Calling the Moon

The moon lay low and huge on the western horizon as I drove home through the frigid night, like a cradle in the sky. It was yellow and wide, flat across the top but almost curving up at the edges like a giant, cosmic hammock, calling to me.

I am here, it said. Though you can't understand everything around me, I'm here.

Do you know that feeling, when you think about the universe and all that lies beyond? The mind almost shuts down, the enormity of the concept that space just goes on, and on, and on. That there are objects that orbit us and that we orbit; that stars are like the sun and perhaps there are more of us out there.
But the moon, it is a constant companion, closer and more intimate than the stars that twinkle behind it. It wanes and waxes, rises and sets, giving rhythm and predictibility to our night sky. The moon was there tonight, beckoning to me in its giant scale and open posture, reminding me of this: you must have faith, some things just are.
That feeling, that bedraggled, confused feeling that space arouses is where I have sat with what happens after death, with where our spirits go and what might possibly follow. I have never had a truly firm vision of heaven, probably a result of being without a sturdy, organized religion. Before Charlotte died, I don't know that I ever truly contemplated this, and when she did die, I imagined that things might be much easier if I were a staunch Roman Catholic or a born-again evangelical, in which case I would know with great certainty where my daughter had gone.

But I could tell you this, from the very beginning: she was not gone.

I knew this at the start because I had felt her life force only hours earlier and it was impossible that she could simply be gone. For five months she had filled me every day with life, twisting and squirming and hiccuping. She was even naughty, seeming to enjoy the game where she would pluck my ribs with an audible snap with her toes, I would push down on her tiny feet and hold them until they settled back behind my ribcage where they belonged, not tiny toes wrapped out in front and then pulled sharply back in a game of sorts. "Our only arguments," I would later sigh. But she had been there, so there, and so vital-- she was new, for goodness sake, not having even had one day to run through the grass in the warm sunshine, hair streaming behind her, whirling and swirling in circles and falling down in a pool of giggles. Could this being simply evaporate, vanish with a twist of the cord, and the cessation of pulse? To me, this seemed not possible. This energy, this vitality, it had to be somewhere.

I knew this also and for certain later that day, as I held her, because I could feel her in the room. Her energy had inhabited me when I gave birth to her, how else could I have accomplished that impossible task? As we held her, she lifted some of our veil of sadness so that we could be with her, so that we could breathe in her beauty and memorize her softness and come to know her for the baby that she was before we let her go. When we did, when our nurse walked out of the room and took Charlotte with her, I could feel the void where she had left, I felt her tiny, strong grip release and she let go, moving her energy to another place for the time being.

Another place. Another place? For some time, I wondered. Where? Here? Somewhere else? Nowhere? And then I remembered that we don't always know or understand all the answers, and they can still be the answers to our questions. This is the very essence of faith, is it not?

So I believe, I do believe, that there is something left. I don't have to understand the entire universe to know that there is a yellow moon hanging before me, glowing light into the dark winter night, smiling to itself as it sets. So also I do not have to know exactly what happens after you die to be sure that somewhere there is something left of my daughter, and I am careful to watch for signs that she is here.

They are everywhere.