Grief in the Days of Time Machines
“No. She just laughed and said of course not. And that she loved me.”
I didn’t buy any of it, but I couldn’t help asking, “So did you ask her what it’s like—the afterlife? Is there a Heaven? What happens?”
“I did. She said it wouldn’t be what I expected. That it was good but unlike anything we’ve been told.”
I didn’t believe a word of it. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to be wrong. I wanted to be the recalcitrant skeptic and for my sister to be the enlightened, spiritual one who brought me the voice of my mother from the other side. Later, I would wonder why the psychic had not told Terri that she was terminally ill, that she was on the brink of finding out all about the afterlife for herself.
This is perhaps the real reason I have refused to see a psychic on my own. I doubt deeply that they are legitimate. But on the outside chance that I am wrong, I am stopped cold by the possibility that one might look up at me from her crystal ball and reveal some horrible and unbearable prediction about my own life. Maybe she wouldn’t actually say it out loud. Maybe there would only be a pitying look on her face as she reached forward and patted my hand. Despite my very real skepticism, taking that chance is more than I am willing to gamble. “It’s a mercy we do not know the future,” my mother used to say.
And she was right.
*
This past holiday season was the first in many decades that I have not watched the Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye classic, White Christmas. Terri and I began watching it when we were children, and it was always our favorite. We knew the words to all of the songs, singing along to “Snow” as the four main characters rode on a train to Vermont, or leaping and twirling around the living room to “The Best Things Happen While You’re Dancing.” But the song that we loved best, because it was our song, was “Sisters,” sung by Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen and later mimed by Crosby and Kaye to great comedic effect.
On Thanksgiving of 1988, my then-husband Kevin purchased a videocassette recorder, the latest thing in technology, and he and I took turns recording our family celebration at my mother’s house. I followed my mother and my aunt around the kitchen while they prepared our meal, asking them questions about their childhoods and their memories of the Great Depression and World War II. It is the only video recording that exists of my mother.
Before we left to go home, Kevin turned the camera on Terri and me, and, sensing our chance for the spotlight, we sang the entirety of “Sisters” with a reasonable approximation of the original tune and much hammy gesturing and footwork. We lacked the bright blue ostrich-feather fans and the matching flouncy dresses, but what we missed in wardrobe and paraphernalia, we made up for in pizzazz.
I have not watched that cassette in several years, and now that Terri is gone I am almost afraid to. It occurs to me that I should have the footage transferred to a DVD, but I am too anxious to give it up to anyone, too worried that something might happen to the aging tape. That it might break or ravel inside of the cassette, and that then this artifact would be lost to me forever.