Tirza ~ May 3

 

Life after death

 

Funny how much better I get along with him after his death. It’s taken time, ten years in fact.  I’ve been waking up at 5:55 lately, his favorite number. His way to grab my attention as soon as I open my eyes.

Now I can laugh and say to him “You were right!” something I avoided at all costs when he was living.  Whenever he was right, he’d say, “I’m always right! ALWAYS!”  

As a civil engineer and a businessman driven by lucre, his beliefs were all the more astonishing.  He believed he had a treasured store of intuition and powerful energy others in the know could perceive, and with my mother, showed interest – way before it was fashionable – in the occult and astrology, anything of use to him in being always right.  

After a trip to Peru with energy healers, and without telling him more than the superficial details, he pronounced, almost accusingly, “You found God”.
Counting out the dozens of vitamins he would take with his 3 meals a day, the only pills he took until 99, he looked up at me from the kitchen table covered with little jars with mouths agape, and told me as a matter of fact that his father, a high school math teacher, helped him count his pills…so the right number of pills always fell into his hand. 

Now I like to do the same, letting him toss the right number into my palm.  And I chide him for any lapse.  Really dad?  Always right?

At the age of 97 or so, from the passenger seat with his girlfriend-slash-companion driving us to a lawyer’s appointment for one of his many lawsuits, he held up his left hand holding his ring finger with his other hand.  She wants me, he exclaimed, I feel her pressing here! (where he might have worn a wedding band).  She wants me to die so she can be with me.  This some thirty years after the divorce and his renaming of my mother as “the bitch”.  

Another time, I was doing the driving, on a mission to help him put his affairs in order, just the two of us in the car. Out of the blue, he asks me if I believe in life after death.  I think before I answer him, cautiously weighing what to say.  I say, “Well, considering that nature is never wasteful, it’s hard to imagine that we spend a whole lifetime gaining wisdom and experience only to have it disappear when we die.”  

Without skipping a beat, as though he had his finger on the trigger all the while, he spits out, “Good! Then I’ll hide my money for my next life!”