These conversations are rarely pleasant but in the greater scheme of things are probably necessary.
Rob: What will you do if… I die tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month.
Rob and I were in the car when he said this, returning from a trip to Whole Foods. For our international friends, Whole Foods is an organic market where so many samples of foods are set out that you can graze your way through lunch and dinner free of charge. We go there once a week or so because they carry foods that no one else does. Strange conversations seem to occur to and from Whole Foods.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “You planning on checking out?”
“Well, no, but would you know how to access our bank records?”
Not long after we got married, Rob took over finances. I was always tardy on paying bills, I am terrible at math, our credit sucked. I was happy to turn this over to someone else.
“I would go immediately to your computer. I would figure it out.”
Not long after Rob and I first met, we had a reading with a Cuban psychic named Aura. She lived in a small apartment in Miami’s Little Havana, didn’t speak much English, and her predictions turned out to be startling accurate.
She told me I would become Rob’s second wife and would be married to him for a very long time. She said I would write many books under an abbreviated “genderless” name (TJ MacGregor) and that we would be creative partners. All that is true. She said I would die when I was 74 – don’t know about that one yet!- and that Rob would marry for a third time, but his second wife wolds always be the love of his life. I really liked that part.
So when Rob asked this particular question, my thoughts immediately went way back to Aura. “I’ll kill you if you die first,” I said. “That’s not how Aura said it would happen.”
It’s not that I believe 74 is the checkout date just because a psychic way back said it was. What was important was the idea of it all, the way our lives ultimately play out. I always suspected that my mother would die before my dad did but was sure of it when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, her way of exploring the afterlife without actually having to die. My dad was more intellectual in that sense, he had to be able to mentally connect the dots first. And he eventually did and died five years after my mother did.
But the exploration Rob and I have taken during our 30 years together has been radically different from that of our parents. We have explored and written about many aspects of psychic phenomena. So it’s not death that either of us fear. I’m not even sure if fear figures into it. We all die. Death is the ultimate unknown.
If consciousness researchers are right , then we choose our deaths in the same way we choose the circumstances of our birth and it may nor may not have anything to do with genetic predisposition. Free will. Choice. When we came into this life, we knew where the chips lay. And at each step in our journeys, we make choices, we exert our free will.
When you talk about this stuff openly, it comes down to this:
Trish: If you die first, I wouldn’t stay in our house.
Rob: Me, neither.
Trish: I would move closer to Megan.
Rob: Let’s go eat that vegetarian lasagna you bought for lunch.
And so this very strange and important conversation ends over food, what we will eat for lunch.
