Painting the Air

There’s an expression: “You can’t paint the air.”

It means nobody can do the impossible. I think my grandfather might have made it up. I’ve never come across it anywhere else, so I’ll give him credit for it. He was a painter by trade and was known to say this often to his son, my father. As a first-generation immigrant of Irish and English heritage shaped by the Great Depression, he’d trot out the line whenever he thought my dad was getting uppity ideas about life. Nope, life was hard, you worked hard, you drank hard, and then you died. At least in my grandfather’s version.

My father would prove his father wrong on more than one occasion. In fact, his life would become a study in air painting. It was also a skill he was adamant about passing on to me. One of the first times I recall learning how to paint the air with my father, it was actually quite literal. I was 11 years old.

My parents had recently purchased a 300-year-old house. There wasn’t a lot of money in those days, so we all pitched in on the renovation project. With my two brothers sanding the wide-board floors downstairs, a thick dust wafted through the entire house, floating suspended in the window light. My father and I were painting the upstairs hallway and the spray from the rollers hung in the air until it was absorbed by the dust, turning it into a fine white mist that coated our skin. So we did indeed “paint the air” that day.

My father was my mentor, my friend, my wise spiritual guide. I’ve always known I’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to say this because I know how rare this is. But my father earned this admiration, day after day. I had the extraordinary experience of watching him continue to learn and grow and strive for goodness and excellence, right up until the day he died, in his 73rd year. I watched him and my mother fashion the love of a lifetime together, which they shared openly with their children. I watched him build a business that could have made him a millionaire, except for an event beyond his control that instead left him bankrupt. I watched him turn right around and build another business, which ultimately surpassed the expectations of his first. I grew up with a man who routinely did the impossible, with a real down-to-earth, day-to-day approach.

My father was a patient teacher and cheerleader who encouraged me to find my own way. So when I told him there was a course on Transcendental Meditation at the university I was attending, I wasn’t surprised that his response was, “Sign me up too!” This was long before TM had become mainstream. We secretly shared our mantras with each other and giggled over the oddness of them, but we both continued to meditate daily from then on.

Becoming serious about meditation back then was only one of the many ways I ignored social convention. Coloring outside the lines was always encouraged and done with my father’s blessings. He seemed to invariably know what was right for me. In my father’s eyes, there was little I could do wrong. There was no way I could ever fail or disappoint him. He loved me unconditionally. He made it possible for me to believe I could do just about anything with my life.

Like clockwork, I would visit my parents every other weekend, driving from several hours away. And like clockwork, my father would call me once a week, always starting with, “What ‘cha thinkin’ about?” Until I was 42, until the day my father died.

Always an arduous and lengthy process, I had just gotten my 22-month-old daughter, Caitlin, to sleep when the phone rang. I dove on it to silence it as quickly as possible, hoping to preserve my daughter’s fragile sleep. It was my older brother, Rip. As soon as he said the word, “Dad,” I knew.

My father had been suffering from heart failure, so we were all aware that his next heart attack would be the last. I knew he wasn’t going to survive it, but I prayed with all my might that he would hang on until I could make the two-hour drive, so I could see him one last time. So I could tell him how much I loved him and kiss him goodbye.

Alone in the car with Cait, (my husband, Andrew, was playing golf and there was no time to get in touch with him) I called my younger brother, Eric, who was already at the hospital, to see how my father was doing. To see if there was some way I could talk to him. As he was updating me, I heard the nurse tell him my father had just died, and then I let out a loud wail, an utterance of agony that came from the depths of my soul.

Cait, who was just beginning to speak in complete sentences, started crying out to me.

“Mommy, I’m scared so, I’m scared so. Where’s Poppy? Matter with Poppy?” In her short life, Cait had also been captivated by my father. She always lit up whenever he was around.

When I heard her tremulous little voice coming from the back seat, any composure I might have had was gone. I was instantly thrown into a free-fall of uncontrollable hard crying. Finding it nearly impossible to see through the tide of tears, I pulled over to the side of the road, struggling to collect myself, for my daughter’s sake.

That’s when it happened.

“Poppy’s here,” Cait said quietly.

Snapped to attention, I looked in the rear-view mirror. Caitlin’s eyes were transfixed on the front passenger seat.

“Mommy, Poppy’s here,” she pointed.

And he was. I could feel my father’s presence as strongly as if I’d turned and found him sitting there. A sense of peace flooded the car. Immediately, we both calmed down. My father had found a way to come and say goodbye.

We made it the rest of the way to my parents’ house without incident.

I wish I could say that the following days went by in a blur. The sense of living in hyper-reality that had started from the moment I got Rip’s call continued to stalk me. There was no relief.

My father had left instructions before he died that he did not want a wake, and that only family and his closest friends should be present at his funeral Mass. We honored his wishes. After my brothers carried my father’s casket into the church, my sister and I walked my mother in. When she got to the casket, she draped herself over the top as though she was giving my father his last hug goodbye. She wept quietly. I laid over it next to her and gently patted her back, watching her stroke the unadorned wood as if it was my father’s face.

The priest looked over at my mother and me and asked us to sit down so he could begin. I straightened up, protectively keeping my arm around my mother, and replied, “This is where my mother needs to be.”

The Mass continued on around us, while my mother and I conducted our own little private tea party with my father.

“Dad’s happy,” she whispered to me through her tears. “I can feel him smiling. He’s okay. He’s going to be okay.”

“Yeah, I think so too, Mom,” I agreed, as I held on to her and my father.

After leaving the church, we brought my father home so that he could be on the property he loved so much one last time before we took him to his spot in the cemetery down the road. Rip recited by heart my father’s favorite poem, “If,” by Rudyard Kipling.

Later, we all went back to the house where my mother, us kids, and our children had a picnic lunch under the oak tree we’d given my father as a present a few years before. We drank champagne and toasted in celebration of his life.

At first, I thought the calm that had mysteriously descended on me in the car would get me through all this — proof that all the spiritual hard work I’d done over the years was paying off. But that sense of peace was short-lived. Quickly, I got steamrolled by a depression that flattened me and flattened me good. I barely dragged myself through the days, and then the weeks that followed. Nights, I cried myself to sleep. In my relations with others, I became withdrawn and silent.

All the while, I was begging my father to find a way to show me where he was, to show me some sign that he still existed.

When I’d plead like this, I’d often hear in my head, “I’m right here with you.”

“Where’s here?” I’d answer. “Can’t you be a little more specific?”

“Here is all there is. I’m always with you. I will always be with you.”

“My father wouldn’t spout such vague nonsense,” I’d answer angrily. “Whoever you are, whatever you are, go away. I want my real dad. Dad, I need concrete proof. Tell me something only you and I would know.”

I’d listen again for another voice, my father’s voice, and there’d be silence.

I’d fallen off the mountain and was still falling. Any connection I felt to my spiritual life or the spiritual world appeared to have instantly gone pouf. I stopped believing in anything. I started questioning everything. I decided the core thing that I had always known for sure — that there was a God — was a lie. If there was a God, I reasoned like a child, he/she/it would not rip our loved ones away from us so permanently, with such complete and utter finality. This was way too cruel and violent an act for anyone to commit, least of all God.

This free fall had me in constant vertigo and I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever hit the ground. I was worried about the effect my state of mind was having on Cait since she’d so closely bonded with me from birth and was still quite securely velcroed to me at the hip. I tried harder to shelter her from my sadness. But she knew.

One morning, I was sitting on the floor trying to play with Cait and was startled back to the present when she’d toddled over to pat my face.

“Don’t be sad, Mommy,” she said. “Poppy flew up to heaven with God.”

It appeared that my daughter was managing to do something quite easily that I had been making a colossal effort to achieve for months. She believed. She believed that her grandfather was still around, still somewhere, still available to her.

This connection between my daughter and father was highlighted again one morning when I took Cait shopping with me to look for a pan I needed to replace, a pan my father had given me.

I’d looked in a few stores and couldn’t find the pan’s match, and this was the last store in town where there was any hope of success. I was searching up and down the cookware aisle, becoming increasingly flustered and agitated.

“How hard can it be to find a stupid pan?!” I growled under my breath.

Of course, it wasn’t about the pan. I just wanted this little piece of my father back. But I was beginning to feel overwhelmed with emotions and was thinking I needed to get out of the store right then before I started to scream.

I was jolted out of my thoughts when I heard Cait say, “Poppy, is that you? What are you doing in there?”

She was peering into the pots and pans on the shelf a few feet in front of me.

I rushed over, hoping I might steal a glimpse of my father, or whatever it was she was seeing. When I arrived, there was no ghostly image awaiting me, but rather the pan I had been searching for. I slid down to the floor, buried my head in my hands, and wept.

During these dark days, Andrew tried his best to help me. He’d quickly realized that asking me how I was doing was a waste of time. Instead, he began patiently listening when I needed to talk and left me to myself when it was obvious that’s what I wanted. The biggest gift he gave me was to let me grieve without trying to fix me or hurry me along. He and my father had developed their own special friendship and I knew he was sorely feeling the loss as well, but I certainly wasn’t in any position to help him.

One night, a few months after my father’s death, Andrew came upstairs to our bedroom where I was lying in bed with the lights off staring at the ceiling. He asked me to sit in the family room and watch television with him.

I looked at him like he’d grown two heads. He knew I had little use and even less patience for TV. Still, he stood there and asked me again.

“Come on, just come and visit with me and keep me company. I just want you with me,” he said. “I’m missing you.”

He’d pulled the trump card. I was always bugging him to “visit” with me after dinner. It was our time to just sit and spend time with each other. He usually assented even when he’d rather be doing something else. So I dragged myself out of bed and we went downstairs.

I sat down next to him and tucked myself under his arm. He’d been watching a late-night talk show. When the show came back on, the guest for the hour was a psychic medium named James Van Praagh, who was doing readings over the phone for callers who were trying to contact their dearly departed. The phone number scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Andrew asked me if I wanted to call it.

I felt torn. Before my father’s death, I never would have considered it, because I would have expected that I could contact my father myself. I’d never had any trouble maneuvering around in the spiritual world. Over the years, it had become familiar terrain.

Andrew had put his phone on the table. I looked over at it, feeling silly and embarrassed because I really did want to call.

As Van Praagh continued to relay messages from the deceased, I couldn’t believe how badly I wanted to call, how badly I wanted him to tell me he was speaking to my father.

Finally, I grabbed the phone and dialed, looking over at Andrew, explaining that I was really doing this for my mother, because she wanted some sign, words, anything to know that my father was still around. I prattled on about how she had even asked me if I knew of any mediums she could see.

Andrew just nodded. Of course that’s why I was calling. Why else?

I felt nervous and sick to my stomach as I waited for the line to ring. Was this finally my chance to hear from my father? To feel okay again?

A busy signal. A busy signal for the rest of the show. My finger became stiff from hitting the redial so many times. I went back upstairs and resumed staring at the ceiling in the dark. And then I cried myself to sleep.

Not long after that night, I started having a series of dreams in which there were rows of dead people standing around my bed looking at me. Some were shaking their heads and whispering to each other as though they felt sorry for me, as if to say, “Tsk, tsk, if only the poor girl would get it.” I would strain to hear their words but couldn’t. I scanned every face, hoping to find my father among them, but he wasn’t.

I also had a dream where the Blessed Mother came to me. She stroked my head while I rested it on her lap. Her touch was like a cool salve on a bad burn. I felt the pain begin to seep out of my body. For a while, I was mesmerized by how exquisitely beautiful and soft her hands were before I remembered my mission. Then I beseeched her to bring me to my father. Seeming to agree, she got up and beckoned me to follow. I was elated. I just knew she was going to take me to him. I got so excited that I woke myself up. When I realized what I’d done I was heartsick.

There was a peculiar common thread to all these dreams. Not that the dreams themselves weren’t peculiar enough. Right before I’d wake up from them, I’d hear what sounded like a doorbell ring — KaRing, KaRing.

Several weeks into these nights of strange dreams, my sister, Melissa, called one morning.

“Hey, how’s it goin’? she asked.

“It’s not,” I replied sullenly.

“Not getting any better?”

“Nope.”

“Well, how’d you like to get away and come on a trip with me?”

“Where you going?”

“To Conyers, Georgia,” she offered.

Georgia was not a place I had ever thought to make a destination, no less Conyers, which I’d never heard of. But it was October and getting cold already. Also, the first anniversary of my father’s death was fast approaching. I didn’t think it would be a bad idea to be someplace else.

“What’s there?”

“The Blessed Mother is going to make a visitation and give messages through a woman who lives there,” she replied in all seriousness.

Over the last several years, my sister had become a “renewed” Catholic. She had become filled with a blinding faith. It was a faith to be envied, and I did envy it.

As Melissa continued telling me about the goings-on at Conyers, I suddenly flashed back on my dream about Mary. I interrupted her mid-sentence. “Yeah, I’m in. Can you book me a ticket when you do yours? I’ll reimburse you.”

“Yeah, great!” she answered enthusiastically.

She’d been unobtrusively trying to reform me and bring me back into the fold for years. I’d always say thanks, but no thanks. I told her I was ever happy to have her pray for me, but I was quite comfortable in my own relationship with God, Jesus, Mary, Buddha, and the rest of the gang on high.

Melissa would just shrug off my irreverence and keep trying. That was okay by me. I didn’t mind having my beliefs challenged. And I loved my sister very much. Despite some of our differing religious views, I considered her my best friend.

“Um, what do you think about asking Mom to come along?” I pondered out loud.

My mother was every bit as lost without my father as I was. Maybe my dream about Mary had been a sign. Maybe, through Mary, we’d finally get to know where my father was. And if we did, I wanted my mother to be there too. Maybe this was going to be it. Who knew? What did we have to lose by going, a few hundred bucks? I’d been feeling desperate for so long, and, as they say, desperate people do desperate things.

Melissa connected my mother through a conference call.

“Hey, Mom,” I jumped right in. “We’re going to Conyers, Georgia for a Mary visitation. You want to come?”

I felt like I was offering her a trip to the Land of Oz.

My mother wasn’t noticeably religious. She’d seldom participated in our church-going years, so I didn’t expect her to jump at the chance.

There was a long, nervous silence. Quickly, I decided to pitch another approach.

“Come on, Mom, think about it, a trip for just the girls. It’d be fun.

After another small hesitation, she agreed.

And so it was that my sister, my mother, my not-quite-three-year-old daughter, and I wound up in a rental car sitting in backed-up traffic for miles on the way to Conyers, Georgia — on the way to see Mary, or, in my case, to see about reaching my father.

Actually, it was the first time since my father’s death that I felt hopeful. I savored the feeling because it’d been so long since I’d felt anything but a suffocating sadness. Of course, I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into. More than 100,000 people were streaming in from all directions, from all over the country, to this small farm, located in this small town, in the middle of nowhere.

When I quipped that this must be the Catholic Woodstock, Melissa didn’t laugh, so I stopped with the jokes. I didn’t want my sister to regret that she’d invited me. And I surely didn’t want to sully her experience with any of my cheap shots. And, really, wasn’t I coming as a seeker too? Wasn’t I finding that I was hopeful? Weren’t my expectations as grand as anyone’s, and maybe even grander?

After a few hours stuck in traffic, we reached the farm, found a place to park, and headed off to find the statues that were known to “cry” tears. But upon arriving at this location, I found that every statue I looked at had eyes as dry as a bone.

Next, it was on to the well flowing with water that Mary had purportedly made holy. People were patiently lined up, holding their plastic water bottles, waiting for their turn to fill them and move on.

While nothing extraordinary had happened yet, there was a palpable feeling of reverence and peace in the air. We got our water and made our way to where the little two-room guesthouse was stationed on a hill, in the middle of a huge, open field. This was where Mary was expected to appear. Everyone was allowed to write petitions for those things they were asking for, and then to place them in slotted boxes around the field. We were also permitted to view the room where Mary would make her visit.

My mother and I decided to see the house, while Melissa went off to find us a place to sit in this vast sea of the faithful.

It was a nondescript, white-walled room, with a couple of windows and scattered religious paraphernalia. A few folding chairs were arranged in a semi-circle. A woman pointed to the corner where Mary would make her entrance.

I felt strangely overcome with emotion standing there. I found myself swallowing back tears as we headed out the door, back into the brilliant sunshine. I purposely did not look my mother’s way, so that she wouldn’t see my distress. As it turned out, this was unnecessary, as my mother had shared the identical experience. We hugged onto each other and made our way to Melissa.

For the next several hours we sat in the blazing sun, packed in like sardines, waiting for the appointed time. As would be expected at such a gathering, everyone was as helpful and kind as could be. People offered us food, drinks, and umbrellas to protect us from the unrelenting sunlight. Many were exchanging stories of miracles they’d heard about or experienced for themselves on previous trips.

Caitlin was astonishingly content to just sit on my lap for all those hours. But it wasn’t long before I started to feel a little queasy. As a trained EMT, I should have recognized the symptoms of heatstroke. But other than pressing cold drink bottles against my wrists, neck, and temples, I did little as I started to feel sicker and sicker. I figured the moment would be arriving soon when Mary would appear, or not appear, and then we could go home. I didn’t want to do anything that would take away from my sister’s and mother’s experience.

It was while I was looking straight up into the sky to keep myself from throwing up that I thought I saw a radiant light descending.

Just then, it was announced over the loudspeaker that Mary was in the room and was speaking with the woman there.

Another hour went by while we waited for the woman to come out and tell us what Mary said.

At this point, as much as I wanted to be there to hear Mary’s words for myself, hoping against hope that these words would offer some clue as to how to find my father, it had finally become obvious that I needed to get myself out of the sun right away. I explained to my mother and sister that I was going back to the car. When they saw how sick I looked, they just nodded and told me they’d watch Cait and meet me back there shortly.

Since we had parked under a shaded tree, the interior of the car was relatively cool. But I turned on the air conditioner full blast and lay down on the back seat.

I began to feel delirious.

“Oh boy,” I thought to myself, “I’m going into shock and there’s nobody around to help me. I’m gonna croak and finally get my wish to be with my father.”

Finding this hysterically funny, I began to laugh. The laughter soon turned to crying. I started slipping in and out of consciousness through a kaleidoscope of images. Every time I could feel myself getting ready to let go, I’d see Cait’s face and get pulled back.

Next, a scene from my childhood was played out in a surreal mixture of dream/vision/hallucination. When I was a young girl, I’d had a horse that was always breaking out of our field. On this one day, I spied him just as he was jumping our fence. I raced to the barn to get some oats to coax him back. But by the time I got to the front yard, he was galloping across the road right into an oncoming car. The driver slammed on the brakes and went into a screeching skid, but the car was going too fast and there was no way it was going to be able to stop in time.

As it had unfolded in real life, in the dream I saw every detail play out in slow motion, right up until my horse and the car were about to crash into each other. I stood frozen, horrified and helpless. At the last second, my horse raised himself up and flew over the hood of the car.

This time, I felt myself rising up with him, spiraling upwards again, flying up, up, up. There was a burst of light, and in the light I thought I saw something but couldn’t tell what. Then it all went black.

I awoke 45 minutes later to the sound of KaRing, KaRing.

How strange to hear a doorbell ringing. I tried to sit up to see who was at the door. Maybe it was my father. Maybe Mary had finally brought my father. As soon as I got up on one elbow, the world started violently spinning around me. I opened the door just in time to wretch on the grass.

By the time my mother and sister arrived, the car’s air conditioning had worked to bring down my body temperature and I was starting to feel somewhat human again. We made it back to the airport with only minutes to spare.

The next day, fully recovered, I was home sitting in our kitchen recounting the trip for Andrew. I had a need to talk because I had a need to try to sort out for myself what I thought happened. As ever, Andrew was a patient listener and a helpful questioner.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” He asked right off.

I explained that I was never really sure what I was looking for. And I admitted that I had felt a little foolish about the whole thing. Had I thought that if I was able to see Mary with my own eyes that would somehow prove that there was a God and an afterlife? And then by deduction, I could conclude that my father must be somewhere in that afterlife? And somehow that would make me feel better, and maybe renew my faith somehow? It all felt kind of wacky.

“So, did you see Mary?” Andrew asked.

“Yeah, I think I did.”

“And?” he prompted.

“And then I got sick and had to find some air conditioning. So I went back to the car. Then I kept passing out in between these wild experiences.”

I told him about reliving the encounter with my horse. And how it had been such a vivid experience that I could think of little else on the flight home.

“What do you make of that?” he asked.

“I feel like I’ve been missing my father so much,” I said, “that, in some unconscious way, I think I’ve been courting death. Thinking that if I couldn’t find my father while I was alive, I’d be able to find him if I died.”

Andrew looked troubled to hear this.

“There was a split second where I could see, where I actually knew that my horse was deciding whether he was going to live or die.” I continued, “And he chose to live. I feel like I had unwittingly put myself in that position too. And I was being asked to choose.”

Andrew nodded.

“Then my horse flew me up to the light. I could have gone through, I know it. I even saw something in it….” My voice trailed away.

“But you chose life, even if it meant not finding your father,” Andrew finished for me.

I looked up at him. “I chose you and Cait.”

That night, I went to bed feeling exhausted but peaceful. Instead of my usual ritual of begging my father to show me where he was, I just thanked him for being my dad and told him I loved him. And then I fell into the first deep sleep I’d had in a very long time.

At 3:21 a.m., I awoke with a start and sat bolt upright.

I’d heard it loud and clear! I know I’d heard it! “KaRing.”

And then it struck me with such force that it nearly knocked me out of bed. KaRing was my father’s meditation mantra! It was a word only he and I knew! Mantras were supposed to be kept secret, just for your own use. But my father and I had revealed ours to each other anyway.

“Dad, you did it!” I called out to him silently. “You got through to me! I get it, I get it!”

I started to sob. But this was wonderful sobbing. I felt a sense of relief and gratitude like nothing ever before in my life.

I realized then that my father had spent the whole year giving me signs, over and over again. From the moment he died, he had tried to find ways to communicate with me. But I had been so tight, so closed off, and so full of pain that I couldn’t feel, or hear, or believe anything. It wasn’t until I let go of my preset ideas of what that valid communication should look like — until I gave up, gave in, and let go of all of that — that he’d finally been able to get through to me.

It took all my strength not to shake Andrew awake and scream, “I found him! I found my dad!”

I started this journey on very shaky legs but eventually returned home having found what I had lost. I found my father, and, through him, I reconnected to my spiritual core. And so it was that my dad and I reunited despite the considerable odds.

So I ask myself now, all these years later after my father’s death, what would he make of my air painting skills?

“Not bad,” I think he’d say.

Maybe more importantly, as I continue the tradition of teaching my daughter the way my father taught me, I see these lessons becoming instilled in her heart.

Cait and I have picked up where my dad and I left off — together, we’ve become air painters extraordinaire.