My mother and I had a code word that she would send me after she died,
If life continues, and she were around, I would see, notice, or hear the word in an unusual place and know it was her.
After she died, the word first appeared in the form of an email that arrived in my inbox from an unknown source —a sender I initially dismissed as spam due to the strange message it delivered. But when I looked at it again, I saw that our chosen word was in the sender’s address.
The email said nothing more than this:
“There is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”
Intrigued, I looked around my office as in, Okaaay, way cool. I’m truly impressed. Where are you? But I could only say, “Working on it, Mom. (Nicely done by the way!) But still working on it.”
I have a friend with whom I study these things, and we agreed we needed a word as well. Whoever dies first will send it to the other. By the time that happens, we may have been long gone from each other’s lives—we may have no one in common who would even alert us to the news, no one even in possession of contact info, but the word he suggested is as common as “table,” so I don’t see how that’s going to work.
I guess I’m going to have to see it written in the clouds or on the crest of a wave or spelled out in swan feathers on the beach to know he is conveying the devastating news that he has left, along with the extraordinary news he’s not gone.
The same is true of the children’s father. Our word is way too general and commonplace. We believe we have time to pick another.
I should arrange a code with each of my children, and I think you and I should have a word as well. So I can tell you it’s true if it is—and you can confirm for me that love doesn’t end, life doesn’t end, the universe doesn’t end. The Big Bang was not a beginning; it was a transition. A mature universe transforming to become new again, as a natural cycle, like the beat of a heart, an exhalation of breath. Emerging from the singularity we call the Big Bang, as if through a portal, a birth canal, carrying the potential of all that ever was or could be —much like you when you were born.
Pick a word and let me know. Make it unique. What word or phrase could mean only you?
Would you believe that now, eight years after receiving that email, I finally looked up the lines in that message? They are the last lines of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem about a damaged Greek sculpture, the torso of the god Apollo. The poem expresses the belief that its incompleteness, its missing parts, cannot diminish the radiant beauty of what remains. The original power emanates from what is left because beauty comes from the inside out. No missing part can dim the essence of what shines.
From all the borders of itself, beauty bursts like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
I like to think that was the message. The change-your-life thing just makes me anxious. Like…in exactly what way? I can guess, but how do I know we are on the same page? I hope the real takeaway is that we can find beauty in the incomplete.
Because, well, who isn’t?
And is incomplete the same as broken? Not necessarily. I hear that ideology a lot. “I was broken, and xyz made me whole.” But I’m placing my attention on incomplete. On becoming. On building upon and growing what is good.
So what’s our word? I hope it brings us joy and connects us instantly across space and time.
When I was little, my friend Peggy and I believed in mind over matter, mental telepathy, and life after death. We were blood sisters. We had smeared two bloody mosquito bites together to seal our bond.
What will be our secret code we asked each other. We sat crossed-legged by the redbud tree in the company of a river we would carry with us all our days. The dry grass pricked our thighs, leaving hatch marks in the tender skin when we lay back to study the sky.
How should we contact each other if there is life after death?
“If it’s true,” Peggy said, “I’ll just say ‘It’s real.’”
“If it’s real,” I said, smiling, “I’ll just say ‘It’s me.’”
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.
