My book club is reading The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, this month. Unfortunately I will be unable to attend the meeting, as next week I will be on vacation.
I listened to the audiobook recently. It was a shivering tale and quite a commentary on modern society, this place where one life means so much . . . and so little.
I wanted to relay my own story of the "inbetween." Susie Salmon, the 14-year old dead narrator of the book, spoke of it frequently, and how she wanted to reach out to her family. Her family seldom saw her ghost but did at times seem to know she was there.
When my mother was terminally ill, she asked me what she could do to show me there was life after death. "Send me something orange," I suggested. I don't have much orange, either in the house or in the yard.
The day I came home from my mother's funeral, there was a wild black cat in my yard. The cat wouldn't let me come near it.
I knew right away that the cat was my mother. My grandfather had returned to my grandmother as a cat when he died in 1976. I remembered that, and I recalled my mother talking about it before she passed away.
Everytime I got upset that year, or had bad things happen (and a lot did), I saw that cat through my window. But it never let me come close.
The last time I saw it was a year later, on the first anniversary of my mother's death.
But the cat, of course, was not orange.
However, the first year after she died, near my birthday, a sandy orange dog showed up unannounced on my doorstep, just a few months after I'd had to put my own dog to sleep. He was a very sweet dog for a stray, but definitely an inside dog, and with my allergies, I could not keep him in the house.
My husband commented, somewhat dryly, "Leave it to your mother to send you something you couldn't use." She always did have that particular knack when it came to gift-giving. I was sure this was a sign from my mother, though, and I was quite distraught because my husband insisted we could not keep the dog. It seemed wrong to rid myself of such an omen.
A few days later, a friend gave me a rose for my birthday. I planted it in the front yard.
It bloomed orange, and still does.
It gave me a shiver. I know more is going on than what we can see.
ReplyDeleteI read Lovely Bones and I liked the aspect of it being told from a dead girl's perspective, but the gory tale was just too long to live with for the two weeks or so it took me to read it. A movie is over in 2 hours. I can handle such a story line about that long.
One of the best books I read last year. I've used The Lovely Bones a couple of times as an example of good writing when I speak to students.
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