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The One Thing
After his funeral, where his son snot-cried on my thighs, where I tried to crawl into his coffin to open his mouth that had been sewn shut so I could see his gapped teeth one more time, he came to me in a clear vision….
He said, wake up, baby…before I go, I have a few things I want you to know….
There was that light again I saw coming from him — the same light I saw at the top of the concrete steps the first day I met him.
He told me dying was wonderful. I thought it was rude that he didn’t miss me, but he said that’s just the way it is — grief is meant for the living.
Music is the language between the worlds, he said.
Dying is like a great moment of understanding and forgiveness. It’s so freeing. You understand nobody really wronged you.
That’s when he told me every religion has it mostly wrong — about the universe and God.
Did my atheist boyfriend, who died on Christmas morning, just use the word God?
But they are also all right about one thing, he smiled, and it’s the same thing.
Just like that, he was gone, before I could ask about the One Thing.
He wasn’t coming back in a body on earth, not this time — he had gone light years away….
