In Loving and Grateful Memory

Shirley wore a silver necklace with the words "Let go and let God" on it. Acceptance was her way, and it took a long time for it to be my way, too. When she got pregnant I was so jealous I almost lost her as a friend. She'd convinced me I just had to accept my lot in life. She had two beautiful children before we were close again. By then I was a different person, or two, or three. Her children were teenagers when her battle with cancer began.

I'd tried to kill myself shortly after I met Shirley. Going back there is painful. As I sink into those memories today, I know of course with certainty I'll never go there again, never want to die by my own hand. It took long study and reading, given those helpful books by Shirley, and being in the world of the sane and adult to realize I'd not only been here before, but I chose this life. If I chose it, chose these people, these circumstances, then I must ride it out. Nobody said I had to continue to suffer. I could end the echoes of the bad sad feelings, distance myself from those who hurt me, pick myself up and move on.

That's where Shirley proved herself the most invaluable friend of my life.. After springing me from the locked ward where I'd landed after my failure to die, she heaped me with books, helpful ones, which I later passed on to another failed suicide years later. In one of the books, A Guide to Rational Living by Ellis, I got "What are you telling yourself? Stop telling yourself you hurt!" Somehow we use whatever we can tie-to in order to make it; coping skills after a failed suicide being not daily but hourly. I decided I'd been twins, and in failing to die, had killed the sad bad hurting twin so the real me, the remaining twin, upbeat, healthy, creative, sane and happy, could live.

Shirley's friendship and kindness acknowledged my past without letting me wallow in it. "I won't feel sorry for you - you already feel sorry enough for yourself for both of us," she'd say, gently, and then change the subject.

I had escaped the house where I grew up, had an apartment and a job and life anyone would have been happy with. But my life back then hurt too much to bear. I wanted out, wanted a new roll of the dice. Stupidity saved me; the things I took fought each other, cancelled out their lethality. I awoke a day later, temporarily blind, with a racing heart, and called the Women's Help Line. An ambulance took to me County General Hospital where I was locked up for a week.

At my court hearing, I was released to outside psychiatric help, and then immediately handcuffed and arrested by the police. Shirley yelled at them, "You take those cuffs off her right now! She's sick!" And they did. We drove away to lunch, promising to go later to the police station near where I lived. They questioned me there a long time, then dropped the charges. My interrogator shook hands with me at the door as I left, complimented my looks and winked, saying he'd like to date me when I got better. The predatory court-appointed psychiatrist made me come in for nighttime-only appointments where he pawed and kissed me. A month later I walked out of his office and never returned, ignoring past due notices, expecting dire consequences, but he never pursued collection. All my official helpers proved to be greedy, leering sharks. Only Shirley stood real, sane, practical, kindly and more family than anyone could wish. She saved my life, gave me back myself. How I loved her!

I miss her terribly. In this wonderful house I have now, she's visited me, her spirit the same affectionately giving and forgiving one it was when she walked among us. I asked a psychic once how I could ever repay her because I felt I got so much and gave so little when our connection ended so soon. The answer was that we've been connected through many lives and have alternately helped each other. I hope so. I hope I've been golden helpful to her. She got to read my first novel which I dedicated to her in loving and grateful memory. It was published after she died.

I planted a purple garden near my front door in her memory after I found a tulip called Shirley, a pale cream mid-season tulip with purple edges which matures to allover lavender. I planted them by the hundreds, fought off voles and replanted the little garden more than once, but every year there were no tulips at all. I devised a bulb cage and made them out of hardware cloth all summer, to be ready for fall planting, one of my typical nerdy solutions. When spring came, my glorious purple garden hadn't lost a single tulip. As the purple garden came up, I'd pass it on my way to work, saying, "I'm trying, Shirley," and maybe I'd only imagined she'd reply, "Me too!" I thought she meant the garden. But about the time I was pointing out masses of purple tulips to everyone who would stop long enough to look, I got an acceptance letter for Key Light.

Shirley visits now and again. She was my best friend and her spirit and mine are linked through this life and I suspect many lives before and many still to some. She read Key Light before it was published. "Neat," she said, recognizing the parts she know that had come from my life. She visits less often, now, of course, but I needed her so much that I willed her to me again and again, my wise and loving friend. "I am here," she'd say, "All is well." I credit her completely with bringing me to adulthood, able to fend for myself in a world I'd feared. Her humor and love and little nudges toward my independence are treasured in memory.

The Gift of Sight

My grandfather was blind, the result of being kicked by a horse when he was a teenager. He had a soft voice and loved to tell and write stories. As children, we would sit on his lap while he played softly on his harmonica, which he called a "mouth organ." Too young to understand blindness, we only thought of him as special, someone kind and quiet and loving.

Sight problems run all through our family, from Glaucoma to Ambliopia. To say I suffer from one-eyed vision is to deny that from birth I have had the privilege of seeing things in a way nobody "normal" does. Of course there's the depth perception blunders - my ex used to hand me back his cup of coffee and ask politely if he could have the other half. Looking down as I poured, the level of drink and the rim of the cup would line up and I would think the cup filled; it could go the other way, too, an over pour. I'm the only one I know that can fall on sloping pavement, which to me looks flat.

Happy to at last find an eye doctor to prescribe contacts for me back in the 80's, I was surprised to go outside and see distinct leaves on the trees, blades of grass, textures and details I'd missed all my life. In addition, the lenses kept my eyes warm, a new treat. That it took me twenty minutes to get the lenses out of my eyes at night and still had to have reading glasses, I happily dismissed as mere irritations; I felt normal looking for the first time in my life. Soon the ordeal of getting the lenses out marred the new treat and I went back to glasses, which by now needed a single bifocal lens. The first time they gave me two, the eye that won't work decided not to look through the new bifocal but at it, giving me a headache. I went back and asked for only the good eye to get the bifocal, a cost savings too!

The non-working eye works if I close the good eye, something I do a lot; I check my makeup, my paintings; the non focusing eye has the stronger color sense. I titled one of my paintings Why I failed Botany, an attempt at fauvism, my trees and hills had colors from imagination. When my brother saw the painting, he asked why there were eyes in the painting. Until he said that, I couldn't see eyes, in fact it's like an optical illusion. I see them now that he pointed them out and then they become part of the landscape again. I couldn't have painted eyes that well if I'd tried.

A few times I've been privileged to see things that have left me breathless. Once, driving home from the eye doctor at night in the rain , every light and puddle reflection held rainbows and colors that were unreal, neon fuchsias, aquamarines, purples, all in shimmering motion. It was a trip I enjoyed in the details I would normally have missed. This time the drops they use to dilate your pupils for examination kept working for hours. I couldn't read, but everything I saw was transformed.

And this week I saw my own aura. Walking outside in the bright sunshine, as I looked down, my body was outlined by the most intense blue! It made me lightheaded, it made me happy. Blue about two inches out from my legs, my arms, each footstep. I should have left blue footprints! The blue of neon lights outside bars. What a gift.