What Do You See?

This post is about death, grief, loss, unexplained happenings and also murals…

Fair warning and, if you’re here for the murals, just scroll down to the end.

The Context/Background

So I wrote a ghostly storybook ⬇️

And in this book I summarize all the scary, unexplained and sometimes magical stuff which happened when my husband and I owned our only house.

One of the chapters in this book covers an event that took place the day after my mother’s funeral, and I’ll summarize/reiterate that event here for those of you who haven’t read my book (website is at the bottom 😺).

Since I had been caring for my mom in our house, the sunny room in which she died had once been our dining room but then the room was empty except for a spattering of funeral floral arrangements which were sitting on the floor in the exact spot where I had dropped them and

my mom was no longer in the room.

So this space felt empty and overwhelming and a room to avoid until I felt better able to stand in it.

Yet, on the day in question I had NOTHING to do for the first time in a long time so I was lying in bed with my dog in the darkness of my bedroom as it was also the first opportunity I had to attempt to process the recent deaths of my father, cousin, grandmother and mother who all just seemed to have died right after one another.

And it was on this “psychological catch-up” day a friend texted me to ask that I take a photo of the floral arrangement her mom had sent to my mom’s funeral.

This enraged me. Or, rather, I already felt enraged and this just happened.

I could have said, “No, I’m not moving from this dark room today.”

But, instead, I furiously stomped downstairs and entered the room where my mom had been and tried to take a photo of the stupid flowers…

And I couldn’t.

All that appeared on my phone screen was blackness. I couldn’t make it go away.

I tried and tried to take a photo or make my phone work but I couldn’t and it wouldn’t.

The sun was streaming through the windows of the room and I hated it.

I was so upset.

And my phone’s black screen did not help my mood. No matter what I did, the seeming blackness was frozen and stuck on the screen.

“OhfuckingwonderfulmyphoneisbrokennowandIlovethat SO MUCH RIGHT NOW.”

🤗

I eventually walked around our house and, when I returned to the room, I tried again to take the photo and… this time my phone finally worked.

The picture was taken.

Consequently, I sent the photo to my friend HERE YOU GO LOVE YOU THANK YOUR MOM FOR THE FLOWERS and stalked back upstairs, tears streaming down my face.

Once back in the darkness of our room, laying angrily on the bed, and after I collected myself, I picked up my phone and began to look back at the photos I had taken and saw that the seeming blackness which had been stubbornly stuck on my screen in that irritatingly sunny room had more to it.

It wasn’t a completely-black-broken-“I’m your phone and I’m not working” screen at all.

No, it had… light figures…?

“Holy shit.”

First, I was just happy my phone wasn’t broken right then. And then I thought… “Mom? Dad?”

Sure, bereaved people see their dead loved ones everywhere.

EXAMPLE: “Oh! See that cardinal! It’s (DEAD PERSON’S NAME).”

But… I feel there’s something to the madness of bereavement. Maybe grief opens our eyes to possibilities and realities which we before weren’t able or willing to see. And, in that photo, I saw my parents who had both recently died.

It was amazing and I was so bummed I had been in such a foul mood when they apparently came to visit me.

Of course, they were to blame for my foul mood with their sickness and death so whatever.

I am also fully aware it could just be a phone glitch and not my dead parents commandeering my phone.

And yet…?

THE NEW HAPPENING OR IMAGINED HAPPENING

Right. So last Wednesday I was feeling quite low.

It felt rather intense but I pushed through it by foraging through boxes to find supplies for the mural my husband and I are now working on.

And then he and I went out for pizza which we hadn’t done since before we were vaccinated for COVID and… watched the Brewers game.

And…. the darkness within me passed.

The reason I share all this is because I was looking back at my photos the other night (again, my husband and I are working on a mural right now and as such I take a shit ton of mural photos) and, in between the Darkness and the pizza + Brewers game photos I saw… three weird photos I don’t remember taking.

They seemed to have been taken in the time period when I was feeling very low.

And… the three photos resemble the one which appeared the day after my mom’s funeral when I felt so grief-infected I could have destroyed the earth.

Sure.

These photos could be a phone glitch.

The “light” could be finger smudges or something.

At the same time, I now have a different phone so it’s weird the same phone glitch happened exactly when I was feeling the same way I had felt the sunny day after my mom’s funeral.

And… seeing those three photos show up right when I was fighting to get through the day… well, they lifted my spirits.

So it doesn’t matter what they really are because I’m seeing what I choose to see because it helps.

At the same time, I’m currently too physically exhausted to feel any emotions about this but… I wanted to share.

The thought that my parents came back to check in when I was feeling really low makes me happy.

They should work on visually manifesting because they should know I hate my phone and I won’t see the photo for days but…

I’ll take what I can get.🖤

CLOSING/SHAMELESS MURAL PROMO

I got the morning off from mural manual labor because I had a job interview last Monday so I drafted this blog post and now we are taking a REAL break (ONE DAY OFF WOOT WOOT!) so I have the time to publish this week’s blog. I realize no one but Jesse 😘 noticed this post is a few days late this week… but here it is! Back on track!

You know next week’s blog (which will be posted on Tuesday) is just going to be me bitching about being middle-aged and the grunt/workhorse for murals… but it is so cool to see a physical space transformed.

MURAL: Thursday (the scraping and pressure washing stage)

ONE WEEK LATER (almost done!) :

Since I’m also the agent for my husband and often score him the mural gigs, I can’t help but also provide you four readers with our website in case you too want a mural:

Muellerlowlife.com

In any case, from this bereaved exhausted eye-twitching manual laborer to you… I hope you’re well and holding on.

And, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by grief and loss or just “everything,” stay busy or sleep or pray or eat pizza or do whatever you need to do to get through the especially bad stretches and know that they will pass and you will be okay.

🖤