| Hello, Diane by Gerald Grow An old friend came to see me recently. This would not be unusual, except she had died fifteen years earlier. Shortly before she died, I couldn't stop thinking of Diane. That whole week, everywhere--waking, turning a corner, looking up from a book rack at faces beyond the window--I saw Diane. After two days, I wrote her one of our biannual letters: Hello, Diane. I'm thinking of you. Hope you're all right. Love, Gerald. --And some news to fill her in on the details you miss when you have a heart-to-heart connection with somebody 2,000 miles away. Diane and I had found one another in graduate school when we were both looking for signs of human life beyond academia. We circled around for months, talking, walking, looking, questioning. In the end we settled on being just friends. Days, even weeks passed when I didn't see Diane, but a door had opened for her in my heart and, when I did see her, she walked straight into it. Hello, friend. She's one of a few friends who found my most unlisted number. During those same years, I had a more platonic soulmate in Monica. I called. "How nice!" she said, "I was just thinking of you." The next time I called, "How did you know I was thinking of you?" Days later, "How can you tell when I'm thinking of you?" And finally, when she thought of me and the phone rang, she would simply answer, "Hello, Gerald." In later years, it was my friend Sandra. Every time she became depressed, I suddenly had the urge to call her. This held true for nearly three years, then she married and moved far away. One week, about a year after she moved, I saw her in every stranger's face. I must have followed a dozen women till they turned and I could be certain they were not Sandra. I wrote her at the last address I had (Hello, I'm thinking of you, hope you're all right...) but got no reply. Not till months later did I find out that she was at that moment in the bitter crisis that ended her marriage, and nearly ended her. But that was years after I mailed the letter to Diane, and got no reply. At least, not from Diane. A phone call woke me from a nap. Someone saying she was Diane's sister. There was difficult news: Diane had killed herself. Before she did it, she left my letter spread out, by itself, on her desk, so someone would let me know. It had arrived that day. She was calling to tell me. And that was all. That was all? For days, the whole world felt like it was sliding out from under me. I called everyone I still knew who still knew her. We cried long distance. Like most thinking people, we had lived through our own near-suicides and our tears were mixed with the relief of someone who did not fall off that precipice, but knows it is there. Diane lay at the bottom of a very steep cliff. Looking down at her blurred, fading form, we could still feel the wind rock us on the ledge. Fifteen years later, I have more than survived that death wish. Yet any time I am fatigued, sick, depressed, or even exceptionally happy, an old, familiar voice whispers how easy it would be to end it all, and I say, Hello, Suicide: It's you again. --And I go on living. I was late to find the love of my life. I was 35, she 33. We were both over 40 when our second son was born to the two of us, alone at home, on the bed where he was conceived. With this woman and these two boys I have begun to make up for so many loveless years, so many frightened encounters with frightened women. Just when I could hardly hope for it, I blundered into a family that has been the greatest blessing of my life. But I never stop caring for the people I have cared for. Perhaps that is because I have cared deeply for so few. So, over the years of learning to build happiness from the foundation up, like a house to live in, I sometimes thought of Diane--who didn't make it. On one of my mornings to keep Stefan, I had just rocked him to sleep. As I was leaning on the bed gazing at this child I never thought to have, tears started pouring down my cheeks. Air made suddenly cold surged in and out of my lungs involuntarily, as if it breathed me. Over five or six long seconds, a presence, like a brilliant, invisible light, suffused the room with an immense, almost terrifying tenderness, coming to a focus six feet away, across the bed and to my left. Though nothing like this had ever happened to me, I knew at once what it was: Hello, Diane. Not exactly visible, but distinctly there, she sat on the other side of the bed, and smiled. For a minute, two minutes, we just sat together, watching Stefan sleep. I knew she came to bring a blessing. I felt her say how glad she was to see me happy, to know that I had survived the life that killed her, that I was still the Gerald she knew and loved. She was so very pleased. And she wanted me to know that she was all right. I heard a voice begin to thank her for being my friend (it was my own voice, speaking outside me), for coming back to help celebrate this child. But I couldn't finish--I was crying too hard, and laughing, too, with the knowledge that the intelligent, life-loving, nurturing being that was once Diane shared the same universe with me still. I can think of a dozen ways to explain this experience away. I've read many books on spiritual matters, and much of what skeptics say against them. I have the kind of mind that can't rest till it sees all sides; and no mind that sees all sides can ever rest. Yet, nothing has ever been more real to me than the time Diane answered my letter, 15 years late. |