Death is an Impostor

and the experiences of risk are generally powerful and when the time comes to put over that line   to get right up to the edge and jump off to fly freely into energy as a creative spirit   and feel flames lick at our psyches and burn with fury and love and fear and take us up and down and around and feel our stomachs tighten and our palms sweat and our brains feel like exploding   but do it anyway and then please God, touch someone with our talent   we’ve achieved Nirvana and I’m left with your eyes  you who were there  bored holes in my reality and let creativity drip out

Scott, September 1990       Journal Entry

Along the Way 2003            P. Crockett

Over lunch the next day, Jeff and I talked.  As fellow sojourners on spiritual journeys of our own, we shared a common, burning question.  What did it all mean, and why was this happening to us?  He, as a man open to the spirit, increasingly aware of the power of the invisible, speculated that Scott and I were apparently completing some dance of the soul, and that he had either always been or somehow recently become part of it.  I reminded him that his name had come up, in no uncertain terms, in my last session with Dee.  “Your spiritual growth has been certified”, I laughed, “by virtually all of my dead lovers.  They said ‘he’s really different; you should go see him.’  With all that’s happened, I can’t believe that it’s any accident I’m here.”  He listened for a moment, deep in thought.  From his perspective, too, the entire experience was highly unusual to say the least, a provocative lesson.  Exactly why had he run into Scott’s soul on his journey, prior to my arrival?  What was the meaning of the trance state he’d experienced the night before?  Why had Scott’s form become visible to him, and his message so clear?

Though clear answers remained elusive, we shared a sense of having been jointly handed keys to a great mystery.  For some reason beyond our conscious understanding, Jeff had assumed an important role in the unfolding spiritual drama of my life.  In so doing, he had broken through the limits of his historical placement in my mind under the fixed label of “first lover” and rapidly assumed a vital and dynamic role in my life as both a real friend and fellow explorer in this shared new adventure.  My expectations and preconceptions fading fast and rapidly dropping by the wayside, Jeff had become a bridge to the missing piece of my heart, part of the promised bridge to span the gap.  We were on a new journey together, with no map.

Nevertheless, we seemed to be finding our way.  As we talked that afternoon, Jeff suddenly paused, sinking deep in thought.  “You know,” he said, “I’m thinking about that dream I had.  What it might have meant.”  My curiosity piqued, I asked “what dream?”  “Don’t you remember?,” he asked, “I told you about this right after Scott died.”  Although merely the slightest shadow of a memory now tentatively began to come to mind, the days after Scott’s death had mercifully become a blur to me, the pain too much to bear.  I had called my closest friends during the weekend that followed to break the impossible news, crying from my gut, hardly knowing what I was doing.  I remembered that much.  I had talked to Jeff, I knew, but the substance of the conversation was lost to me.

Looking into my eyes, seeing that I was lost, he said gently “I’m not surprised.  You weren’t really with us then.”  After a moment, he continued.  “But I did tell you about this when you called.  This dream freaked the hell out of me.  It was so vivid, so nerve-wracking.  I dreamed that I was sitting by your bedside, and you were sitting upright in bed, your legs out in front of you underneath a blue-stripe comforter.  You were leaning against the headboard, and had a glass full of some kind of clear liquid in your hand.  I was filled with sadness, sitting there by your bed.  You were obviously so sick, so near death.  And there was nothing I could do about it.”

Quiet for a moment, appearing pained by the memory, he turned to me again.  “Just sitting there by your side, I really felt the need to reach out to you, to say something.  In my mind I was thinking, and meant to say, something like ‘Gosh, Paul, you’re really ill, aren’t you?’  Instead, I came out with the words ‘Paul, you’re not very solid, are you?’  You looked at me, then down at yourself.  With this expression on your face I’ll never forget, you said ‘No, I guess I’m really not anymore, am I?’

Suddenly, I had this sense of crying, that everyone was just crying.  A feeling of deep grief.”  As Jeff spoke, his words triggered distant memory.  He had indeed shared the dream with me, but I had been entirely unable to deal with his disturbing vision at the time.  Even now, separated from the trauma of Scott’s passing by time and distance, I found its imagery horrifying.

“Then I woke up,” he continued, “and I was a wreck.  The dream had totally shaken me up.  It was a really nerve-wracking experience.”  Even now, months later, amidst a lunchtime crowd, he seemed haunted by the memory.  “I remember looking at the alarm clock in the darkness, and it was just after 6:00 in the morning.  It was that same Friday morning, before you called.”  “Oh, my God,” I said slowly, a realization dawning.  “You had that dream on the day he died.”

“I know,” he replied, reflecting, “I told you that when you called.”  As he looked over at me, I began to make a stunning connection.  “Did I tell you that Scott had died just after 9:00 that morning, in bed?  That was Eastern time.  But you were asleep in Seattle, on Pacific time.  You had that dream at the exact time he was dying!”

Jeff looked at me, his mouth falling slightly open.  Immediately, our minds reeled with the implications of this new mystery we’d been handed.  In my mind’s eye, I recalled Scott in the moments before his death, laboriously pulling himself up to the bedside, blue-striped comforter twisted up beneath him, reaching for his glass of Gatorade.  What could it mean, this extraordinary communication between souls, one deep in dream on the West Coast and the other awakening from his dream of life on the opposite side of the country?  Could Scott’s soul, suddenly free of all blinders at the moment of departure, have left this message for me as a gift, to be discovered in the fullness of time?  Or had he for some reason needed to share the powerful experience with another, as graphically and as literally as possible in the world of dream?  Or had the message perhaps fulfilled some deep need of Jeff’s soul, still unknown to us?

Though easy answers eluded us then and defy us still, we could not doubt that Jeff’s extraordinary experience that morning reflected an important connection, an expression of the spirit as richly loaded as poetry.  As always, I interpreted this dream, tendered back to me by another, as a message and a gift.  He had dreamed of me in Scott’s place, I felt intuitively, because our two souls were so intertwined.  Also, had part of me not died with my beloved that morning, leaving me less than solid?  Strangely, the dream warmed me, reflecting the same sense of wonder at his transition as that raised in his first message through Dee, “He’s surprised that he went so quickly.”

We talked at length, digging for meaning and exploring the potential significance of the dream against the larger backdrop of Jeff’s shamanic sojourns, his encounter with Scott’s soul, and his visitation of the night before.  The answers were far from clear, but it was obvious that the three of us shared a soul-level connection.  Scott had pointed me toward Seattle for a good reason, and had been busily breaking down walls between Heaven and Earth ever since, pointing us toward greater lessons.  It dawned on me that Jeff was even now serving as a bridge between us, in the sharing of the experience.  For some reason unknown to us, both Scott and I, in our ways, had communicated with him about the momentous experience of his passing.  Yet another connection had come full circle.

In a later telephone conversation with Jeff’s life partner Dean we further probed the mysterious occurrence, and I mentioned some of the avenues Jeff and I had explored in seeking out the challenging depths of its meaning.  At some point into the conversation, I asked almost rhetorically “What exactly was it that could have drawn Jeff and Scott together like that, at that time on that morning?  What was the link there?”  With virtually no hesitation, Dean answered my question with a simple response that rang true even as it somehow deepened the mystery before us and raised still more unanswerable questions.  “Well, Paul,” he’d responded easily, “that link was you. You called him.”
How or why, I didn’t exactly understand.  But I felt that his answer bore on the truth and offered a rich source for mining.

Following our lunch together that day Jeff and I made our leisurely way home,  both of us quietly watching the city pass by through the open windows of Jeff’s truck as we listened to the music playing low on the radio.  Suddenly he turned to me and spoke.  “I don’t think I’m going to be able to let you leave Seattle,” he said, a look of concentration on his face, “without doing a journey for you.”  I returned his gaze and nodded, comfortable with his instinct and judgment.

Then, as if to himself, he said “Scott still wants to get through.  There’s more he has to say.”