Letting Go - Part II

I am very suddenly, very harshly, jolted out of a deep sleep. 

I hear Erik say, “Hi”.

I know it is him, even though, bizarrely, the voice sounds like one of those electronic voices.  The kind they use on TV when they are interviewing someone and black out their faces and make them talk through a voice synthesizer, or whatever they call it.  Yet I know it is him.

I am frozen into my fetal, sleep on my side position in bed.  My heart is pounding so hard and I feel terrified.  Darn you Erik, you scared the living daylights out of me!

I cannot bring myself to turn around toward the sound of the voice, and am upset with myself.  Why am I so scared?  I had hoped something like this would happen.  Now I can’t deal with it...

So I stay huddled under the covers, my eyes trying to look through the back of my head, and listening.  There is nothing.  NOTHING.

Still, I am convinced it was Erik, and he said hi in the electronic voice.  I decide he realized he frightened me so badly, he figured he better leave again.  I am disappointed and angry at myself, thinking that maybe if I hadn’t gotten so upset, he would have stuck around and said more.

I don’t think I fell back to sleep after that.  It was as if I could feel every nerve ending in my body, like I was wired at 80,000 volts.  Also, I think I was hoping he might come back, now that I had composed myself.  But to no avail, and the morning came, another regular day.

As I went about my routine on this day, I could not stop thinking about my little tiny message.  Why had he just said hi?  What was he going to tell me if he hadn’t left so quickly?  What the heck was this all about?

Ironically, I had no problem quickly devising a logical explanation for the electronic voice.  I often think of our spiritual selves as energy.  Our thoughts are electronic impulses from our nerves, and our hearts beat on electric impulses.  Modern medicine can even keep our hearts going with electronic devices – pacemakers.

When debating afterlife with non-believers, I sometimes resort to this fact.  You must believe in electricity, I tell people.  And it is a first law of physics, energy cannot be created or destroyed…so, where do you think the energy of our hearts and minds go after bodily death?  I just love when something is so logical.

So I had no issue with the sound of Erik’s voice, in spite of my chagrin that he left so quickly.  Leave it to Erik to aggravate me from the afterlife!

Then the light bulb went off in my head, and I decided I would call Peter when I got home from work.  He would have something profound to say I was sure.

It was actually such a brief story, that Peter didn’t have a lot to say, it seemed.  He was very quiet on the other end of the phone.  Certainly he agreed that it was Erik, but it’s pretty difficult to put great meaning into the word “Hi.”  So we talked for a while, and it was good to be able to tell someone who first of all believed me, and secondly, understood so well. (And of course, didn’t think I was loony.)

I went to bed hoping for another visit, but of course it didn’t happen.

The next day, I was starting my car, and looked down at the pink change purse.  Lightning bolt.  Erik came to me the night I had hidden his picture.  Two small moments, but both had taken my breath away.  Was he trying to tell me he wasn’t mad at me?

When I got home, I bolted for the phone and called Peter.  I told him I had figured something out, but couldn’t quite put my finger on what it meant.  And so, I told him, very carefully, about holding Erik’s picture, weighing my decision so heavily, and how I had remembered our conversations about letting go.  He told me he had thought a lot about the visitation too.  He told me that he had thought of something about the contact, not being confident of what he was thinking.  But then he said that with my story of putting the picture in a different place, away from my everyday sight, he felt that he may have the answer to Erik’s visit, but didn’t want me to be upset. 

With my promise to not get upset with him, and that I would deal with whatever he said, he told me his very simple and brief explanation.

He said:  “Mary Ann, I think you didn’t hear Erik exactly right.  I think he didn’t say ‘hi’.  Mary Ann, he was saying ‘bye’, because he was at peace and able to crossover…you helped him when you changed the picture.”

I have that picture in that hidden spot still.  I never moved it further.  It always makes me smile when I look at it.  And it is always with me, just like Erik.  And I know Erik is his usual, twinkly eyed, smirky self, beaming down on us all.