A Passion of Spirit (SWC)

A Passion of Spirit

This is my long-winded entry to @jerrybanfield's Supernatural Writing Contest. Thanks in advance to all who actually manage to read through the whole thing.

I have known since childhood that I was “different,” as I have always been aware of other dimensions, though not consciously able to control where or when my impressions occur.

My earliest recollections of this are from the house I grew up in, in Monterey Park, California, in a neighborhood called the Monterey Highlands. My family moved into the house during the summer when I was three, and as it was a new subdivision, no one had ever lived in the house before, aside from loads of crickets, and the black widows that followed them. But that is another story.

My sisters were older than I, respectively seven and nine-and-one-half years of age, at the time we moved into the house. It was a typical ranch style home, of the sort commonly found in Southern California, and elsewhere across the country.

I'm not certain exactly when the “happenings” began, but by the time I was in grade school, there were regular noises that clearly no one in the family were making. If one of us left a room and then quickly returned, things had frequently been moved in our absence, despite no one else being near that room.

The most common occurrence was that, when we were all in the bedrooms, we would hear the wooden kitchen cabinets at the opposite end of the house start banging shut, evidently of their own accord.

My mom started referring to our noisemaking “guest” as a poltergeist, and it came to be a regular part of our home life. I don't recall anyone ever being frightened, or even particularly concerned, and it never occurred to me that it was something to fear. It simply was.

When I was twelve, my eldest sister married and moved out of the house, and I moved across town to a duplex with my mother and my other sister, Carol.

That house held something too, or perhaps what had been in our previous house followed us; but in the new place, it seemed only to interact with me, though my mother and sister were aware of it. Strange.

I became aware of it when I returned from visiting my grandparents, in New Mexico, and my grandfather had given me a metal box with a small collection of coins. I decided to catalogue what was there, and when I went to recount a couple of days later, several coins had been added to the collection. Added?!?!?

And the count changed almost every time I counted, a few coins this way or that, almost every time I counted them. Something was having fun with me, and it wasn't my sister or my mom, since the counts would change even when neither of them had been home.

After starting high school, life got busier, and though odd events continued, they were less of a focus in my life. I have since lived in other homes with unseen “guests,” including one seriously haunted Spanish-style home in Tampa, but they all seemed benevolent, and I never felt threatened.

Through it all, I remained open to the knowledge that what we can see and hear is only part of the story, and that there is much more to life, and to this realm we call our “reality.”

My real spiritual test, however, came during period I've come to call “my longest winter.” First my dad, and then my mother-in-law, both of whom had been in long decline due to Alzheimer's Disease, died; my dad on 21 December, the first day of winter, and my mother-in-law on Good Friday, which that year coincided with Friday the 13th.

While both deaths were hard, they were also blessings, because they had both been suffering, and now that suffering was at an end. I am grateful that I learned early on that death is simply a part of life.

When my husband and I drove to Richmond, Virginia for his mother's funeral, it was so cold and blustery at the grave site that her brother, who was the presiding minister, cut the ceremony short, out of deference for the elders attending.

The elders, as it happened, turned out to be fine, but my husband and I both came own with a bad case of flu two days later, and cut our stay short as a result. I tried to convince him to visit a walk-in clinic, as he was very ill, but he declined, and asked me to just take him home, which I did.

In our shared grief, our recovery took far longer than it normally would have, and by summer we still had little stamina. Our own wedding anniversary in July, the first time that day would take place on Friday the 13th, we had long joked would be our biggest and best party ever. But neither of us had the energy, or the will, and in the end, we went out for a quiet dinner. We were still drained.

Then one morning in September, as I sat down to drink my orange juice and watch the morning news, I watched a plane hit a tower, followed a few minutes later by a second plane.

And, with that, our entire nation was thrust into grief, and much of the world grieved with us. And ever since, our government has been playing on our grief, using that grief, and the fear for which they carefully tend and fan the flames, to dismantle the rights our ancestors fought and died for, and which we had long thought would always be preserved, in this democratic republic we call the United States of America.

But I digress.

A day or two after New Year, we were settling in to watch a film one evening, and my husband asked me what I wanted to see, to which I responded, “Surprise me.” He put in the film “Speed,” with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, which we had both always enjoyed.

Much to my surprise, early in the film, when the cops are meeting for coffee at a local coffee shop, which was filmed in Venice, California, I suddenly realized that I had tears streaming down my cheeks. I turned to my husband and commented, “I'm so homesick I could die.”

Some time around the same period, maybe a few weeks before or after, I was looking for something in our attic when I came across an old issue of Los Angeles Magazine, which was a part of the Sunday edition of the L.A. Times, in which my friend Ted and his silversmith shop were featured. He lived and worked in Venice.

At the end of March, I went to a monthly meeting for the Spring of Tampa Bay, a charity I was heavily involved with, and as an adjunct to the regular monthly meeting, there was a jeweler offering her wares to the members. I purchased two crosses; a small filagree box cross, reminiscent of those I'd seen in Mexico, and a larger open work sterling and onyx cross, both of which I absolutely loved.

Later, probably in April, I received an email from eBay that they were hosting their first ever eBay Live conference in Anaheim, California, in late June. I had just opened an eBay store for my husband's business a few months earlier, and he agreed immediately that I should go, adding that I should spend a few extra days to see my friends and family, while there.

I mentioned that I really wanted to spend some time with my aunt Fran, my dad's best friend since junior high, who we hadn't been able to visit on our previous visit to L.A. He immediately responded that the person I should really make a point to spend time with was Ted, with whom we had had dinner on the previous visit, who was among my closest friends.

I reached Fran, my sister Carol, and my best childhood friend Rocky, and made plans to visit with each of them. But when I called Ted, who had had the same phone number since I met him over twenty years earlier, his line was disconnected. My heart sank.

I kept trying to reach him, hoping that he was vacationing in Maine, or had managed to repeat his trip to Alaska, or really anything but what I feared to be true, what my heart was telling me was true, that he was, in fact, no longer here.

I left a note on his front door, already knowing that the one who would be contacting me was most likely not going to be him, and drove into the canyons, as I had done a hundred times or more.

The advantage in the canyons, is that radio waves, much less cell phone signals, which didn't even exist when I first started driving into the canyons, are entirely unreliable.

Did I say advantage?

Predictably, his friend Richard tried to reach me, as it was he who got the note I had left; but the call, since I was driving in the canyons, dropped. Thankfully, he then tried my number in Florida, and reached my husband, though I would not know that for several more hours.

It is a blessing, in retrospect, that he didn't reach me when I was driving in the canyons. Because, if he had, my story might likely end there.

My husband reached me later that evening, but only after I had reached my childhood best friend's home, and was surrounded by her family. I was thus in the position of being only able to react as was appropriate in front of children, rather than being alone, and thinking only of myself, which again, was a blessing in disguise.

It is a testament to how closely I had played my cards to my chest, over the years, that both my best friend and my sister Carol, two of the people closest to me, each thought that Ted was gay. I know that I never described him so, which would have been a lie, but I was also unwilling to divulge the depth of our relationship, in some ways, even to myself.

Although I loved him truly and deeply, I was not able to say the words to him at the time. I wish I had mustered the courage.

Ted was considerably older than I, and as the men in his family tended to die young, he did not feel that he had time to offer me. And yet, it was with Ted that I felt truly myself, truly at home, and had I had children of my own, it was his children I wanted.

Ted was talented, he was brilliant, he was wise, he was hilarious, and he was highly educated; he was, in fact, everything I wanted in a man, and more. And, while I loved the way his mind worked, he loved mine perhaps even more.

He saw in me all the promise I had all but ceased to believe was true. I saw in him the scholar and the gentleman I had all but ceased to believe was possible.

And so. The call came. He was gone. He died three months earlier, after a roughly six months long decline, on March 19th; the last day of winter.

And yet, though we had been close friends for twenty years and more, no one had even let me know. No call, no card, not even an obituary in the local paper. Nothing at all. I was bereft.

I have little doubt that my purposeful writing about my time in Santa Monica and Venice, which started shortly before September 11th, my tears at the beginning of Speed, and my discovery of the magazine profiling Ted and his work, were all connected.

According to Richard, Ted had started failing physically around September 11th; on some level at least, I was feeling him slipping out of this world, and into the next.

Ironically, the one person who really knew what I was going through was my husband, who had met Ted briefly, when we visited L.A. for a television appearance in 1994. Although he did not know the depth or nature of our relationship, as I hadn't felt the need to detail the romantic side of the relationship that had ended over eight years before we met, he knew that Ted was vitally important in my life.

Upon returning home, I was trying to regain some semblance of order in my life, and failing miserably. I contacted Hospice, as they had offered me grief counseling after my father's death, and said that I was now ready to receive it, if it was still available. That counseling turned out to be a true godsend, and I am grateful to Hospice for making it available to me, when I needed it most.

Around this time, my husband and I had just finished watching a film, and he decided to go to bed, but I was still wide awake. Again he asked what I wanted to see, and as I left the choice to him, he chose the film: “Ghost,” with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore.

Under the circumstances, what a film to choose; this is one of the things that let me know that, with all his faults and foibles, my husband was, in his own way, doing his best to support and help me through this difficult period.

And it was during this film, sitting in our hot tub, that I invited Ted in, feeling somehow that he was lost and without direction, and he took me up on my invitation . . . and scared the hell out of me in the process. I felt his spirit attempt a melding, almost a physical sensation as something unknown was joining with me, and yet . . . suddenly I just couldn't go there.

It ended as abruptly as it started, and I sobbed.

Interestingly, it was also my husband who best characterized my relationship with Ted, when he observed that what we had had was a passion of spirit, which is precisely what it was.

And there it was. I was widowed by a man I never married.

And yet, I had a husband at home, expecting me to be a wife, except that I no longer knew how to do that.

I loved my husband, but my love for the man I had left behind dwarfed that love, showed me my marriage for the sham it had become, and left me grieving and raw.

I felt badly for my husband, as I understood that I broke his heart, but I had no idea how to ameliorate that, either for him or for myself. Not surprisingly, as we both came from alcoholic families, he retreated into the bottle, and I had no earthly idea how to respond.

I am a peacemaker by nature, and did my best to maintain the peace, but with increasingly mixed results.

And then the “happenings” began once more. In earnest.

I was wearing the small box cross I had purchased the month that Ted died, leaning back on the couch, when the cross suddenly flipped over without anything touching it, startling me out of my reverie. Although I love black onyx, I usually wore it with the filagree side out, but it started flipping over to the onyx side, sometimes several times in a day.

Our employee Mandie was very kind to me during this period, and one day as she and I were discussing the situation, the cross flipped over while we were talking, and she screamed, then started babbling almost incoherently. I think she believed me before, but to see it for herself was almost more than she could take, and it freaked her out completely.

My meditation group was my lifeline during this period. They saw it all, and they could tell, as my friend Beqi said, that I was truly being haunted.

The next time our meditation group met, we agreed that since Ted seemed to be having trouble moving on, and since quite honestly a part of me didn't want him to, that we would do a meditation specifically for the purpose of asking him to move into the light.

The room in which we were meditating was, as always, warm and comfortable, but as the meditation wore on, I noticed that my left hand was growing colder and colder, to the point of being almost painful. After the meditation came to an end, I held out my hand for the other members to feel, comparing it with my warm right hand, to which Beqi quipped that evidently his response was, “Hell no, I won't go!”

Things escalated from there. I was trying to hold together my husband's business long enough for us to sell it, which my husband had told me he wanted to do, which would give each of a stake toward building a new future.

His downslide progressed, and though he never harmed me, there were times I felt very threatened, and my friends and family feared for my safety, but I knew I was being protected.

Any time things got out of hand, I would literally feel something get between us, which I couldn't see, but which he felt as well, because he would take a step back.

Usually it felt like Ted, but a couple of times it felt like Ted and my dad together, which made me feel good, as I had always been sorry I hadn't introduced them. Their shared love for jazz alone could have been the basis for a warm friendship. And now, they seemed to have come together to offer their protection to me.

Ultimately, my husband forced my hand one day by deciding, while drunk, that he wanted to reduce my father's 1890 grand piano to toothpicks with an axe. Ummmm . . . no.

I talked him out of the axe, he went back and got it again, I called 911, and he flipped off the power to the phone.

At this point, we both knew the sheriffs were probably on the way, as I had connected with them prior to him shutting off the power switch, and so I set about talking him out of the axe once again.

Right after he gave it to me, the knock came at the door, and I asked him if he wanted to talk to them, or if he wanted me to. “I'll talk to them,” he said, and proceeded to do so, telling one deputy everything that had happened, while a second deputy came in and took my side of the story.

Needless to say, he was arrested, and that was the end of our marriage. I had been pushing that boulder uphill long enough, and although he wanted to come back and try again, I had no desire to prolong it further.

In the end, Ted hung around long enough to make certain that I was safe. And, once I was, his visits became less and less frequent, then finally ceased.

And that was the hardest time . . . it was like losing him all over again. But in time I healed.

They say that it takes a year to get over losing someone you love, but for me it took three, to fully finish processing everything that had happened so that I felt confident enough to start again. Of course, having lost three loved ones in quick succession, may explain the additional time.

When I finally began dating, almost exactly two years following our split, and roughly four years after Ted's death, I was brutally honest in my online profile. My logic was that if someone can't accept me for who I really am, then I don't want to be with them in the first place, but I agree to accept them in the same way. As I have.

Acceptance of one another is key in any good relationship.

Though Marek swears that he doesn't remember the part where I described myself as a haphazard housekeeper. ;-)

As for my ex-husband, I did my best to maintain a friendship with him, because we had far more good years together than bad, and because I didn't want to treat him the way my mom treated my dad when they divorced, or the way his first ex-wife had treated him.

We still socialized together, much to the confusion of some of our friends, and had a lot of fun in the process, despite making it clear that these were NOT dates.

Once Marek and I started dating, we even had my now former spouse and his girlfriend over for dinner, and we had a blast together. It was a fun night.

There is no reason to hate someone you used to love. Just because the relationship has changed does not mean that it must be destroyed and all vestiges of what once was good ground into the dirt.

Remaining friends is not only possible, but if kids are involved, highly recommended. Your kids will thank you later.

In the end, I can say unequivocally that this period was probably the greatest period of growth in my life, on many levels, spiritual as well as temporal. I learned a lot through journaling, through writing poetry and songs, and through my ongoing meditation practice.

I have come out of it wiser, with greater tolerance and compassion, and with a sincere desire to help those who are going through their own grieving processes, as I know first hand how difficult it can be to navigate, with or without spiritual “guests” guiding your way.

Interestingly, I recently had a dream about Ted, whom I don't recall dreaming about at all since his death. In the dream, his face and voice had been combined with Marek's body. The message I got was that everything I loved about Ted is alive and well in Marek, which I already knew, and it felt sort of like a hail and farewell. . . a final good bye, or a closure on his part. I awoke feeling good, and shared it with Marek upon awakening, who agreed that it felt good.

I have written about aspects of these events before, and some individual occurrences, but I have never published anything approaching this level of detail before now.

Thank you, @jerrybanfield, as I've had a feeling for a while that my spiritual gifts are part of what I am meant to be sharing with the world, and are a part of my way to help others.

But, as an introvert, I kept chickening out, as it just felt too scary to make myself so publicly vulnerable.

Your contest has been the spur I needed to get it done. Thanks again.

All words and images are my own unless otherwise attributed.

In this particular post, the first image is a scan of a photo taken by Ted, I'm not sure in what year, of one of the bears in Bern, Switzerland, being cute in order to earn treats from the tourists. This photo was his gift to me for my 27th birthday.

The second photo is of Ted on his Honda motorcycle, which appeared in a national print ad for Honda. I do not own the rights to either of these photos, but was given them by my friend, who died without heirs.

Resteeming is welcome, and you may link to my post from your own website or blog, but please ask for permission before using any excerpts or images, as all rights are reserved.