Page 106 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Jacob became extremely capable, a facilitator, someone you wanted around

because he smoothed your path—whether through his skill as a polyglot or his
general aura of “can do.” Lena was pretty much lawless, used to wear a pair of
sunglasses on the back of her head and a badge that said HELL, which she tapped
whenever anyone asked her where she was “originally from,” and she was so
clearly somebody that you could trust with your life that reform always seemed
possible for her. Jill advanced an entirely false impression of herself as biddable
and in need of protection. Ah, I’m just a little chickadee who won’t survive the

winter unless I nestle under your life-sustaining wing. Far from original, but it
worked.
—

THEY WENT OUT to dinner at their favorite restaurant—the benefits were twofold:

delicious chargrilled broccoli plus the discussion of Jacob’s question without
having to bring it into the house with them. Jacob proposed sacrificing their
summer holiday to a project of his, an idea he was developing as part of his work
as a bereavement counselor. So that was it, the question he’d been building up to
for weeks. Do you mind giving up your holiday to test-run my project? She was
embarrassed that he felt he’d had to work up to asking her this; it was a question
that would’ve been easily raised and just as easily settled with an unselfish

partner. Regarding him her support was in fact unconditional and to date she’d
thought she adequately expressed this; now she fought demoralization as she
heard him out. His project focused on a particular type of experience that a large
number of his clients reported having undergone. “To oversimplify the
descriptions I’ve been given, this experience presents as . . . an implosion of
memory. And as the subjects drift through the subsequent debris, they calmly

develop a conviction that they do not do so alone. These presences aren’t
reported as ghostly, but living ones . . . minutes, sometimes hours when the
mourner feels as if they’ve either returned to a day when the deceased was still
alive or the deceased has just arrived in the present time with them . . . and
what’s interesting about these lapses people experience is that most of them
happen under fairly similar physical conditions.”
“So you’ve put together some sort of program that induces this feeling of . . .

presence?”
“Well, that’s what I’m aiming for. Of course it’d only be for mourners who
need that feeling from time to time and can’t make it happen by themselves.
We’re calling it ‘Presence.’ And now we’ve got some funding . . .”