Mind Picking : Happy Halloween XIV

 

I have shared stories before on Halloween that concern "Messages from the Other Side", but since my brother died this past April and my sister-in-law in September — and I feel like I have received further such messages (and believe me, I know how hokey that sounds) — here I will be sharing more of the same.

To begin at the beginning of the year: One of the things that Dave gave me for Christmas was tickets to a nighttime ghost investigation of Black Creek Pioneer Village, and as this is apparently something we do, I considered this a really thoughtful and intriguing gift. Not only did we get to hear stories about what they assure us is one of the most haunted pioneer villages in Canada, but this tour was also considered a "scientific" experience: the guide — a young man with long black hair, a long black dufflecoat, and the measured speaking style of a high school drama student — brought us from building to building, using a ouija board in one, spirit boxes and EMF readers in another, teaching us about sigils and signs. And it was amusing if not mind blowing; and especially since the guide behaved as though he had a set script to stick to and couldn't pivot to react to what was actually happening. For example: He brought us to a loft area of what had once been a family home and sat us in a circle of chairs surrounding a circle of (battery powered) candles with a foam ball in the middle of the floor. He called on the spirit of a child who is known to haunt this space to make himself known by moving the foam ball. At that moment, a pretty loud bang knocked against the side of the house, and as we all jumped, the guide said, "Interesting...but can you move the ball?" And then two of the candles flickered and went out, and again, instead of saying something like, "Thank you for letting your presence be known," or whatever he might improvise, again he said, "Interesting. Can you now move the ball?" The candles came back to life, but since the scripted experience didn't happen, we carried on to the next building without further inquiry. The most intriguing experience was when someone was using sensory deprivation tools and was able to give fairly sensible replies to questions he couldn't hear, right up to shouting "No" when the guide said that the evening was over. The guide said, "I guess we can have a few more minutes", and there were a few more questions and responses, and when he again said that it was time to pack up, the man who could apparently only hear a spirit box through his headphones once again shouted "No!" I have no idea if any of this counts as "messages from the other side", but there were better stories to come this year.

For a year or so before Ken passed of cancer, we had been unseriously talking about what kind of a sign he could send from "the other side" so I'd know he was doing okay. I came up with a couple of ideas, but Ken always said he'd do more thinking on it, and then, like with so many things, it became too late to discuss further. When we went to Nova Scotia to spend some time with my parents in the immediate aftermath of Ken's death, Dave was shocked and delighted to find a dime on the floor of one of the bedrooms in the lakehouse — and while I 100% agree that, since the passing of Dave's parents, finding dimes has always felt like a message from them (a phenomenon Ken knew about and was intrigued by), I wanted to be comforted by this sign more than I truly was.

A short while later, I read a random post on facebook that said something like, "If you want a sign from a loved one who has passed, don't be afraid to ask for one right out loud. But don't just ask to see a balloon, ask to see a red balloon. Even better, ask for three red balloons. Be bold and specific and you will be amazed by what your loved ones can manifest from the other side." This made me smile, but it's not like it prodded me to ask for a sign of three red balloons "right out loud." And then the next day, I saw this art print in a thrift store:

It stopped me in my tracks, long enough to make me take a picture of it, but I just keep wondering, "Is this something?" Everyone in the family I show this picture to seems to think it is — and more than anything, I want to believe that something survives death and my brother is somewhere safe and happy and beyond pain — but I don't know if hoping for this actually equals belief. I just needed more.

Then one day in early July, I was walking the dogs through the schoolyard behind our house, and as I turned a corner in the pathway, a coyote crossed the path ahead of me and disappeared into the trees. I had heard of coyote sightings in the area, and nothing about the experience scared me exactly, but it did feel a bit odd to see a coyote in the park for the first time ever. Weirder still: later on that same day, I was taking Cormac to the groomer, and as I sat at a red light at a pretty busy intersection, another coyote came trotting around the corner towards me, crossed the street behind my car, and calmly jogged down the first intersecting street. It was so unusual that I actually thought to myself, "If I see a third coyote, I'll know that Ken sent them."

And as my light turned green and I started driving, I had to laugh to myself — with pure delight — because that had been the third coyote. When I first got up that morning and started scrolling through my phone, the following was one of the first images I saw:

Ken would have loved that picture. We were the Saturday morning Looney Tunes cartoons generation. And, as is common for our generation, he would have loved ribbing me about woman drivers (how does someone drive into a painting? Is it more irresponsible that someone approved the mural in the first place?) It filled me with great delight to think that Ken might have been aware of this story and from the beyond sent me two coyotes to prod me to connect it with him; to join him in a laugh that connects us through space and time right back to our childhoods. Is this enough to create belief?

Here I'll reshare another story we were told this year about a family member who passed:

We heard that Dave's Aunt Susan was in long-term care, and after a brief stay in hospital, had become unresponsive. We made our way over for a visit and could see that she was obviously near her end; a husk of herself, still and silent. We sat with Dave's cousins, Jeff and Shannon, for a few hours, telling stories and sharing laughs, and they said they could tell that their mom could hear us and was enjoying herself. The most remarkable story they told us was that on the Monday — nearly a day after Susan had become unresponsive — she suddenly blurted out, "Bev! Bev! Wait! Beverley, wait for me! Bev!" And those would be Susan's last words: a plea for her big sister, my late mother-in-law, to wait for her, as would have been her perpetual complaint when they were growing up. Being five years apart in age, Bev always said that she resented when their mom would make her bring Susan along when she was meeting up with friends. So in the present, we sat there and marvelled at the idea that Bev was probably waiting just out of reach of the bed-bound Susan, telling her that it wasn't quite time for her to tag along yet. Susan wouldn't pass for several more days, and when she did, it was when her children had briefly left the building for some air. Perhaps not a message from the other side, but it certainly seems like a conversation with someone beyond the vale.

This is also the year that my beloved sister-in-law received a devastating cancer diagnosis. When it was just Kennedy and Mal visiting their Aunt Rudy in her home one day, her husband Dan went to answer the door, and the entire time he was standing on the porch talking to someone, the TV in the basement family room kept turning itself on (loudly) and off again. This has never happened before, and when Dan came back upstairs, he asked Rudy, "Do you think that was your Dad saying hi?" And that's not entirely out of left field: Not only did her Dad watch that TV, loudly, during the years he lived in the apartment below Rudy and Dan, but I have recorded before (in this Halloween post) how we have previously concluded that Jim can certainly manipulate electronics from the beyond.

In addition to that, Dave and Rudy's cousin, Shannon, talked of finding quarters in impossible places in the days before her mother passed (which she took as a comforting sign from her Uncle Jim, who always performed the magic of pulling quarters from her and Jeff's noses as they were growing up), and in August, Dave's cousin from his father's side of the family, Michele, told us the following story: After Dan and I visited with Rudy one evening, I was so upset when I went to bed that I just couldn't sleep. I was tossing and turning, worried sick about Rudy, and I turned to Dan — dead asleep, snoring — and I cuddled against him and took his hand. And then I felt the mattress go down behind me like someone was sitting there, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was so real that I screamed and woke up Dan and said "There's someone in the room with us." And Dan turned on the light and looked and said, "No there isn't." I called both my sister and my mother the next day and they each said, "That's just your Uncle Jim saying that everything is going to be okay." And it did make me feel better. Uncle Jim's got this.

Rudy herself passed on September 13th, and as I wrote recently, Dave and I have been asking more assertively for signs from the other side in the wake of her passing. On the day I wrote about, Dave and I had attended a toy show and then walked through an antique mall, and after I saw a giant stuffed Wile E Coyote, I put it into the universe that if I saw two more that day, I would know it was a sign from Ken. And I did see two more Coyotes, and only two more. Dave was inspired by a Laurel and Hardy figurine and said that if he saw two more, he would know it was a sign from his dad. And he did see two more that day, and just the two more. It felt like something, and as I wrote at the time, we just wanted to figure out what a sign from Rudy might look like.

And then earlier this month, Mal was on a training trip for a new job and it went so well, and was such an auspicious new role to be given, that Dave said, "I can't help but feel like Rudy pulled some strings from the other side to get you this job." And Mal replied, "Oh, I know she did." And then Mal showed us two photos: One of a dime sitting on a stack of boxes in the staff room on the first day of training, and a second photo of a different dime sitting on a different stack of boxes in the staff room on the last day of training. Mal has no doubt that these were messages from Aunt Rudy and that she did indeed pull some strings to get Mal what seems like a perfect new job just as the last one disappeared. How can this not feel like proof of something?

As it turns out, that would not be my last story for this year. When Rudy died, she left Kennedy and Mal as the beneficiaries of one of her insurance policies, and nearly immediately upon receiving it, Mal put in an offer on a little house to move into. The next morning when I got to the gym, I saw there was some kind of garbage near my usual spot in the boxing rig, and when I went to pick it up, not only did I notice that this "kinetic tape" wrapper was printed with my initials "KT", but there was a shiny quarter sitting on top of it. And not only was it a shiny quarter, it was one with the image of a sledge hockey player on it:

Rudy's husband, Dan, has a great nephew with spina bifida, and it was with so much pride that Rudy shared a video with us of this young man playing sledge hockey in a Canadian Tire commercial during the last Winter Olympics; Rudy and Dylan were actually in the local hospital at the same time over the summer and he was much discussed amongst us. No specialty quarter could possibly be a clearer message to me — and especially sitting on top of a piece of paper with my intitials on it, in a place I was sure to see it — that Rudy is reaching out to me; it honestly felt like a blessing for what Mal has decided to do with the inheritance. All of my musings and reading and writings on the possibility of receiving messages from the other side seem to have led to this most compelling bit of proof and I am deciding to accept it as such; even if that sounds hokey.

Perhaps these "Messages from the Other Side" stories aren't quite Halloween/spooky material because I find them more comforting than scary or eerie; and I hope that anyone reading this finds some comfort in them, too. I know how hard it is to accept as fact stories like these when they happen to someone else — I am at heart a rational, skeptical seeker of truth — but I also know it all happened.

*****

My usual caveat: These stories are recorded to the best of my recollection and as told to me; make of them what you will.

Happy Halloween!

Strange stories from previous years:

Halloween I

Halloween II

Halloween III

Halloween IV

Halloween V

Halloween VI

Halloween VII

Halloween VIII

Halloween IX

Halloween X

Halloween XI

Halloween XII

Halloween XIII

Mind Picking : Sleeping Beauties and The Holy Grail

 

We've had a couple more outings recently that I think I can combine into one post. On the 3rd, Dave and I went to an event with John Cleese. The show began with Cleese and an interviewer coming onto the stage and telling a couple stories about the early days of Monty Python and the making of The Holy Grail. The audience then watched the movie on a giant screen, and after an intermission, Cleese and the interviewer came back onto the stage and took questions from the audience. For the most part these were pretty basic questions, but Cleese made the answers interesting enough. Had the lines for asking questions been shorter or had we the opportunity to write our questions onto cards, this is what we were prepared to ask:

Me: Eight years ago on this stage my husband asked for, and received, a kiss on the cheek from Carol Burnett, and now it's my turn to ask: Can my husband please have a kiss on the cheek?

Dave: My wife and I have been married for thirty-five years. What advice would you have for cutting marriage up into smaller, more palatable, chunks?

We had the VIP tickets to meet John Cleese and pose for this photo together after the show and it wasn't until days later that I realised I should have asked him to pretend to kiss Dave on the cheek. Overall: A very fun outing and Cleese was clever and funny during the Q&A and really quite lovely and charming during the meet and greet (I don't know why I had expected him to be gruff or crusty).

*****

The next evening, Kennedy asked me if I'd like to join her for a trip into Toronto. As I had written about recently, Kennedy received a lot of positive feedback from her accidental participation in a comedy show last month and the director of a storytelling group (who was in the audience that night and tracked Kennedy down via Instagram) had asked Kennedy to come see a showcase, with a view to having Kennedy tell her own story at an upcoming show. Kennedy and I went into the city, had a nice dinner of Korean fried chicken, and went to watch the show. The director herself is a powerful storyteller — her partner wrote a wonderful story, but something seemed lost in the telling of it — and the other six participants were all just pretty good (including two storytellers who run such groups of their own). After the show, the director asked Kennedy if she could possibly write and polish her story for a showcase next month, and although she has no idea that Kennedy actually has a background in performance, Kennedy agreed to try what might be a bloodbath for anyone else. Here's hoping I have a happy story to tell about this in a couple more weeks!

*****

This past Saturday, Dave, Mal and I met in Toronto to see David Byrne give a talk on his new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. As the book had only been released a few days beforehand, I was the only one of the three of us who had had time to read it already (and judging from the reaction of the audience to Byrne's talk, I wouldn't think that many of them had had the time to read it beforehand either). We started with dinner at the repeatedly Michelin mentioned Lebanese restaurant Amal Toronto — absolutely fantastic from the food to the service to the atmosphere; we would definitely go back whether we had a vegan with us or not — and Mal was so excited to see David Byrne in person, less than a year after we went to see him perform the hits of the Talking Heads, that the content of the talk wasn't the most important part.

 

 

Our tendency as humans is often to imagine that the “story” of history leads us to where we are right now. We like to imagine ourselves as some sort of inevitable culmination — it all led to us. What we see, and what we judge as important and significant, viewed in the rearview mirror is determined by how we see ourselves at present.

As for the book: I thought it was just okay. I could see that it had been a passion project for Byrne — he begins by writing that he enjoys going down rabbit holes and for years had been collecting stories on ideas (from science to art and literature) that were popular at first, forgotten for up to centuries, and then rediscovered and widely accepted — and the collection as presented in the book seemed very particular to Byrne himself with little overreaching point. The lecture came off the same way: Byrne shared three of the stories from the book — modern vs Roman concrete, the paintings of Botticelli, and the symbiotic nature of chloroplasts and the mitochondria — and then added two new stories that never made it to the book: the concept of "zero" and the clitoris. He kind of stumbled through the lecture (I recognise that this is not his wheelhouse), but Dave and Mal were both so charmed by Byrne's enthusiasm that their satisfaction became my satisfaction. I'm glad I read the book (if only to relate to Mal through it) and delighted that we made an evening out of this. (Probably three and a half stars for the book, five stars for the evening overall.)

*****

And, finally, this was Thanksgiving weekend; the first Thanksgiving without Ken and Rudy. Kennedy and Zach put on their usual incredible feast (I can't believe we forgot to take a table selfie before all of the amazing food was cleared away; it's not super obvious that this was taken after Conor had left and Mal photoshopped him in for Nan and Pop's digital frame, right?), and they were generous enough to include the whole family, including Dan. Dave had a lovely toast about what we have lost this year and what we still have to be thankful for, and as ever, I am just so thankful for this family; so grateful that Dave and I have the means to buy into amazing experiences; grateful that we have adult kids who still want to hang out with us. Dave is right: even through the losses, we have so much.