August, 2020
After biting my fingers to the quick until 4 or 5 AM, I am writing this now at the bay beside Devon. I’m under my umbrella at Fresh Pond, at low tide, while hordes of possibly infected children splash in the distance. All of the dark geese just picked up at once. They rose from where they rested on loosely strung wire, holding sagging green nets to driftwood poles in the bay. I am on the rocky shore of the bay facing out, in between two rock jetties, Albert’s Landing and Fresh Pond Road. I have a few of your letters sealed into a Ziploc bag to protect them here. Strange that I picked this spot to read these packets of letters since I’ve never gone to Albert’s Landing before in all my years out here. I can picture you paddling out on the surfboard that Aunt Edith bought for you. I just found the buoys you talk about to your mother in a note home from your summer visit to Grammy Klem’s when you were ten, and you wrote about going to just this spot.
I walked halfway out to the buoys on the sandy bottom in my swim shoes at lowest tide today. There are kids on their surfboards, and a line of socially distant umbrellas, pick up trucks, swimmers in wetsuits, and snorkelers doing serious water work. A man walks strangely backwards as in some exercise routine while answering his cell phone. There are dogs on leashes and off, low-flying helicopters making trips back and forth from Montauk, boats out at Devon Yacht Club, moored and rocking gently, and a green-tailed kite. It is high season here.
There is so much to tell you. On Sunday night I was deep into my “Dream Yoga” book for the second time, and I came upon this from Andrew Holocek:
“In the world of dream yoga we work with ‘last thought, best thought’, or Proximate Karma…The last thought or feeling you have before dropping asleep tends to ‘reincarnate’ as the first thought or feeling in your next state of consciousness…”
It also works this way during death, and I wondered what your last thought was before you died that might have reincarnated. That transported me back into your hospital bed with you, waking at 4:00 AM with your head still nestled on my shoulder to discover you no longer breathed.
This happens still at least once a day. I gasp each time I remember, and I am crying again now. The pain is so strong it can actually bring me to my knees. Last night I screamed and screamed and screamed. Your last breath. And I was not there. My body was next to you, but not my sleeping mind. Unless - I had a magical thought - what if we were dreaming together when it happened?
After I finished crying I read on in the Dream Yoga book:
“…teachers from the Nyingma tradition...say that it’s the property of the awakened ones - from any tradition - to respond instantly when someone cries out from the bottom of their heart…”
If that wasn’t a cry from the bottom of my heart, then I don’t know what it was. I woke on the brown velvet couch in the cottage this morning, around 9:30 am. I saw Ricky’s name light up on my ringing phone. I groaned for lack of sleep, wondering why he would call so early.
“Call me immediately. Important.”
He had also been woken by his phone at too early an hour, and he assumed that it was you calling, Nick, as you normally would call Ricky at that hour. But it was Cousin Judy calling to tell him that she has decided to loan the Grimshaw estate $170,000 to pay off the reverse mortgage. MIRACLE!!! The house is saved. For now. There won’t be anymore foreclosure notices scotch-taped to the front door.
Ricky said it was you, Nick. Calling through Cousin Judy. Judy said the new iPad her daughter gave her started playing her favorite song and she didn’t know how it could know, and she thought it was you too, Nick. I told both of them about my loud cry, and the passages from the book. The three of us agreed - it was you.
We love you more than you know.
It’s day four of extreme emotional weather for me. Free-floating anxiety run amok. The past two days I’ve been in a bouncy castle, without motor coordination, or full eyesight, or balance. There are birds waiting to swoop just outside of the peripheral edge of my vision, an emanation of an anxiety level so deep that I can’t reach it by talking or breathing or meditation. Of course I remember that you called me your Bouncy Castle. You said because of the bounce of my skin. You marveled at its resilience and delighted in biting me!
But this new bouncy castle is no good. I am being pursued. Chased by my ethic to do more and more and more. Find Nick. Help Nick. Save Nick. Keep him safe. These are my jobs, and I am doing them so badly! I called Diane, and she reminded me that I don’t have to do anything but be in touch with how I feel. She laughed when I told her the story of Cousin Judy coming to the rescue and paying off the reverse mortgage.
“That was Nick!” she said. “He knows where you are. He’s watching and making sure you are safe.”
“But I have to keep him safe! I have to make sure!” I blurted out.
She reassured me that you are probably just fine, and I yelled back that you had better not be, that you had better be missing me too!
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