TheBanyanTree: Optical Illusions

[Monique Colver]

One weekend I am standing at the deathbed of my ex-husband, holding his hand
and comforting him as he slips away. We turn him on his side, and he bleeds
out through his mouth and his nose, dark gouts of blood that I mop up with
towels in one hand as I hold his head with the other, as I tell him "It's
okay, you're okay," not knowing if he can hear me or not, but having to say
it anyway.

            Afterwards I notice that there is blood on my foot, and think to
myself, "Good thing I didn't have my shoes on." This is not the type of
thing one should be thinking at a time like this, but it's what occurs to me
anyway.

            The following weekend I'm at his Celebration of Life, an event
he helped decide on, and I know that it's going to hit me when I least
expect it, the fact of his being gone. He'd suffered from mental illness,
and just when he was getting control of that, he was diagnosed with terminal
cancer. This helped to prove my theory that sometimes life just sucks. He
bore it with his trademark good humor, not wanting to put anyone out, and he
made jokes, and he realized how many people really cared. It took cancer for
him to realize that.

            A week after his service my husband and I visit the lodge where
we were married just over a year ago. This is an old building, originally
built in the early 1920's. As I sat in the restroom, where I would normally
sit in a bathroom, I looked down at the floor, a green vinyl with uneven
splotches of mostly white, and I saw it move. Not the floor itself, but the
splotches, as if the surface were nothing more than water, and it was
flowing downstream towards me. I put my foot in its pink madras shoe, the
same shoe that had missed the blood flow two weeks earlier, in the path of
the flowing splotches, and they appeared to float around it, steadily
floating towards me.

            My ex-husband had often, when in the throes of his mental
illness, seen such strange things, and I vividly remember the two of us
leaving a restaurant with him telling me how the tiles in the restroom had
been speaking to him. They had moved while he watched, and while he knew it
was another symptom of his illness, he was also certain that he had seen
such a thing.

            I remembered that he had been at this same lodge, just over a
year ago, for the wedding, and it occurred to me that he knew where to find
me.

            And those white splotches floating towards me, peacefully and
slowly, brought him right back to me. I knew it was him, telling me he was
okay where he was at, even as I knew it could be explained as an optical
illusion.