Page 39 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

seldom mentioned any of the men who had made similar claims. For as long as I could remember, a Bible was kept handy near my parents’ bedside. In addition, through a church-sponsored subscription service, there was always a small, monthly booklet of daily devotions with brief homilies based on a variety of Bible verses. But by the time I was in high school, I understood that those books maintained their place because they were used primarily by my father.
Now, though, there were eyewitnesses. One woman was a doctor. Another was a teacher. They were wom- en she could trust who shared words like harmony and peace in books and interviews. Eventually, she made an exception about the gender of the after-light witnesses. She happened upon Thomas Edison’s last words, the line he had reportedly spoken after briefly reviving from a coma—“It’s very beautiful over there.” By then, I was married and had three small children. “A man like that,” she said. “A genius.”
However, despite her anticipation, she survived an- other seven years, long enough to outlive her confi- dence in a lush eternity. She felt, she said for the last three years of her life, like Mina, Edison’s wife, that “Over there” was the valley framed by the window he faced when he woke, the light splitting fall foliage in a suggestive, transcendent way.
After she died, I stood outside in the ordinary light of early January, the sun for her funeral failing to spark the noon temperature to zero. Beside her grave, I squinted and raised my hands to comfort my eyes in that bright, intrusive light.
Entropy
Because my mother died on New Year’s Day and my father refused to move one thing she owned, I saw how Christmas had stalled at gifts opened but un- packed, how her medicine was arranged by fre- quency: from Crystodigin and Almodet (once daily) to Cytomel (three times per day). They had duties that supported her weak heart and faulty thyroid. I lifted the vial of Percocet (as needed, for severe pain, no refills), and I wondered at the gaps between the demands that screamed. Beside it was Nitrostat (as needed), those pills the ones that the foolish in mov- ies always grope toward as they tumble one room from relief.
By then, I had my own medicine to take, swallowing Theolair twice daily and inhaling Ventolin as needed, lying back like Proust, whose life I’d learned for my
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“Isaid goodbye to all of the clipped-from-my- yearbook classmates as if
they might have moved south, choosing another hemisphere so that they might twist backwards, slide the other way until we might see each other again, a sort of heaven rounding the planet from the opposite side.”
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