.Labor Day happened on this day twenty-two years ago. Holly was the most willful person I ever knew, and she wanted to experience the whole of summer before she very purposefully let go on this day and died. Her oncologist was shocked that she had soldiered on so long. Her parents were disappointed she did not last longer. I felt the deep guilt of being relieved her suffering was over.
She did not pass over unnoticed. Her mother and I were at her bedside when she stopped breathing at 4:58 pm. Henry, who was in the car with his grandfather, felt her brush by at the moment of death. Robert, our friend in California, felt her pass through his painting studio on a breeze at that same moment. Colleen, her friend in Ann Arbor, was visited by her in a dream the night before. Holly told Colleen she would be alright, and the next morning Colleen awoke convinced that something had happened to her friend. But when I forgot to call, Colleen dismissed the visitation as “just a dream” until a couple weeks later, when I finally did call and we compared notes. Holly knew I would forget to call, so she took care of business herself. It was characteristic of our whole life together.
As I mentioned in a post a couple days ago, I have lately been nagged by thoughts that perhaps I have grieved long enough, maybe too long. I have wondered if my emotions have not kept Holly’s spirit bound to this material plane; that I have (in my selfishness) unwittingly prevented her from being reborn again?
Yet as I have thought about this notion, I have been ignoring her willfulness. Just as she chose the time of her death, she also may have chosen the moment when the journey of her soul should resume. Who am I to assume that she would allow her consciousness to be bound to me and to this world? Who is not to say that every time I’ve thought about Holly, I have just been resurrecting her in my own mind? Yet materially she may have long ago already made the transition to a new life of experience.
I thought I would die without her, but in reality it was both of us who, in our own ways, are reborn. What happens in another time is one of the great mysteries of existence.
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“I love you today. I will love you tomorrow. I will love you always. Because when we are reborn, I will fall in love with you again and again and again.”
∼ Faye Hall
∼ Faye Hall
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۞
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Wandervogel Diary 