The After Death Chronicles by Annie Mattingley

Author:Annie Mattingley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612834054
Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing

Hal's episode of grace stands at the threshold of the totality of what most of us are capable of fathoming about consciousness. He is the man in chapter 2 whose decade of dreams after the death of his young friend Donnie had awakened him to the ineffable. Hal had told me of yet another early experience in the realms of mystery. As a young man he had had emergency surgery for a burst brain embolism. In the middle of the night he lay awake in his darkened room in great pain and close to death. The door opened. Hal's tiny grandmother, his mother's mother, was silhouetted against the hospital hallway's bright light. She entered, carrying a stack of dinner plates, which she distributed, one by one, on every available surface. He scrutinized her every move, especially aware of the loud sound each plate made as it was clanked down. She left the way she had entered, without speaking or acknowledging him. In the morning, Hal's mother called from her hotel across the street in an agitated state. She too had been awake in the night, so convinced her mother was in the hotel, she had gotten up to let her in but, “When I opened the door, the hall was empty.”

“I think you need to get right over here. I have something to tell you.” Hal replied. This could be only another startling ADC story, but it contains an element beyond that of accepting that the dead can visit us because, though living at a distance and definitely not in the hospital physically, Hal's grandmother was very much alive. In that day's mail, he received a card from her with a picture of a tiny, grandmotherly woman peeking around a slightly ajar door. The card read, “Just checking in.” Hal began to heal that day. Of course he asked himself, how could his grandmother have come in this way? And even if he wondered if he had hallucinated, there was also his mother's certainty that his grandmother had been across the street. Why the plates? Did they represent the meals still to come in his life or the ones his grandmother would serve him? Had she helped him to heal somehow, perhaps even saved his life?

Grace can have so many names, be described in so many ways. It comes in whatever form and manner will be effective, with neither boundaries nor limitations. It sees a need, seeks an opening, and presents itself. Whether it comes with the protection of a cocoon or with a New York accent, it takes whatever shape gets us to notice and to listen. It is an opened window, a breath of fresh air in a stifling room. We fill our lungs and breathe easier, cleansed and strengthened to face the next moment. It is by this strengthening, and by the sudden shift, that we recognize its presence.

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