From "The Actual Dance"
"My mother. It was 27 years ago. I was only 28 years old. It could have been yesterday, that night in 1973. Mom lying in a bed in a semi-private room in the George Washington University Hospital. She was going in and out of consciousness, delirious sometimes. She was dying from breast cancer that had metastasized to her brain.
We the five children had previously agreed not to take extrodinary measures. Two nurses stood at the side of the bed. I stood at the foot of the bed.. I was the only other person in the room. I did not want to do this alone. My older sister was supposed to join me but she did not make it in time. I did not know what to do. I was suppose to be strong. The only boy with four sisters. Dad a traveling salesman and he had died three years earlier when I was just twenty-five years old. Now I am the man in the family. I am supposed to be strong.
Well I did not hear an orchestra back then. I just listened as the two nurses each holding a different wrist from the opposite side of the bed counted down. As I heard them say "she is gone," my eyes filled with tears. I began to turn away from the bed when I noticed out of the corner of my right eye a giant swirl, a spinning tuft of a cloud. At the speed of light my head jerked from right to left as tuft spun out of the room.
In that instant I knew exactly what it was. I new and I could not tell anyone. Not even Susan. It was the first time I ever experienced the super-natural. I was afraid because I had just seen something I knew I was not supposed to be able to see. And I do know what you call them...people who hear or see things in their head that no one else can hear or see.
I have since come to understand that life exists in each of us in a tangible form and that the essence of who we are beyond the physical body exists. And I was privileged to experience that life force exit my Mother at her last breath. "
Thank you mom - Frieda Alfman Simon.
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