Northern Lights

I am writing just shy of a year after Tyler’s death. How is that even possible. I am writing early, as if I can ‘get ahead of it’. As if I know that some type of shift might happen, some cosmic shift, some physical shift, some alchemical shift. What does it mean that he is gone one year. It cannot be. But I know that I have grown older, forged in a fire of the last year that has singed my hair and ignited my soul.

I have had his photo on my phone background for the year. Sometimes this feels like sitting shiva, like wearing black, like a longing expressed and seen and lamented and felt each time I pick up my phone to check the time, to answer a call or text. A call or text that is never from him. Will never be from him. Grief in my pocket, a physical representation of what I have lost.

I have spent the year building a bottom to my grief. It is never going away. It is also not the end of me. I am making a bottom though, dark and deep, but also supported and held. A boat at the bottom of the sea. I have made room for others here. I write and I make room for myself.

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I have a first memory, an impossible memory, of when Tyler was born.

It’s a snapshot in my mind. Holding my grandmother’s hand, walking down the corridor of the hospital to meet him. I would have been 18 months old. All I know of memory tells me this is near impossible. To have a memory so young. But this, this moment, somehow holds. It really is only a snapshot. A couple steps. A hand to hold. The anticipation that is the most innocent, most young, most fragile. And yet, there it is.

I do not remember the actual meeting, the event. But it holds the weight of my life about to change. It holds my universe unfolding.

I have lived all of my life since that moment, with him. All of my memories, all of my stages and ages. All of my heartbeats. Until a year ago. And even now, I have him somewhere, just not here. I cannot call him, though I try all of the time. But he certainly calls me.

Gretel, bereft of her Hansel. Gretel carrying a photo of Hansel in her pocket. Gretel tracking alone in the dark. Gretel waiting for signs. Gretel building a boat at the bottom of the sea.

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The Northern Lights arrive. I see them in my dreams, and always, always wait with bated breath for them when I am awake. I miss them, again and again and again. I look. I wait. I get up at odd hours to check. I follow some trackers on the internet, whose best guesses are usually wrong. It is hard to predict magic like this, but not impossible. I wonder at the magnificence of them and the raw beauty. A celestial dance that only seeps through the veil once in a great while, for the lucky and the brave.

Last night they were faint. A whisper. They felt close, but still behind the veil. The air flexes back to disappointment, bated breath again, that needed to be lulled back to rhythm in sleep.

I call to the light in my dreams. That night, hovering low above me, I watched them dance around me. In this dream space I can see what I cannot with open eyes. It is not nothing, but I long for the light to appear when my skin is cold and the air in my lungs tells me I am alive. Not just here in my warm bed, not just an echo of a dream memory in the morning, elusive and faint.

It is a challenge to wait for something you know is there. Behind the clouds, behind the veil. I wait too, for signs from Tyler. I pay attention, not just wait. I listen and look, and feel with all my extra senses I have no names for, no real clarity around, no attunement or ritual to understand.

I know he is here, somewhere, here and not here, beyond the veil most of the time. Like the Northern Lights. I think about him, and a friend of his calls to check in or just send a funny story. Sometimes this happens inside a minute. I know that Tyler is pulling both of us at once, threading connection in ways for which I am ever grateful.

There are several one-off signs from him too.

I am sobbing in the car and someone drives by with a handmade sign in the back window that reads “Check On Your Friends”. Undeniably Tyler, who not only wrote profusely about this, but also LIVED THIS.

Wearing his spotted, electric blue fur coat walking down the road with a friend. I casually say “I bet people are thinking ‘Where did she get that coat?’”. And a millisecond later someone drives by, rolls down the window and asks “Where did you get that coat?”. Ensuing belly laughs and tears, joy and sadness, on the sidewalk in a coastal ferry town.

But the most regular signs I get are him in the sky. Gray, dreary days. Rain filled weeks with no sun. And he parts the clouds, letting a few rays shine out. Sometimes he sticks around for a while. The sky parts as my kids and I roll down the leafy hill in fall, or sled out back this winter. I see him when I walk, quite often.

The first time I knew this was him, it was rain soaked with gray skies that had stacked for days. Dreary. Becoming of my mood. Up my dirt road I went; I walk almost every day, no matter the weather, or my mood.

As I was walking, I noticed my shadow through my tears. Head down, crying quietly, I would not have seen it had I been looking anywhere but my feet. I looked up, and there, impossibly, the sun. Parted clouds and sparkling, iridescent blue sky. Only over me.

I heard Tyler’s voice. “Look at what I can do. I can do this for YOU.”

I walked on, bathed in warm sun. My face turned to the sky instead of the ground for the first time in countless days and countless walks. The hole in the sky, the rays shining down, all the way back to my house. I went inside and, still incredulous, I looked back out the window. The sky had filled in, the clouds swirled back into place, the sun, gone.

The sun, for me. Warmth, for me. A message, for me. A reminder to look up, for me. And then gone.

These holes in the clouds arrive regularly, impossibly. My children look for Uncle Tyler too, eyes searching the expanse of the sky to find him. I love to share this with them, a link to their uncle in the hopes they will always remember him. Just this afternoon, a hole in the clouds and a rainbow appeared. I rallied my son from his intense lego creating, and he saw the kaleidoscope of color too. “Hello Uncle Tyler!” And it was gone in the blink of an eye, before I could even try to capture an image with my phone, my phone imprinted with his face.

About an hour later, as we were winding down for bed I thought about the message, what was he telling me. A thousand wishes to hear his voice again. “Hello? You’re doing a great job Kait. I love you!” I crave his voice, the air of his lungs filling the space of a room, a conversation, the lilting edge when he shared from his tender heart. The way he gathered breath and thoughts together before speaking truth, attention further rapt by those who listened. And it dawned on me to go back and look to the sky. The Northern Lights in FULL dazzling display. I ran back inside, grabbed my children and our coats, and went back out to witness the incredible beauty. I would not miss this. The cold air filling our lungs, the color filling my eyes, the message filling my heart.

Tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight. The veil lifted. They glitter and sparkle and dance. Colors of fuchsia and raspberry swirl in one direction and north, pillars of green light beam skyward. The gathering dark in every other direction.

My ancestors feeding a fire. Flames fueling the bonfire of my soul. As a mentor of mine, Stephanie Greene, teaches, these flames are for the parts of me that have already come home. Surrounded by my ancestors and guides. The beauty is astonishing. The fire and energy magnetic.

Resonance, in its truest sense. The source of external vibration matching my internal one, a woven interconnection with the universe and me. Hansel guiding Gretel home, home in truest myself.

Thank you Tyler. I see you. I hear you. I know you are at my bonfire, I feel you by my side.

And for more of Stephanie, you can find her here. Her bonfire burns bright and ferocious from the hillside by the sea, you can’t (and won’t want to) miss it.