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By Robert Koehler

Well, do you? Do I?
I tear these words loose from my not-so-recent past — indeed, 27 years ago — when my wife was dying of pancreatic cancer. I think they mean something, but God knows what. I plunked that question in my journal on May 3, 1998, three days before she died. I wrote:

“That was Barbara’s mystical question to me at 6:45 a.m. Oh Lord — I’m down in the quiet dining room at 11 p.m. I just kissed my daughter goodnight. She’s upstairs in the bed with Barbara. Should I put my arms around her?”

My daughter, Alison, was then 11 years old. She was about to lose her mother. These days never go away, of course, but recently — as the anniversary of her death rolls past — I’ve been feeling a glaring desire to return to that time of our lives. This is partly because of the global news. It’s full of war, poverty, starvation and death, as much now as ever. And all of it is abstract.

What I’m feeling right now is an intense sense that everyone’s life matters, in a deeply specific and individual way. So I’m bringing some memories of Barbara into the present moment — memories of what losing her meant and how it felt, the depth of soul it opened — because doing so feels necessary.

“Do you believe in them yet?”

I have no idea what she meant when she asked me this question several days before her passing. Neither of us were religious. We had no certainties about the great beyond — but our souls were open … to whatever.

So I return to those aging memories, which I was able to start penning into my journal several weeks later. For instance, here I am at her bedside, in the last hours of her life:

The feel of her hand. Moist, cool. Incredibly beautiful music by Mahler. A little after 3 p.m. — there’s a cloudburst. My neighbor’s red maple, which I can see out the bedroom window, is swept with wind and rain. And I am sitting there holding Barbara’s hand and I realize the next breath is not going to come. For the past hour, there had been an amazing change in her breathing — stop and start. A breath pushes through, then no breathing at all. But my sweetheart is at peace. Her face is no longer distressing to look at. That’s how it goes for the whole hour. Breath. Stillness. Breath. But then the rain comes and there is only stillness.

“I think she’s gone.” I tell the news to Pearl, Debby and Lauretta (mom, sister, cousin, who are downstairs). There are great, heaving, broken sobs as I hug Pearl.

Alison arrives. She was at school. When it became clear her mom had very little time left, my sister and brother-in-law drove to the school and picked her up. She got there within minutes of Barbara’s final breath. She wishes she had been able to give Mom her Mother’s Day presents and quickly retrieves them from her room: bath oil and powder. She puts them in Barbara’s arms. The hospice people take them out along with the body.

I hold Alison as we cry. “I don’t want to be with anyone but you,” she says.

I begin making phone calls. I call our friend Chris, who vividly remembers the moment it started raining — the moment of Barbara’s passing. She and her 5-year-old daughter, Becky, had been out driving at the time of the cloudburst and Becky, who loved Barbara and called Barbara her “second mom,” became suddenly silent. “Oh, somebody’s having a baby!” she said, then got a very serious look on her face. She told her mom: “I think Barbara’s having a baby.”

Another mystical swoop. No further details. Becky simply said it; she didn’t know why. But it happened at the moment of Barbara’s death and has remained, for me, a stunning whisper from the unknown, a fleeting … truth? Death and birth are somehow connected? Oh my God. What if? What would that change?

I draw no “aha!” certainty from this story, no clear sense of larger awareness: Oh, now I get how the universe works. This is just a flicker of maybe — maybe we know almost nothing about the universe in which we live. As I’ve written previously:

“I keep the story in my heart. I do not ask it to bloom beyond itself. But I keep it as a talisman, a tiny fragment of the infinite unknown that has fallen into my life. There’s more to this thing called life than we can possibly understand, but there are clues. And there is hope.”

It helps me continue to value my wife’s life in the present moment, a quarter century after her death. She’s still with us. And so is everyone else.

Do you believe in them yet?

(Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound*, and his album of recorded poetry and artwork,* Soul Fragments*.)*