Four Funerals and a Wedding by Jill Smolowe

Author:Jill Smolowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

On Day Three, Joe suddenly said, “Do you see that light?” Thinking he meant the fluorescent bulb behind his bed, I rose to turn it off. “Not that one,” he said. “That one.” Joe pointed to the left of his head. “Now it’s over here.” Slowly, his arm swept across his chest and he pointed to the right side of his head. “No, wait, it’s right here. Bright.” Closing his eyes, Joe drew his index finger to the middle of his forehead. “Can you see that?”

All sensation sucked up through my body and started buzzing in my head. “See what?”

With a tone of amazement, Joe described a mountain scene. Blue sky. Lush flowers. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. Wait! Now it’s a beautiful beach with no one on it.”

I could feel and hear the pounding in my temples. Shortly before dying, many people describe a tunnel of light. Others, my great-grandmother and mother-in-law among them, describe visits from dead loved ones. Those left to ponder such accounts tend to fall into one of two camps: they either regard the phenomena as evidence of an afterlife (that would be me) or they dismiss the episodes as hallucinatory bunk (that would be Joe). For my husband, the unwavering skeptic, to suddenly be describing a bright light, with a look of rapture on his face—

He was freaking me out. I grabbed Joe by both arms and yanked him to an upright position. “Do you see a tunnel of light?”

“No. It’s bright. Like the sun.”

“Don’t follow that light,” I said sternly.

Joe opened his eyes. When he seemed fully present, I said, “I thought you were dying. Do you want to go?”

“No,” he said.

“Okay. Then if that happens again, tell whoever is there that you’re not ready, that it’s not your time.”

When I entered his room the next morning—a visit that began with Joe telling me he’d dreamed of his own memorial service—Wease had an explanation for his unusual visions. Just prior to his hospitalization, he’d been working on a new magazine; one of his tasks had involved culling through photos of mountain vistas, beach scenes, and bucolic landscapes. The images he’d seen in his mind, he said, had been drawn from those stacks. True to his beliefs, Joe had separated the light and the images from any near-death context. I assumed that was that.

But Joe surprised me. “There are some things I want you to know, in case I die,” he said.

Struggling to look receptive, I took my notebook from my purse. To him, it was a signal I was taking him seriously. For me, it was a necessity; I was too numb to hope I might accurately remember whatever he had to say.

Joe proceeded to tell me that he wanted Becky to have his Leica camera and copies of his novel and two full-length plays. He wanted his extensive collection of theater books to go to his cousin Bill, a fellow writer. The stuff he’d mailed from his mother’s apartment a few

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