When Boo and I were in Tahoe last week with my mother-in-law Gale, every night, the three of us would sit on the floor around the coffee table to eat dinner. Across from the table, on the wall is a clock frozen in time…..I never really noticed it until Boo pointed it out:
Boo: Mimi, why do you have that grandfather clock?
Gale: Well, it’s more of a grandmother clock….it was my mother’s. It’s very special because it reminds me of her.
Boo: Does it work?
Gale: No, it hasn’t worked for a very long time. The pendulum used to start up here and there but it hasn’t moved in a few years.
Boo: What time does it say?
Gale: It’s been at ten til five for as long as I can remember.
And that was that.
Now, I have to tell you part of the backstory here: Gale’s mother Cari passed away suddenly in 1993 from an aneurysm. It happened in Lake Tahoe, in the very house where Boo asked about that clock. When the aneurysm burst, Cari was flown by medivac back to the desert. Gale stayed in her mother’s bed for two days refusing to leave her side until she was talked into leaving for a few hours. When she went home, all of the sudden, a huge rainstorm appeared…..a rarity in our dry desert. Gale phoned the hospital and asked them to open up her mother’s windows so that she could feel and smell the storm…..Cari loved storms. Placing the phone back on the hook, Gale misplaced it slightly……and no calls were able to come back through. When she arrived back at the hospital everyone said they’d been trying to call her over and over……..
…..the rainstorm took her away…..
Yesterday I got a text at 7:51am from Gale:
Gale: The pendulum started swinging this morning…..
Me: What???!
Gale: I know, right???? How about this…..last night was the 19th anniversary of my mom’s aneurysm rupturing in this house. I woke up this morning and the clock was ticking?
Me: It was your mom…..
Chills.
We talked on the phone about it tonight. Gale told me how two nights ago she woke up around 2:30am to a huge rainstorm in Tahoe. She got out of bed and ran up to the porch to pull the outdoor cushions in from the rain and then she went back to bed. The next morning….the pendulum on Cari’s clock was swinging. And then we talked about how in December 2004, Gale had some scans to check for aneurysms because sometimes they are hereditary……and the doctors found one. They watched it for about a year because the risk of surgery was greater than the risk of the aneurysm…..but every six months after that…..the aneurysm grew…..and on August 22, 2006 the doctors said they would have to remove it. Gale underwent brain surgery in September 2006 and the aneurysm was removed successfully……the discovery of that aneurysm was her mother’s parting gift to her.
*****
I do think it was Gale’s mother swinging that pendulum…..just like my dad left me that “Choose Joy” message on his desk…..just like Boo saw my dad on the porch in the mountains…..and just like my grandfather called my sister’s cell phone after he passed away.
I believe in those “thin” places…..
……….the places where our loved ones can just reach through……with the very tips of their fingers…….and move a pendulum to say:
Everything’s okay.
What about you?
