Signs

Since Sarah’s death I’ve done a lot of reading on grief and mourning and child loss and death, both “how to” manuals and memoirs written by parents of dead children. There’s a lot of stuff out there. I have read straightforward “What To Expect During The First Year” how-to’s, similar to when I was pregnant with Sarah. (Of course, very little of that ended up actually applying to our family’s experience). I’ve read some very good “Dead Children” memoirs, as I so compassionately refer to them. I’ve read poetry, by Victor Hugo, who lost his daughter; I’ve even read some fairly embarrassing crap on how our dead loved ones send us signs from ‘the other side’ and manifest their presence in our lives. Currently I’m reading a physics book that talks about conservation of energy and matter and how nothing is destroyed in our universe, ever, but has always existed. It’s tough going for a liberal arts major like me.

It’s very comforting to think that there are signs of Sarah’s presence or to believe that she manifests herself and that her atoms and molecules are still present, just in some other form. A day or two after her death, before her funeral even, I was eating a donut while sitting in my car and a bee kept landing on my fingers. It stayed a long time to eat sugar off my fingers and when I was done with the donut, it flew around the car for a while with me when I drove off. Of course I decided it was Sarah. She would love to fly. She also loved to make and send JibJabs to me and to her friends, little gifs in which her face was inserted into a picture or music video. There was one I had always loved where she was a bee shaking her tail and landing on a flower.

Is this evidence of an afterlife? Of course not, let’s not “bee” absurd.

These days, I waste a lot of time watching documentaries on streaming TV. That seems to be my default timesuck. Max wastes a lot of time playing Minecraft. Sarah love Minecraft and I guess this is his way of maintaining a bond with her. Anyway, I watched a series called “Surviving Death,” and one episode had a medium meeting with grieving families. A couple had lost their son who was Sarah’s age when a tree fell on him. They were not inclined to believe in signs either. The parents said “We just want to know where he is, and if he’s happy.” I cried because that is exactly what I want to know about Sarah. Where is she now? Is she well-cared for? Is she happy?

Would knowing the answers to these questions make me feel better?