Woke up. Picked up the phone. Saw the headline that Maya was gone.
Checked email. A friend and his wife had a baby boy.
Checked Facebook. Saw a picture of them both. Remembered holding him when he was the age his son is now.
Pretty existential way to start the day.
The mommy is the same age Maya was. Physically she is very healthy but her mind is slipping. Every day I wonder how she's going to be and if there is something I need to do. I know she will die. I just want her to have what she needs and wants until that day. And she pretty much does.
I don't have a belief about what happens after we die. I believe something happens. The heaven/hell thing makes no sense to me. Eternity is a long time and both places would be pretty full by now. Eternal bliss sounds boring. Eternal misery sounds like it would just become ... numbness.
Reincarnation? Maybe. But everyone was Cleopatra, or Plato, or someone famous. And the math is bad. Too many people now compared to how many people there have been.
So.
I just dunno.
It doesn't make sense to me that this awareness I experience as me will just go dark. Energy is always changing form. A great mystery awaits. Or maybe not. Maybe the remaining synapse firing will whisper a tale of light and love and then ...
The mommy likes to talk about her family sitting on the clouds waiting for her.
Maybe.
Maya knows. And a boy in Colorado might have something to tell us. Once he learns to speak our language. I had just begun to wind down from the loss of the boy from the bus. I mean. Really. He was lost to me years ago. And yet he has been so present in the last few days.
I know what I hope. I hope for a moment of lucidity. A sort of Frank Capra summing up in which it all makes sense. And then. What ever.
I am remembering how we were back when the babies who are now fathers were born. I am imaging the family that is now beginning and how they will be. We all just make this shit up as we go along. We read some stuff. We talk to some experts. We make agreements and commitments and we hurl ourselves forward. But we're really stumbling along.
Maya was really good at something I've never been good at. She loved her life. She embraced it. She owned it. I'm so easily laid low by the ... oh ... I don't know. The this. And the that. I am full of resentments and complaints.
I do know one thing. Or I feel it with such unequivocal certainty that it feels like knowing. I've seen the love. I've seen the new dad in the arms of his own father. And his mother. And my own. So much love. You can't really do anything but yield. You can't be judgy and peckish when you're in that moment. Looking into those little eyes. You can get back to judgy and peckish after you put them down and face what ever is happening next. Or at least I can. But in those moments you have to yield.
Maybe we imagine all things we come to believe. So this is what I am imagining. Maya found out about our new boy and stopped by to smile at him. And then. She was on her way.