I’m not sure who the visitors have been, always, but over the years, I have received visitors – uninvited – who came to me with a message, and in their own voice.
The first time, I was sitting alone in a tiny cabin along Highway 57 in Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin. I had traveled to Door County to be alone for a few days to heal from some heartbreak. Door County is one of my places on earth, the place I return to as often as possible, even now that I’ve lived in California for most of my life. I travel to Door County to honor a promise I made to myself many years ago – that no matter how far my life would take me, I would return.
I still turn to look up at the cabin each time I pass it, when I visit Door County, in silent recognition of that time. The builder placed the wood frame building just-so on a rise, a few hundred feet in front of the woods. The highway below cannot be seen from the front window, which I faced, sitting alone at the little kitchen table. Across from me was the sky hanging over Green Bay. Except for me and my relentless thoughts, I was alone. “It’s ok, Mary:” a voice spoke in the room. I turned to look over my left shoulder, in the direction of the sound. No one was there. When I turned to face the window again, I was still alone in the room.
*
A few years later, I was awakened in my dorm room at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, where I was studying for a Master of Divinity degree, on my way to being ordained in the United Methodist Church. What had wakened me? I didn’t know, didn’t understand, still don’t understand. What I did understand was that the presence of my maternal grandmother – Frances Markowski – Feodosia Machsuda Srebny – had somehow entered me, come into me, inhabited me. I was afraid, and in my fear, I cried out for Jesus. Then, nothing. No presence, no sound, no light, no other disturbance. Did I fall back to sleep? Mostly a light sleeper, I don’t remember if I was able to sleep again that night.
Over the coming months that turned into years, I was aware – always – of the presence of my maternal grandmother, who had passed when I was in college. Hers was the first funeral I attended; until her death, my parents had gone without me, my sister, or my brother, to funerals. I had not felt attached to my grandmother. She had lost her ability to speak any English in her later years, instead speaking only Ukrainian when Dad picked her up at the nursing home to spend the holidays with us. As soon as she arrived, she began to ask my mother to be taken home again.
She gave me a gift after her return during my seminary years. Jeff speaks about those visitations as a “haunting,” although I didn’t feel haunted. Instead, from time to time I sat and word by word, line by line, I crafted poems that tell the story of her life, of her leavings, of her griefs. I call the poems, “The Feodosia Poems”, and they will be included in my collection of poems, Moments, to be published this year.
Years later, a friend and I would sit on the floor of my home and together, with our intentions, free my grandmother to move on in her life. I watched as she traveled away from me, away into the past. She has not returned.
I asked my friend why she had come to me, why not to others in the family? “Who else would she go to?” my friend answered, simply.
*
In 2001, I was living in Oakland, California, in a rented duplex with Jeff. I had moved my mother to Oakland to live in a wonderful assisted living home, The Matilda Brown Home, not far from where I live now, in 1998, the year I was appointed as Pastor at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church in downtown Oakland. Mom loved her new home, where she made friends and enjoyed the simple activities, the regular meals in the beautiful dining room, her times outside in the garden, where she and I sat together on a swinging bench during our visits. She loved her little room, the smallest at the home, where she returned after breakfast every day to read the newspaper as she sat on her single bed. The one small window overlooked the school yard of Oakland Tech, and she could hear the young people playing sports as she sat in her chair.
The night before she passed, Jeff insisted that I go home to sleep in my own bed. He spent the night in the swivel chair next to her bed. Before I left her room to go home that last evening, I sat in the silence, her breathing the only sound in the room. Then, I noticed a melody, playing itself alone in my head. The words of a melancholy song from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” came into my head: how can I make you understand, why I do, what I do? Going away to a distant land, far from the home I love.”
As planned, Jeff stayed the night in the chair beside Mom’s bed. In the morning, I awoke alone in our flat, and prepared for the day. I stood at the window in the corner of our bedroom, combing my hair. “Everything is going to happen naturally from here on.” I heard a voice. I turned to look over my shoulder into the room behind our bedroom, with its windows on two sides bright with the morning. “Jesus?” I asked, into the silence.
A few minutes later, I arrived in Mom’s room. I saw immediately that her breathing had changed, and that death was not far away. Mom had been asleep now for several days, medication given by her doctor easing her discomfort. As I arrived, I turned to Mom in her bed and said: “I’m here now.” Jeff had left the room, and she and I were alone. And I stood and watched as she took her last breath.
*
I expect life holds many mysteries, many things I will not ever understand. I expect that your life holds many mysteries, too.
