The Vanishing Point: where you’ll find the ones you’ve lost By Laura J. Oliver

My mother once shared with me a moment of altered reality she had experienced. The context of the conversation is lost to time, but I have carried the image with me for decades. I wonder if you will, too.

I was probably in my 30’s or 40’s. Three kids, trying to become a writer. Trying to fit everything into one beautiful whole—motherhood, family, wellbeing in the home that held us—all while trying to acquire a solid sense of self so that I would be fine if everyone I loved disappeared. Call that self-reliance. Call that abandonment issues.

Call that hoping that the story she was about to tell me is true for all of us.

I knew more about my mother’s life than she knew of mine because her approval was more important to me than her help. I was, therefore, selective in what I shared. I don’t feel that way now, plus, being dead, I figure she is aware of all I didn’t tell her, but it’s too late to renegotiate that arrangement. Or is it? Are the people you loved and lost still accessible if you need them? Where do you look?

Driving down the freeway with my sisters from Missouri to Illinois in order to return Mom’s ashes to the prairie, I was thinking about just that: where have those we have loved and lost gone? I glanced out the passenger window of our rental and saw a billboard looming larger. “Dream Big,” I read as we closed in on it.

“We are here.”

That was it. No company logo. No advertisement. Just, “We are here.” I smiled, believing the universe is in constant conversation with us if we listen. But where is here? I wondered.

Don’t get me wrong about my relationship with my mother. She drove me crazy a lot of the time. At one point, I told her I’d be back when I could be, but I had to have space to learn where she ended, and I began. I didn’t see her or talk to her for the better part of a year. She must have grieved, but she didn’t complain. At least not to me. I needed space, and she respected it.

But at some point, after I’d come back from establishing distance, she told me this story about love closing distance and her experience tells me where to look for the people I still long for.

She was on the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean—her geographical spiritual home. “You can see the whole curvature of the earth from the shore,” she said, “It’s as if God himself is present.”

And in this experience, she reported, she looked way, way, down the beach and saw the love of her life, a man I’ll call Adam, a man who had been gone from her days for many years. He waved and called out to her, and she, overjoyed to see him again, waved as well, holding her breath at his approach.

He walked down the hard-packed sand toward her. Breakers crashed then rushed the shore; sandpipers ran up and down the slope of the beach, chasing the waves in their recession as gulls wheeled white overhead in a deep blue sky.

He came nearer and nearer, steadily closing the distance between them, the rhythmic boom of the breakers scoring his pace, his joyous anticipation of their reunion.

Only in this reality, his image did not appear bigger as he got closer. His figure remained as small as he approached as he appeared at a distance. Everything was perfect, but miniature, colors vibrant, details exact, but unlike in our reality, the laws of physics had been altered.

Size and perspective didn’t change with proximity. Closer didn’t mean larger as the space separating them closed to yards, then feet. Nearer and nearer, he approached without slowing, nearer and nearer he approached without pause—and when there was no space left between them at all—when they were not even inches apart, she watched this person she would love all her life, walk directly into her heart.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.