Time's Twist

     My workday was over, and as I cruised down my street, I could taste the Earl Grey tea and the chocolate chip cookies I planned to enjoy when I got home, but what I saw through my peripheral vision caused me to slam my foot on the brake and pull over. In front of my neighbor's house across the street from mine, my eyes caught on our family cat, Bonita. Her pure white coat was stiff with blood, and she lay dead by the side of the road, a sight that shocked me to the core.

Losing a beloved pet is never easy. At the time, our kids were young, and I felt myself sinking into the dread of telling them this sad news. Yet, as I knelt over my cold, stiff cat, I was reeling with something more disturbing: the fact that a few months ago, not only had my neighbor, Jean, talked about this event and pointed to this exact spot, but she had died recently, and I would not be able to ask her how she knew.

The reality that life ends tops any list of existential questions. It's a big ask and a compelling reality, a weighty topic that we often grapple with. Cradle Catholics like me learn early about death, at least conceptually. Nightly, our family knelt before a white porcelain Madonna and Child statue and prayed the rosary after dinner. In addition to other prayers in this devotion, each rosary includes fifty-three Hail Marys. That means the praying person asks the  Blessed Mother "to pray for us now and at the hour of our death" fifty-three times. The sing-song repetition kept the grim topic at bay, plus I was safe at home, mostly trying not to giggle or fall over onto my sisters while balancing myself on my knees. In a way, death entered the doors of my consciousness as an ordinary guest—good preparation for revelations to come. Plus, there was the all-important promise of life eternal in the Resurrection. 

Although my friendship with Jean began because we were across-the-street neighbors, neither worked, and we eventually became good friends. Initially, we shared books, which led to more extended conversations. She was older than me by a few decades, had a Master's degree in Sacred Music, and I was a psycho-spiritual therapist in the making. "Come on over," she'd call to say, "I've made coffee, and we have to finish our conversation about the Mystical Body and Jung's Collective Unconsciousness." Both of us were meaning-makers who liked deep diving. From reincarnation to Resurrection, from the constraints of suffering to the goals of transcendence - all were topics we munched with donuts over coffee. We loved anything that related to aspects of the shared human experience. We knew we'd be friends forever. 

One day, united in our interest and perhaps overly caffeinated, we made a pact. "Listen," Jean had said, leaning forward, her blue eyes clasping mine. "Let's agree right now that whoever dies first will find a way to cue the other." Of what? We weren't exactly sure, but we agreed that, somehow, we would send a signal that there is, in fact, life beyond the grave. Because Jean was steeped in midwestern practicality, her unusual proposal was all the more compelling. Despite what some might say was outlandish, I recall the moment as a resonant meeting of our minds and hearts. It was a spirited testament to the depth of our friendship and the shared beliefs that bound us together. And then, a few years later, she learned that she had breast cancer, and we were no longer in ordinary time.

As often happens in such ordeals, the following months had their ups and downs with all the predictable medical encumbrances. The weight of Jean's illness overshadowed everything. Chemo, radiation, pain, nausea, weight loss, and weakness dominated our conversations. Once, as she made her painstaking way back into her bed during a visit, I blurted as if in a cloud, "Jean, it's dawning on me that you are walking so slowly because you are in pain." There were other times when she rallied, and one significant day stood out.

It was a few weeks before she died. When I walked into the makeshift bedroom her husband had set up on the first floor, I winced to see the translucent veil of her skin stretched tight across her skull. Yet, as soon as I sat beside her bed, she unexpectedly propped herself on her elbow and expressed how sorry she was about our cat. Puzzled, I assured Jean that Bonita was okay. I had just left her eating in the kitchen. "No, no," she insisted that she'd just seen our family's pretty white cat dead, "Hit by a car," she pointed, "She's right out there by the side of the road." I stood up to raise the blinds so she could see better. The spot she pointed to in front of her house, where she insisted our cat was lying, showed no blood, no sign of an accident, no dead cat. The experience was unsettling and left both of us in a state of confusion. At the time, I attributed what she said to a bad dream or the result of her brain on chemo. 

Months later, after Jean died, when I stopped the car and kneeled over my cat lying dead in the precise spot she had pointed towards right outside her bedroom window, grief flashed while disbelief snapped me into psychic whiplash. Do I think that in some phantasmagoric way, Jean came back and killed my cat? I do not. Years later, my Uncle Bill was in the last stages of life and shared what, to some, were incoherent ramblings about trips he had taken and deceased loved ones he'd been visiting. "Huh!" I thought, "Just like Jean. Bill is traveling in and out of time." 

I peek at ideas from quantum physics that explain matter as interconnected webs of energy and relations. I strain to understand relativity and the time-space continuum. I read that time itself can be boundless, leading to the notion of eternal existence. I can barely wrap my mind around the reality of her precognition, but whenever I think about Jean, the deep-down earnestness of our pact, and what she told me about my cat, my heart knows something about eternal life that makes me smile.