In the 10 years after my father died, so did all four uncles on my mom’s side of the family, two male cousins on mom’s side, and my maternal grandmother’s second husband. This is when I became convinced that the women in my family were cursed, and also when I began to believe that the spirits of my dead relatives were never far away.
The former notion was all mine. The latter came from Mom’s friend Marylou, a kindergarten teacher who dressed in mini-skirts, wore pale blue eyeshadow and even paler pink lipstick, and teased her curly blonde hair into a bob tamed with copious amounts of hairspray. Also, she drove a Camaro.
Before becoming a kindergarten teacher, Marylou had been a nun. When we knew her she was single and as far as I knew she had no boyfriend, so I concluded that she’d left the convent so she could wear eye makeup, lip gloss, short skirts, and a sexy hairdo while driving a sports car.
Beneath the bombshell vibes, Marylou was gentle, loving, and deeply spiritual. She was one of the people who, while Dad was missing and after he died, made herself an indispensable member of our much-needed support system. She was Mom’s friend and colleague, but she and another of Mom’s young, single teacher friends, Ann, made it clear that my sister and I were just as important.
It was Marylou who told me one night as I was getting ready for bed that I could and should talk to my dad if I wanted to, even though he was gone. She also said that I could talk to God. I can’t remember her exact words, only that the fact that she’d been a nun gave her unsolicited advice more heft than it would have coming from, say, Ann, also a devout Catholic, but one whose gifts leaned more toward the culinary (she and her mother were phenomenal Italian cooks who often invited us over for handmade pasta).
I’d always said the Sh’ma, the prayer known as the watchword of the Jewish faith, before bed, but with Marylou’s blessing, I added one-way conversations with Dad and God to my nighttime agenda. I still talk to them, but now that I’m 63 I know a whole lot more dead people, and I talk to them, too: my mother, my aunts, my cousin Debbie, my friend Sheri, who died nine years ago at the age of 62.
Like me, Sheri was a Jewish girl from upstate New York who wound up in Edmonton because she followed a man here. When I met her, I was in my early 40s and thought of her as the older sister of my dreams: organized, bossy, and competent in ways that I was not.
She was very no-nonsensey. When the late-stage ovarian cancer that doctors had seemingly successfully treated returned only a few months after her last round of chemotherapy more than 10 years ago, Sheri didn’t sugar-coat the truth. She knew she was dying. When she was still strong enough, we’d go for walks and she’d talk—unburden herself, really—about her fears. Most were about her children. Her daughter was 18 when she died, her son 22, and she despaired about leaving them.
“Do you want me to be there for them?” I asked one day when we were in the dog park near my house. I was thinking of the surrogate fathers who stepped up for me and my sister. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask, “Do you want me to be their mother figure after you die?” I didn’t want her to think I was trying to replace her.
“Yes,” she said, her relief palpable.
As long as we were on the subject of life after death, I decided to go out on a limb. “Do you believe in an afterlife?” I asked.
I was pretty sure she’d say no. She seemed too grounded. I was positive, for example, that unlike me, she did not consider the movie Ghost to be a documentary. Also, I doubted that she read the Alice Sebold novel The Lovely Bones and thought to herself, Wow, Alice Sebold knows a lot about heaven, which is what I thought after I read it.
“I certainly hope I’m not just going to die and that’s going to be it,” Sheri said.
“Can I ask you something kind of weird?” I said.
“Go ahead,” she replied.
“Do you think, after you die, you could send me a sign?”
Her response caught me off guard. Instead of scoffing, which I think is what I might have done had the roles been reversed, she acted as if mine was the most natural question imaginable. “What kind of sign?” she asked.
I’d been so sure she was going to roll her eyes that I hadn’t given any thought to what kind of sign, when, and under what circumstances. Put on the spot, thinking this was my one opportunity, I said the first thing that popped into my head. “A butterfly.”
To this day, I don’t know why I said that. I also don’t remember anything more about the conversation, but almost immediately after Sheri died, I began looking for a sign. However, Sheri died in January. The only butterflies you see around here in January are dead and pinned to display boards at the local natural history museum. As a result, I saw no signs.
The summer after Sheri died, my 19-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, asked me to take an aerial acrobatics course with her. She’d just returned from a semester abroad in England, so we hadn’t had a lot of time together. I firmly believe that when your 19-year-old daughter asks to spend time with you, you should be delighted and jump at the opportunity.
But the truth was, I had neither the interest in nor aptitude for aerial acrobatics. There were a million other things I’d have preferred to do on a Saturday afternoon in the summer than pretend I was a flying monkey in the circus.
“Why don’t you invite someone else to do it with you?” I suggested.
“I really want to do it with you,” she said. “It will be fun.”
I called the aerial acrobatics studio to find out what the class entailed. “As long as you can lift your body weight and aren’t afraid of heights, you’ll be fine,” I was told.
I could not do a full-body push-up. I could barely do a pullup using the fancy machine in the gym where I’d been working out with my friends for a few years. And I’m terrified of heights. So, basically, I was absolutely the wrong person to be taking an aerial acrobatics class. Which is what I told Elizabeth, but she was insistent.
“I still think you should ask a friend,” I said. “Ask Danika.”
Danika is Sheri’s daughter. She is a year younger than Elizabeth. She’s graceful and strong and was the star of the Cirque-du-Soleil-like class she took on a cruise a few years before Sheri died, something I knew because Sheri was so proud when she described Danika’s prowess.
And so it was that Elizabeth, Danika, and I enrolled in the class. Most of our classmates were in their twenties. The teacher was older than I, as was one of the other students. Within 10 minutes, every single person could get herself up on the trapeze and start learning tricks. Except for me. Even with three people trying to lift and push me onto the trapeze, I could not get airborne.
At the end of that first session, the teacher and her assistant told me they could probably get me a refund.
Part of me was thrilled to know there was a way out. The other part knew that quitting was not an option. Even though I was miserable and hated the class because it was hard and I was never going to be good at it, I also had a daughter who was two years away from graduating from university and entering the work force. I could imagine her coming to me and saying, “I can’t find a job! It’s hard! I hate it! I can’t do it!” And I’d say, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” and she’d say, “You quit that aerial acrobatics class two years ago. Who are you to talk?”
I’d boxed myself in. If I wanted to retain the slightest shred of moral authority, I was stuck in aerial acrobatics. Every night that week, I forced myself to do three pushups. I did not like it, but what could I do? I needed arm strength.
And then, at the end of the week, I got an email.
From Sheri.
This was it! My sign!
Except it wasn’t that Sheri, it was Sheri, the teacher, whose name was spelled the same way as Sheri my friend.
She’d come up with a solution: she would rig a trapeze close to the ground so I could sit on the bar with my feet firmly on the ground.
I was touched. And encouraged. I wouldn’t be swinging from the trapeze like everyone else, but at least I’d be able to sit on one without feeling like a fatted calf being hoisted onto a spit, which is how I’d felt that first week.
The following Saturday I showed up full of enthusiasm. The first half of the class, on my low trapeze, I felt really good about myself. Then we moved to the other half of the studio, where the silks were suspended from the ceiling. Standing on one foot, wrapping a silk around the other, I lost my balance and fell onto the thick mat. The confidence I’d mustered during the first half of class evaporated, replaced by the self-loathing that had marked my first week.
I couldn’t wait to get out of the studio that day. Elizabeth and Danika were going home together after class, but I was driving on my own to a volunteer gig. I climbed into my car, turned the key in the ignition, and music blasted through the speakers. That was weird: I always had the radio tuned to news stations. Then I realized what I was hearing: Journey, singing “Don’t stop believing.” Those were the lyrics filling my car.
This was my sign. This was Sheri, telling me not to give up. If she’d been alive, she probably would have taken the class with me. She would have encouraged me. And I was convinced, sitting there in the car, with tears streaming down my cheeks, that that’s exactly what she was doing.
That week I had an epiphany. Signing up for aerial acrobatics was akin to signing up for an advanced Shakespeare class without knowing the alphabet. I was starting so far behind the curve that merely learning a few letters (i.e., a few moves), would be an accomplishment.
I adjusted my expectations. I attended every single class with a healthier attitude. By the end, I could do a few moves on the trapeze, and I could hang upside down on the silks.
On the last day of class, I pointed out to Sheri the teacher that I was the only student with a perfect attendance record, which was ironic: if anyone should have been skipping, it should have been the student with no aerial acrobatics acumen who (photo above notwithstanding) hated the class.
However, I am not quite as clumsy in my interpersonal skills as I am on a trapeze, so I ended my brief monologue to Sheri after “perfect attendance record.”
Sheri, ever positive, was delighted to hear that. “I hope we’ll see you again,” she said brightly.
“You will not,” I said, equally brightly.
Instead of continuing with aerial acrobatics, I did something I’d been putting off for years: I signed up for a learn-to-ice-skate class. It was something I’d wanted to do when my kids were little and learning to skate, but I’d always told myself I didn’t have the time.
Aerial acrobatics helped me to understand that a lack of time had nothing to do with it: I’d avoided skating lessons because I was afraid to embarrass myself in front of strangers. Spending my summer embarrassing myself in front of strangers for something I didn’t even want to do freed me to do something I really did want to do.
As for the sign from Sheri, I’m pretty sure I would have heard the lyrics “Don’t stop believing” in the car that day even if I hadn’t asked her to reach out from wherever she is. But I’m equally sure I wouldn’t have gotten the same message—and that message is what made all the difference.
Great essay, Debby, full of life even as the jumping off point was death.
This perfectly placed line made me laugh, which is a gift.
"I was positive, for example, that unlike me, she did not consider the movie Ghost to be a documentary."
So great