The Lost Sailor's Journey To Heaven

A bee brushed the golden hairs of my arm as I placed a white daisy on the casket. For a moment, I smiled at the bee and wondered if it was Rob, my friend who left this world a few days earlier. Suicide always takes you by surprise. Rob’s death sent me tumbling down a deep shaft of depression with a desire to go deeper, to know, to taste, to feel an all-consuming darkness. He stayed with me through this time, helping me through the puzzle of guilt, anger and sorrow. This is my story of losing Rob, finding Rob and gaining faith in a power greater than us all. I left the casket and walked towards the receiving line where his mother greeted me with smiling eyes. For a woman who just lost her youngest son, she had amazing composure. Throughout the memorial services and funeral, she stressed to us that “we were important” to her. She wanted to make sure that we, who were left behind, were “OK.” When she could have sobbed and hidden from us, she greeted us as if we were all her children. "I've heard so much about you," I said, as she grasped my hands in hers. I felt I knew her through Rob’s conversations. And three years earlier, we met briefly when she rolled up in the big family van to drop Rob off at camp. “Rob was having the time of his life,” she had told me as we exchanged pleasantries. I remember eyeing all of Rob’s little sisters with their adoring faces pressed against the window of the van. One blew him a kiss. Standing beside Rob’s casket, I wondered if she would remember me. She gave me a warm smile and said, "I've heard a lot about you as well. You're the Nature Girl." My eyes filled with tears of joy and sorrow. She knew me. Rod had talked to her about me. Stunned that she knew Rob’s private nickname for me, I finally understood why he gave me the name. I instinctively looked for signs of God in nature, and since Rob’s death, I had found signs that Rob was still alive and with me. He fluttered as the carefree honeybee in the sweet-scented air of fresh cut grass and harvested garlic. The morning after his death, I walked back to my dormitory from my sister’s off-campus apartment. It was so quiet; I imagined the world had come to halt. A fluffy black dog silently approached me at the edge of his white picket fence. I looked down into his deep maple eyes and swore it was Rob looking back at me. At the entrance of my dormitory, a small brown spider put the final touches on a delicate weave precariously built between the handles of two doors. I was about to put my key in the lock when I sensed the spider was Rob. He had seen me home safely. Feeling it would be sacrilegious to break the spider’s web, I walked around to the back entrance. I passed Rob’s older brother, Matt, as he tinkered on his motorcycle in the street next to the dorm. We knew each other only in passing, and I debated whether I should approach him. What could I say to him? Rob felt like a brother to me, but Matt was his real brother. Then Matt called out to a friend nearby, "I crashed my bike this morning, I knew I shouldn’t be riding when I am upset. The bike’s banged up. Luckily, I’m not hurt." His words of a bike crash were enough to send me running toward the back entrance. My heart beat with fear, excitement and confusion. I knew about the bike crash. I had even known that Rob would die a tragic death at nineteen! But how? Matt’s words reminded me of the vision I had three years earlier at a farewell dinner for St. Joseph’s Camp. I wanted to do something memorable for the farewell dinner and suggested we pack into our barely freeway worthy automobiles and head to San Francisco. We had just finished dinner at a Japanese Restaurant when I realized there wasn’t much else to do but go home. None of us were of age to go to a club or bar and we had no place to go but the 35 minute drive back to our camp in the Los Altos hills. To kill the time and make the evening more eventful, I offered to read the staff’s tea leaves. After spending a summer together in close quarters, I knew everyone well enough to know what they would want to hear. It would be fun! “Xoxie will have many children and write romance novels.” “Carlos will manage a hockey team.” “Louise will become a doctor and climb mountains.” Then I got to Rob. He was the last one on my loop of ten people around the table. Cupping both hands around his cup, I gently rocked the tea so the leaves would twirl and dance. As the leaves settled, I took a deep breath and started his reading. Darkness, tragedy was all I could see. I shook my head to dispel the vision, but the darkness wouldn't go away. A tragic death at age 19. "What do you see?" Rob interjected. "I don't know." "You see something." "No, It's not clear," I said, shaking my head again. Then I tried to center myself with a deep breath. "Is it bad?" "Just give me a second to clear my head and concentrate." The coldness of the vision was terrifying, but I quickly consoled myself with the knowledge that I was not a psychic. And by the slim chance I could see the future, I figured that I would not know Rob in three years. After this dinner, we would go our separate ways and I would never hear from him again. For some reason, this was a condolence to me.