything would taste good! She also liked to say we ate “continental”—that is, like Europeans, late and leisurely. We retorted that we ate at the same time as the Continent, which was six hours ahead of us. Either way, it was sometimes nine or nine-thirty before we ate during those social gatherings. In the morning, booze bottles and beer cans would litter the house. Garlicky french bread would be hardening inside a napkin-lined basket. Salad would lie limp and wet in the fridge. And sometimes there would be slabs of rare grilled steak wrapped in foil. 

On occasion, someone would be snoring on the living room couch or under a table.

It’s no wonder I find both solace and independence in setting my own eating schedule, eating at the first sign of hunger, refusing to relive those times.

Despite my mother being an excellent cook (all joking aside), food was not a driver for her. She didn’t equate it with love. Often, when she was cooking for a party, she ended up not eating. “I’ve been smelling it all afternoon, I can’t stand to eat it,” she'd say. No surprise that, after a few Scotches or martinis, she was flirting and twirling her way through a room full of bachelor aviators or amorous commanders with tight-lipped wives. Mother didn’t think much of officers’ wives—“all they talk about is kids and recipes and their boring little lives”—and it’s no wonder they returned the opinion after watching their menfolk drool over the hot redhead with the deep cleavage. During one party, I saw my mother dance on top of the cocktail table.

My father must have drunk his share, too, he was a typical navy guy. But I never saw him drunk. He was quiet and deliberate, so maybe it just didn’t show up on him. Or maybe he was content to stay in the shadows and watch mom scintillate.

My brothers were stunned when I brought up my whole Food theory. It brought back an unexpected flood of their own memories, their own deprivations. We should have been nurtured. We should have been fed. As children, we should have been considered first. It was another sign of mom’s careless love.

My belief is that she didn’t really know how to love. I think that she was driven by her own deprivations, her own lack of being nurtured, and it caused her to try and fill up those holes by always putting herself first and central in any situation. She needed love and attention so desperately.

I wish I knew more about my mother’s real childhood and the dynamics in her family. She was a middle child and the only girl. My grandparents always seemed like nice people to me, but she fought bitterly with my grandmother. Clearly, something was amiss. I’ll never know, because mom continually rewrote her personal history and hung on to small slights with frightening tenacity. She was terrified of looking truly, clearly, at her life and her choices. She preferred the constructed mythology. It still mystifies me that she spent her life clarifying other people’s problems for them.

Mom did make beautiful homes for us. She put quality clothes on our backs. If she was around, she'd listen to our teenage problems (even sex) with a liberality that was rare in those times. If we needed money, she'd rob a bank to get it for us. And if we had to wait for our food, at least it was delicious. But she wanted too much, too desperately, to give without a lot of strings attached. So she remembered all those "gifts" and flogged us with them whenever we disagreed with her. She never considered them her maternal duty, something a mother does without thought of repayment.

It was truly a gift when she taught me to cook. My first dinner was roast chicken, and once I knew how to make that, food was on the table by seven o'clock. I learned how to cook lots of things through watching her and my own art. All my brothers can cook well.

Dinner continued to be unimportant to my mother for the rest of her life. She was a lunch gal, happy to fill up in the middle of the day then snack on ice cream and Scotch for dinner. Unless we went out for dinner, which happened more frequently when I worked and couldn't get away for lunch. Mom loved eating out. But if I came home from work and cooked dinner, she was as likely to turn it down or pick at it as eat it. It frustrated the hell out of me, and I wonder if it's because Food was Nurturing to me, and Mom wasn't letting me nurture her with it. I bet it dredged up old issues without my being aware of it and that's why I had such a strong emotional reaction. And it's like she knew it and would use it as a tool to irritate me, too—maybe a pattern she carried over from her own stormy childhood. So unhealthy! So complicated!

When I contemplate a diet, I break out in cold sweat. The fear. The deprivation. The hunger. Why go down that road when, ultimately, it will fail?

Food and pleasure entwine themselves from the first time we suck at the breast or bottle. Watching a baby feed, eyes closed in bliss, cries of hunger and need banished, little hand clasping and unclasping in instinctive sympathy...that's fulfillment. Strong stuff.

I wish I could say that these revelations have changed my relationship with food. That I understand and don't care about it anymore. But it hasn't. I continue to use food to compensate for loneliness, celibacy, sorrow, fear, as well as friendship, celebration, love. I still feel a burn of rebellion when I shove a cranberry-orange muffin in my face. Only...rebellion against who? Myself? Life? The ghost of my mother?

I understand this is my problem. I'm an adult, and whatever part my mother played in it is past. I'm not writing this to excuse myself and blame her. I'm just reflecting on my own roots.

Volume Control

I saw my mother on the television last night. It happens more often than you’d think, even though she’s been gone for more than a year. I’ll be cooking in the kitchen or chatting on the phone when, all of a sudden, I will hear her familiar voice coming from the other room.

That’s what television does to its celebrities, minor or major. It recycles them. Brings them back, fresh, to a new audience.

I watched the show. It was a well-told story and favorable to her abilities. I cried at the end, from pride in her accomplishments.

Not all such shows were supportive or even kind. I remember one that entrapped her into appearing only to twist everything she said and discredit her, putting her in the same class as charlatans and believers in urban myths. They interviewed people antagonistic to her efforts. I was appalled. She, of course, was humiliated. But without a manager or agent to protect her interests, these things occasionally happened.

Fortunately, the public has a short memory. In a couple of days, it was forgotten. Just another whack show. Just another psychic. Except, of course, for the reruns. Syndicated immortality.

I can’t help wondering if there is another kind of immortality as well, one that my mother is now enjoying? She believed in it—how could she not, when she worked on the threshold between life and death, when she routinely obtained information and greetings and love from people (and animals) who had left this earth? And because I lived in proximity to her and experienced her work, I tried to believe as well. That there is more, that we continue, that we can even communicate with those we love on either side.

But death has been a hard door. With my father, I experienced his presence deeply and often after death. In dreams. Washing dishes. In the car. Then his presence faded after a time. As if he’d gone on to do other things—or I had.

Mother and I were closer, more attuned, and shared a similar belief system. Unlike Dad, who died in a kind of shock that fervent religion did not save him from cancer. I said the same thing to both of them before they died.

"I don’t know what comes next. But you’re going to find out before I do. And I’m betting it’s not what we think—just like everything else about existence. I’m betting it’s more complex, more amazing, more cohesive than we can imagine. And if it’s not—well then, we’ll never know because we’ll be snuffed out like candles."

Still, I hoped that my mother’s abilities to communicate across different spheres or dimensions or whatever would make it easier for her to get word back to me. But nothing dramatic or spooky happened, like her appearing to me during the night or calling my name. I sometimes wonder if it's because I resisted hearing from her after she died; it sounds mean, but I carried the burden of my mom's communications for my entire life. Her decline and demise were painful to watch and not what I wished or expected, ever. But her absence in my life was also a relief. Not just relief for the end of her suffering; the relief of someone who's head has been hammered on a daily basis and now was free of it. Who wasn't going to be pulled into drama and bickering and complaints anymore.

That isn't to say I haven't missed her. After she died, the grief sometimes staggered me. I re-watched George Clooney in The Descendants and, in one tiny scene after he's announced his wife's impending demise, he falls to his knees on the lawn with bowed head and stays that way for a few moments. This time, when I saw him do that, I understood! I've had grief for my mom catch me and shove me to ground in just that way.

But actual contact with her has been nebulous, more like thinking of her unexpectedly than feeling her around me. So I still don’t know if that's her contacting me—or me contacting my own inner needs and desires. I’ve carried my mom's voice around inside me all my life. I’ve spent years trying to mute it. Maybe death just turns the volume up again.

It's Never Enough

Author's Note: Over the years, I've written about my relationship with my mother in journals and doc files. So far, I've been writing this blog in the present tense, now that Mom has passed away. I've decided to include some material written while she was alive. Not everything in this blog is going to be about our psychic experiences, I've decided. It's about me being her daughter, too, and what it was like to live with a celebrity (a relatively minor one, perhaps, but with the same ego challenges!). These posts help to flesh out the complicated way it was. And FYI, I do own a cell phone now.

“Cheez, mom, I know it’s practically against your religion to be grateful for something— on account of how it cuts into your time crying to the moon for stuff you can’t have—but could you, just once, say thanks for something your kids did instead of being pissed off for what they didn’t do?”

“He could have stayed another day instead of flying home and then all the way back to San Diego.”

“He could have, if he’d known about his Friday meeting when he made his reservations to be there on the day of your surgery. But he didn’t—and so he ended up making personal reservations separate from his business reservations, and he didn’t want to pay the extra $100 to change them into one trip.”

“It’s ridiculous…”

“It also meant he could spend Valentine’s Day at home.”

“Well, who cares about that?”

“He and his wife, for starters.”

I scratched my head. I knew she was in pain. I knew the medication was making her cranky, too, and the lack of food and the nausea. Most of which was self-inflicted, since she refused to eat and was mainlining morphine in her IV drip. God knows, I knew being in the hospital by yourself was no picnic, either. It was nice to have someone to talk to, to complain to, to sit with you.

But given she was mostly drifting into semi-conciousness, Bill being there would have been mostly watching her sleep.

The problem always is, you do what you can, you try, you give what you can give. And whether it’s a little or a lot, it’s never enough for mom.

Other people say things like, “I think it’s wonderful how you kids are all making an effort to fly out and be with her.” People that aren’t even related to us can see that we’re wonderful. Our mother can’t, she’s too much in her own way. She hates to be beholden to anyone. And she wants to be owed for everything. So for her to be grateful just goes against the grain.

“Well, I’ll be there in a couple of weeks. You just take it slow, a day at a time. And eat something…if it was me in that bed, you’d be telling me the same thing.”

Whimpers of pain and a breathy conversation with the nurse while I hang on to the phone.

“Here are your pills, dear…”

“I can’t take those. I can’t swallow them. Can’t you give me a shot?”

“I just did, in your IV drip. Morphine.”

“Oh.”

“I can crush these pills if you’d like. All except this one, it’s a gel capsule. I can’t crush that one.”

Grumbling. “I guess I’ll have to take them, then. Get me some water.”

“Mom, maybe they could get you some applesauce if you’re having trouble swallowing.”

Moaning, then tiny clicks as the pills go into her mouth. “I have to go now.”

“Ah…okay. Talk to you tomorrow.”

My mom can flatten me out in a ten-minute phone conversation. Just suck me dry like a fly in a web, and leave my pitiful husk hanging on the line. Her suffering is relentless and garrulous, her empathy for your end of the conversation extremely limited. Her arthritis, her neighbors, the cat across the street, the horrible children on bicycles, the landlord, the gardener, the cleaning woman, even her friends; and of course, my siblings and their spouses and children. The glass is not only half empty, what remains is poison—so she is not about to see the gratitude in that! I don’t know how she got that way, it’s certainly exacerbated with age—but I thank God every day for Caller ID and Voice Mail. They preserve my sanity.

That and the fact that she’s never gotten the hang of email.

People are astonished that I don’t have a cell phone. If they spent half an hour on the phone with my mother, they wouldn’t be. And don’t get me started on cell phones, anyway. Tools for living in a world of TMI in every public place you can think of.

Ghosts of the Past

This happened in the same Virginia Beach house where Chibi "told" me about the stolen chicken (see Animal Afterlife).

It was a new house, you should know that. Only a few years old, and we were only the second family to move into it (more on that later). It was on the edge of a lovely, well-established development with inlets and ponds and mature trees. A two-story colonial brick, still smelling of fresh paint and new carpets. Not the kind of house I'd expect to be haunted. But I was wrong.

All the bedrooms were upstairs, and mine was just down the hall from my parent's room. The first night we slept there, I was awakened by a strange sound in the wee hours of the morning. It was like something hard scratching along the baseboards, moving down the hall, on the other side of the wall. My door was closed, so I couldn't see if anything was out there, but I convinced myself it might be one of our cats and went back to sleep. In the morning, I didn't say anything to anyone.

The next night, I was awakened again by the same noise, only now it seemed as if more than one creature/person was making it. It rasped along the wall, moving down the hall. There was also a king of snuffling, like a dog searching out a scent in the ground. Shivers went up my spine. What was that sound? Who could be making it? It was very low down for a person. Cats couldn't drag their claws across a wall the way people did along a chalkboard! Anyway, it sounded bigger than a cat. Had a raccoon gotten in somehow?

Maybe I should have gotten up and had a look. But you have to remember that I'd been in a house where the doors sounded as if they were being shut (when they weren't), spirits walked down the hallway, and people went into trance. Although this was a new home for us, that didn't mean spooky stuff couldn't happen! Maybe it had followed us up from Florida!

The next morning, I told Mother about the noises—and she said she'd heard them, too!

"Why didn't you get up and see what it was?" she asked me.

"Why didn't you?" I said. "You're the psychic, you're not afraid of spirits! I'm just a chicken shit."

"Well, let's see what happens tonight."

"Do we have a choice?" But I believed we did. It was part of the paranormal lore that, if you had an unhappy soul drifting around, you could help it "cross over" by praying. So that night, when the scratching and snuffling started again, Mother and I both said a prayer. We told the maker of the noise that it was free to go; we sent love and forgiveness and help its way and hoped it would find peace.

I swear to you, the noise stopped that night and never came back. For true. But that's not the end of the story.

One day, my mom was sunning herself out in the back yard when she saw a man walking her way. Immediately, she knew he was a spirit, not a living person. He didn't look at her but kept walking across our land until he disappeared.

"He was dressed like a fisherman, in a Sou'wester," she told me. (See image for outfit.)

"But," she continued, "I also felt like he was a farmer. Maybe he lived near here."

Not near, as it turned out. Here. Soon after, a woman came to see Mom for a reading, and she was local enough to know the story of our property. The man my mother saw walking by had owned a farm on our land. He was also an oysterman. And, according to the woman, he was a mean old bugger who used to chain his dogs and verbally abuse anyone who came near him. But—and this is the kicker—he also kept pigs. Pigs for which he, for some reason, felt his only real fondness.

Our house had been built right on top of his pig pen! And that's when my mom knew: the sound we'd heard each night was the sound of pigs scratching and rooting in their sty.

It's always a relief to solve a mystery, even a greater one to have it stop waking you up at night.

There is another postscript, though, unrelated to the farmer and his pigs. We discovered that the family who had occupied our home was known to us from a former military posting. We'd lived around the corner from them on the Naval base, and I'd gone to school with the kids. The parents had not been happy even when we knew them; things must have gotten worse, because, while living in our house, the dad hung himself. I am not kidding. The family moved out afterwards, which is why the house was only a few years old when we bought it.

We didn't learn this until later, after we'd made our own memories and become embedded in the home. It was horrific and sad to contemplate but, surprisingly, it didn't freak me out. The ghost of the dead man never walked or made noise or appeared in our house, so I was good. Mother would claim that the echoes of that troubled relationship are the reason why she and my stepfather fought so much, that she was "picking up" that discord and playing it out in her own life. But that's crap. The two of them had been hammering on each other's feelings for years at this point, and they didn't need any help from the spirit world to keep it going.

I said a prayer for the guy, just in case. But the people who really needed prayer—and a counselor—were my mom and stepdad.

Mom: Inner Dialogue

Living with my mother was a roller coaster ride, emotionally, mentally, and financially. The following dialogue was written by me, but it comes from snippets of conversation Mom had (with me and with herself) and actual circumstances during a certain period.

Morning. Time to wake up and face another day.

I love my bedroom. It's beautiful, with dark gleaming woods carved with lotus flowers, a Chinese canopied bed, green silk curtains, and a koi pond print over the small fireplace. I'm proud of the fact that I did it all myself. My whole house is tasteful and expensive, and looking at it gives me a deep sense of satisfaction.

More than I get when looking in the mirror. My hair is so much thinner than it used to be! I hope the color looks natural, red is a hard color to get just right and it mixes up a little different each time you do it. Mixing shades, that's the secret; that's why I do it at home instead of paying some beauty salon! 

My body has gone soft and droopy. There are too many lines on my face, especially around my lips, despite all the surgeries. I hate getting old! Who's going to want to look at me now? How could any man ever love me again? Those days are over, I guess. Four husbands and here I am, in my sixties, alone.

The worst thing is getting up in the morning. When I put my right foot down on the floor, pain shoots up my leg; my other foot is misshapen from that calcium spur near the big toe. It takes a few minutes for the pain to settle down to a dull roar. Then I can walk pretty freely, as long as my shoes are loose enough. My hands give me pain, too, especially the right thumb; once it locked on me and I couldn’t open my hand all the way. The doctor says it's basal joint arthritis. I need to get it fixed, but who has the money? I need my foot fixed, too, but it will have to wait. It will all have to wait.

Oh, god. It's only seven o'clock and I’m thinking of this already.

My house may be beautiful, but I need to sell it—fast. How much longer will it take? It’s been on the market for over six months. The market is so slow, even though I’ve lowered my price. People have come to see it, they’ve said wonderful things about it, but will any come back? What about the woman who wanted to talk to her attorney? What about the young couple with the baby? What will I do if it doesn’t sell? I must have money right away!

I’m afraid to answer the phone. They’re all calling now, asking for their money. Thank god for answering machines. My bills are two months late and as soon as I wake up, the panic starts. I don’t sleep well, even though I’m up until two or three o’clock, watching television in bed. If only I could sell it! And then what? Where will I go?

I should have saved some of the money from the insurance settlement. I might be a psychic but I didn't foresee the moving van catching fire and all my stuff burning up! I wish I had, I'm going to miss some of those things; I don't care about the furniture—I like what I just bought even better—but almost all the family photos were destroyed.

I shouldn’t have bought such an expensive place. But I didn’t like any of the other homes I looked at. This was the perfect location, with the hills and the water on both sides: peaceful, quiet, with the golf course to look at. Oh, well. I’ve never settled for less, never in my life. Not through four marriages and a dozen different homes, five children and numerous careers. I’ve always wanted the best. I was born wanting it, which is strange for a girl from a family like mine: blue-collar cafe keepers and cowboys, all of them. Mother never had any taste and Dad was just a cattleman, good with his hands and soft with his voice. I was the only one who got out.

Still, I loved the ranch when they had it. If I look at the picture of myself sitting on the fence, I look so happy and young. Maybe it’s just easier to be that way when you know there are years before you, stretching out, ready to be grabbed and lived. My folks just moved from small town to town, working in shops, scratching out a living in the desert or the lumber forest.

My daughter doesn’t know how lucky she is! What’s the matter with her? When I was forty, I had plenty of energy. Life was my oyster and I felt capable of anything. She says she feels like an old woman, like nothing else is ever going to happen to her again. Her two marriages have beaten her down. Mine never stopped me!

The cats are waiting to be fed, and the dog wants out. I need to empty the dishwasher and turn on the news. There’s cat food puked up on the counter again, damn it; life is a never-ending mess to be cleaned up! She didn’t put the knives in the dishwasher upside down, like I told her. I need to straighten the hall rug, it’s crooked again, and that lampshade has turned a little, too. I hope that’s not food I smell in the trash compactor. I told her to always rinse out the cans before putting them in there, otherwise the garbage smells; food goes down the disposal, anyone knows that!

I need to buy some new slacks today, to go with that new grey sweater. Maybe they have some at Nordstrom’s, I like Harvé Bernard’s, they fit me so well. I’ll get dressed after breakfast and go to the mall. My daughter gets irritated at me, she doesn’t say much, but I can tell. She hates it when I spend money—unless it’s on her, of course! I’ve bought her the best things she owns, including two new pairs of shoes and a nightgown for Christmas. Not to mention ties for my son Chuck, toys and clothes for his children, a bracelet for his wife, and that lovely whale sculpture for Chris. I even got that beaded purse for Chris’s new girlfriend. Everyone seemed very pleased with their presents. I know I was only supposed to give to the grandchildren, but these are my kids; I couldn’t very well give them nothing at Christmas! Of course, the bills are starting to come in now, and I can’t pay them. . .

Oh god, I don’t want to think about that. I have to borrow some money somewhere. It’s humiliating to let your friends know how bad off you are. I’ll have borrowed all the equity in this house by the time I sell it. Then what will I do? If only the goat ranch proposal would come through. Why isn’t anyone interested in investing? It’s such a great idea, raising cashmere goats out here. The weather is perfect and they need fine cashmere for European textiles. Someone else is going to get that property if we don’t move on it soon. I know it's kind of isolated but there's a nice little house for me to live in up there, and it would be kind of like living on the ranch, only in California, not in the desert. Of course, I'd need to hire a foreman, I can't do goats on my own, not at my age!

What if it doesn’t work out, what will I do? I can’t think or my head will explode.

Maybe I should just kill myself. Take pills and go to sleep or use the revolver in the dresser drawer. The kids could have the insurance, the house. . . My life is over, anyway.

Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know! I have to hang on, just another month or two. I’ll see if Vince or Ada will give me a loan in return for the pink slip on my Cadillac. Maybe the market will pick up in the spring. Maybe it will all happen, and I’ll be safe.

I better hurry if I want to be dressed in time for the stores to open. I think black is the best color for those slacks.

Animal Afterlife

I once stood at the top of our stairway, ready to descend, when our female Siamese cat scurried past me. She was in a hurry, but what floored me was the very clear message I got from her as she ran. It was:

"I've stolen the chicken from the kitchen counter and I'm going under your bed to eat it."

I was stunned for two reasons: one, Chibi Chan was a small cat and it would be an enormous feat for her to drag a whole fryer up the stairs and under my bed; two, I'd never gotten a telepathic message from a cat before.

I knew my mother had left two chickens on the kitchen counter, in a pan, to defrost for dinner. I followed Chibi to my room, looked under the bed, and there was the raw chicken (still mostly in its plastic bag, thank god!). Chibi growled at me as I dragged the carcass away.

"If you didn't want me to know, you shouldn't have told me," was my response.

There wasn't any logical reason why I'd suspect Chibi of chicken stealing. We left chickens to thaw on the counter all the time, and the cats had never bothered them. They weren't even counter jumpers like some opportunistic cats I've known. So, even though I knew the chickens were out, there was no reason for me to link that fact to Chibi's crime. She told me herself, loud and clear.

I consider myself a pretty good judge of animal behavior, at least in the species I typically encounter. I've had cats and dogs my entire life, and the usual fish, guinea pigs, turtles that kids go through. As a child, I searched out bird nests in the spring and watched them grow into adults; I've owned a parrot and raised canaries. When I was 11, I saved up my allowance for raw peanuts to feed the local squirrels (who ate from my hands), and I'm still putting out food to help wildlife get by in Wisconsin's frigid winters.

In my experience, messages from animals are usually more ephemeral and emotional; they're coupled with body language that makes them easier to decipher. "Love you." "I'm hungry." "I'm afraid and may bite." "Come play with me, I'm bored." "That feels good, do it some more." Chibi's message was an anomaly I've never experienced again. I don't know why.

That was a pretty unusual house we were living in when it happened. It was also the height of my exploration into the paranormal with my mother, living in Virginia Beach, surrounded by a cadre of New Age friends and within striking distance of Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. (Association for Research and Enlightenment, which continues today). Were these factors? Was it because I was sensitized to the paranormal, living with the hairs on my neck half-raised most of the time, listening and watching and wondering?

Animal spirits showed up in my mother's readings all the time. She'd describe a cat sitting on someone's lap or a favorite mule or a happy dog. Were these truly the spirits of the animals she perceived—or where they translations of memories from the human she was counseling? She'd see our own pets after they died, greeting other pets, running through meadows, playing. (FYI, none of us had ever read The Rainbow Bridge, that anonymously-written viral poem about happy pets living in an animal heaven, waiting to be reunited with their owners.)

The Bible tells us that we have dominion over the earth and all its creatures. We've taken that as license to destroy anything that stands in the way of our material desires. For centuries, Mankind's mainstream attitude toward animals has been that we are superior to them even after death. That we are the only beings with an afterlife of any kind.

Since I loved animals, I was distressed by this attitude and eventually discarded it as heresy. When I was young, it was because I believed animals had as much right to heaven, or whatever afterlife there was, as we did. When I grew older, it was because I believe that life and death are biological processes shared by every creature on this planet. We die, they die. We'd love to believe that we deserve a place to go afterwards, but if we do, so do they.

"Experts" tell us that the difference is our self-awareness of Mortality. We know we're going to die and animals don't. I wonder if you took a child and raised it without ever mentioning that she was mortal and bound to die, if she never saw roadkill or squashed a bug, if she lived a life isolated from death...would she have any more consciousness of Mortality than a dog? Or is it really an innate knowing woven into our brains? How do we know for sure that animals don't perceive their own mortality? Because they live in the Now? Because they can't write poetry about it? Animals in the wild encounter death all the time. Maybe they just shrug their shoulders, say they can't do anything about the inevitable, and get on with living. Maybe they're the smart ones and we humans need to stop struggling against the inevitable.

In another post, I mention the way I sometimes feel an animal leap onto my bed at night. I search the bed or flick on the light but there's no one there (I have cats, so I expect it to be one of them). My explanation is that it's Baldrick or Ollie, my two best-loved cats, who have passed on. But who knows?

I've sensed people around me after their deaths. I've done the same for my pets. My mom saw animals in her readings and was convinced they "go on." I hope they do, I really hope they do. And not just pets but every creature. They deserve the best possible afterlife, given the shitty lives we've imposed on many of them. Except maybe mosquitoes and fleas and ticks, though I can at least make a case for mosquitoes as a food source for birds and bats. Fleas and ticks, however....

An afterlife where animals exist, where all life exists...what would that look like? Some people believe we will all be these energies, maybe all the same energy, melding like drops of water into the greater Ocean of Being. All one. Some people believe we continue to learn and grow and evolve even as spirits until we reach Perfection, before joining into One. For some, that includes reincarnation back to the physical plane (Earth or elsewhere) to "get it right."

I do know that I've had a pet or two in my time that was so incredibly similar to an earlier pet, I would have sworn it was the same one reincarnated! Something beyond species familiarity.

Well, who knows what's to come? Not me. But there better be animals there.