You’ll never guess what,” Anna said as she opened the front door. “I saw my angel in a patch of tar in the parking lot of Stop and Shop yesterday.”
“Ahh,” I said. Whenever I find myself in a situation where I have absolutely no idea what someone is talking about but the people around me seem to think I should, I give a long, heartfelt noncommittal “ahh.” Usually, a good noncommittal ahh can buy you enough time to figure out what’s going on, or at least which questions to ask.
Anna, however, wasn’t buying the ahh.
“Well, you know about my angel, don’t you? Do you not know?” she asked as she grabbed my elbow. She seemed shocked.
Smiling, pastel-colored ceramic angel figurines smiled down at us from all angles of the little living room, with its many comfortable recliners. There were pictures of angels all over the walls, too, brightly colored prints and posters. Some were in ornate gilded frames, most in simple black plastic frames from Target.
“Well, I suspected you really love angels,” I said. “But, no, I’m not sure I know about your angel. Specifically. Your specific angel. You’re saying you have a specific angel?”
“Oh.” Anna sounded disappointed. “I just thought everyone knew.” She looked away.
“Well, maybe I do know, and I just forgot. Sometimes that happens to me. You just need to refresh my memory.”
“Because it’s famous here in town. The newspaper even ran a story on me and my angel.”
“Then I probably do know, somewhere deep in my brain. I forget so much. My mother used to say that I would forget my own head if it wasn’t screwed on. Would you remind me?”
“All right. Just wait a minute.”
Anna wasn’t actually my patient. Her husband, Eddie, was. Eddie rarely talked. He always smiled briefly at me when I said hello and then ignored me, but he tracked his wife’s every movement around the room. He adored her. I adored Anna, too, and my visits had really been with her. Now Eddie watched as Anna stood on the couch to reach a photo album at the top of a bookshelf crammed with more angels.
When she climbed down, Anna explained that she had an angel she saw all the time—at least once a month.
The freedom to believe people is one of the joys of being a chaplain. Other health care providers have to be suspicious by nature. Is she really taking her medication the way she’s supposed to? Is she really following her diet? Did he really give up the cigarettes? Is he really staying home all day now that it’s unsafe for his wife to be alone? But a chaplain is allowed to believe her patients. A chaplain may—no, should—believe the story of her patient’s spiritual journey and what he thinks it all means, no matter where it leads.
But sometimes, I don’t. I can’t. Sometimes, I’m a skeptic. And in this case, it was even worse: I found Anna’s belief cute.
Angels, of course—real angels as depicted in the Bible—are not cute. They are not pastel-colored. They are not babies. They do not even look angelic. The seraphim have four faces and six wings. The cherubim are eighteen feet tall and covered with eyeballs. The angels with flowing robes, streaming hair, and golden wings, the angels who play lutes and harps—these are not the angels of the Bible. While the New Testament’s book of Revelation does mention angels playing trumpets, the blasts of those trumpets signal the destruction of the world. Not something you’d put on a Christmas card.
And yet.
Anna pulled a folded-up newspaper out of the album and opened it, turning the old pages carefully until she stopped and pointed to a photo. It was of the sky over the harbor at sunset. There, in the center of the gold and pink clouds stretching over the water, was the unmistakable image: a cloud angel. It flew on its belly. A long gown swooped around its ankles, its arms stretched forward, and it held a trumpet to its mouth. It was like something out of a potpourri-scented gift shop. It looked right at home among the statues and pictures in the living room.
“Do you see it?” she asked.
“Yes, clearly, absolutely,” I said. “It’s beautiful.” And I meant it. But I didn’t believe that the image was anything other than a remarkable cloud.
But then she opened the album. There, in one glossy developed-at-Walgreens four-by-six after another, was the same exact image of an angel. She’d seen him in clouds, in splotches of paint, in shadows, in the grain of wood, in bubblegum stuck to a picnic table. She had dozens of photos of him, flying on his belly and raising a trumpet to his mouth. It was delightful and alarming at the same time. I would not have believed it if I had not seen it, page after page after page.
“Do you see him here? And here? Now do you see why I call him my angel?”
• • •
THERE ARE LOTS of studies that show that people’s brains are primed to see faces and patterns in inanimate objects. The phenomenon even has a name: pareidolia. We’ve come to understand that this predisposition became hardwired into human brains for survival. A baby who recognizes a human face or a hunter who sees patterns made by an animal in the grass is going to have an advantage over one who does not. The same natural tendency to look for and see faces and patterns all around us also sometimes inspires people to see the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast or an old man’s face on the side of a mountain.
I don’t know if pareidolia completely explains Anna’s angel sightings. I do know, though, that angels are popular among hospice patients. Not with every one of them, of course, but with more than just a handful.
While Anna seemed content with her angel sightings and her thick photo album, another patient, Marjorie, approached the subject like a scholar. She dismissed the kind of angelology represented by kitschy figurines as “fluff,” but for most of her adult life she had studied all that she could find on angels. She had read dozens of books and was writing her own book on the subject, she explained. She believed that every person has a guardian angel assigned to them at birth. You could get to know this angel if you learned to communicate with it. The angel could give you guidance and advice.
“How do you communicate with your guardian angel?” I asked.
Marjorie raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms over her chest. “How do I communicate with my angel, or how do you communicate with yours?” she asked. She always could see right through me.
“Both.”
“How I talk to my angel and what I talk about with my angel is private,” she said starchily. “But if you want to learn to communicate with yours, I’d suggest you start by asking him his name. That’s just good manners.”
“And he’ll answer?”
“Yes, of course. That’s good manners as well.”
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to just talk to my angel in my mind, like a prayer, or if I had to say something out loud. But Marjorie seemed a bit annoyed by my questions, so I stopped talking and just listened to her plans for her book.
As soon as I got back out to my car after the visit, I sat down in the driver’s seat and introduced myself to my guardian angel—out loud, just to cover all the bases. I asked my angel his or her name. Then I waited for a minute. Nothing happened.
I turned on the engine and headed off to my next patient.
• • •
A YEAR OR SO LATER, my sister and I signed up for a beginner Reiki class. I’d first been introduced to Reiki at work, where several volunteers who offered it to the patients set up a one-day Reiki marathon in the office. Any employee could sign up for a twenty-minute introductory session. Developed in Japan in 1922, Reiki is based on the idea that there is healing energy in the world that can be directed and channeled by the laying on of hands. I didn’t know how it worked, but I loved it. I felt so relaxed as the Reiki practitioner put her hands on my head and shoulders.
In the beginner class, we sat in folding chairs in a circle. The instructor asked all of us to close our eyes as she offered a guided meditation. Now, I love a good guided meditation, even the ones you can get on CD from the library or download for free on your phone. Usually they tell you to sit in a quiet place with your eyes closed and use your imagination to envision yourself lying in a meadow looking at the clouds, or hiking up a mountain, or floating in the ocean.
This meditation started in a similar way. The Reiki teacher had us envision ourselves walking through the woods and finding a cabin in a clearing in the trees. Open the door, she encouraged. Then she asked, “Do you see anyone or anything inside the cabin?”
To my surprise, I did. There was a couch with its back to the door and a plaid blanket thrown over the cushions. A golden glow seemed to be coming up from the couch. The glow sort of coalesced and turned into a young man with a shining, glowing face. He was beautiful and I couldn’t stop staring at him.
“Hi there,” he said, in my mind.
“Hi. Who are you?” I said back, still in my mind.
“I’m your guardian angel.”
“Oh my God! I’m so glad I finally get to meet you!”
“Oh my God! I’m so glad you finally got to meet me! I’ve actually been here all along.”
Was he making fun of me? Yes, I think he was. But I didn’t care. Then I remembered what Marjorie had said. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“David.”
My eyes flew open.
Wait a minute, I thought. I’m just making all this up. This is all just my subconscious remembering what Marjorie said all those months ago. This isn’t real at all. I’m just imagining this.
“No, I’m real,” David said, loud as could be. “I’m really real.”
I looked around the room. All the other students were sitting quietly, with their eyes closed. They didn’t seem alarmed at all. They certainly didn’t give any sign of having heard David’s voice.
I did a quick inventory to see if I was going crazy again. I’d been doing these inventories for seven years at that point. It’s a habit you develop if you’ve ever been psychotic. Even so many years later, I tended to question everything I thought and saw, especially if it was the least bit unusual. It was exhausting. I’d once shredded my Achilles tendon and had to wear one of those big immobilizing boots for months. When it came off, I’d been tentative and nervous in my movements for weeks. Just walking was nerve-racking, because I didn’t trust my foot. This felt the same way, in the mind.
The last thing I needed was to think I’d met my guardian angel during a guided meditation.
I kept my eyes open for the rest of the class. David didn’t seem to mind. “I’ll still be here,” his voice announced in my head.
Since then, David has shown up occasionally in my dreams, always with advice. “You’re not supposed to plow through writing, or life,” he said once. “You’re supposed to let it fly.” Another time, “God never calls you to do something without also giving you the ability to complete it.” I always wake up flooded with relief.
Sometimes he tries for subtlety. This is always lost on me. Once, I was happily bouncing from rooftop to rooftop with a ninja in a kung fu movie-dream when I suddenly got scared. I refused to jump. The ninja yelled, “Just keep bouncing!” but I got angry. I stamped my foot, declared the whole thing ridiculous and demanded to know where we were going. The ninja morphed into David. “Jesus Christ, Kerry,” he said, annoyed. “I was trying to show you that you don’t have to know exactly where you’re going to have fun getting there.”
Once, he showed up as a very elderly man teaching a zumba class in a dream-gym. He came down off the stage where he was demonstrating the moves and stood in front of me, his flesh turning a sparkling gold as I watched. “You know,” he said, “you’re never going to lose weight when you’re pregnant.”
I had no symptoms at the time, but I woke up knowing I was pregnant. An over-the-counter test was positive. An ultrasound a few days later revealed that I had a rare type of ectopic pregnancy called a cervical pregnancy that, if not diagnosed and treated early enough, can rupture and kill the mother. If I hadn’t had the dream, I wouldn’t have had the ultrasound. It’s strange to think that a dream could save your life.
So: Is David really my guardian angel? Is he a figment of my imagination, bubbling up from my dreams? Or is he a manifestation of my subconscious mind, my animus, in famed Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s terminology? Does it matter?
Does it matter whether Anna’s angel pictures were pareidolia or a real angel trying to comfort and strengthen her? Because that’s what those sightings did for her. “My angel always appears to me just when I need him,” she explained. “Whenever I think I just can’t do it anymore, he shows up. Whenever I think I can’t take it, he’s there and I know I’m not alone. I know God loves me.” Anna had no doubt that her angel was real, and she didn’t care about other people’s opinions of his reality. She knew that the comfort and encouragement and love he brought her was real too.
Is David real? Are angels real? Who gets to decide what’s real and what is not? What does that word even mean?
• • •
WHEN I WAS SICK, the question of what was real and what was not real was all I could think about. Were my ketamine-fueled hallucinations of astral journeys real? After all, many indigenous tribes use psychotropic drugs to induce astral journeys, and the wisdom gained during those hallucinations is not just prized but believed to have a reality greater than the reality we generally inhabit. Thousands of years of Christian tradition have held mystical visions to be not only real but more real than this world, in which we see through a glass darkly. What I thought was God during my hallucinations insisted that it was the only thing that was real, and that it was this mundane “real world” that was an illusion. Anyone who has studied Eastern religions in even a cursory way is familiar with that idea. The belief in a reality beyond the reality we see and touch every day is a foundational idea of many belief systems.
But every single person I spoke to about the ketamine hallucinations told me they were not real. They were not a real religious experience. That was not a real encounter with God. There was no reality to them, and therefore no value.
When I was psychotic, I was absolutely convinced that the baby I’d been pregnant with had died, and I grieved as though I had had a stillbirth. In objective fact, my baby was alive and gurgling on my lap, but the nature of psychosis is such that a chubby, living and breathing infant is no refutation to a delusion. I sat on my couch and sobbed for hours, for months, over a dead baby. But while the grief was searing, debilitating, all encompassing, no one would acknowledge it was real. I felt the most alone I have felt, with my secret, deluded, inconsolable grief.
A year after my son was born, after I’d been on antipsychotics for about six months, a friend invited me to a luncheon gathering. I didn’t know anyone else who was going so my friend sat me next to her sister, a psychologist. We got into conversation, and I told the sister that I had been diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. She was very sympathetic and kind until I explained that the psychosis had been caused by a drug.
“Oh, so you don’t have real postpartum psychosis. My patients with real postpartum psychosis suffer so much. But yours isn’t real.”
It was a harsher echo of what so many loving friends had said to me when I told them about what I had thought, said, and done while I was psychotic: “That wasn’t really you.” But if it wasn’t me, who was it? If it wasn’t the real me, where had the real me gone?
When your ability to determine what is real is taken away by a drug, it’s terrifying. But it’s far worse when it’s denied to you by other people.
• • •
OVER YEARS of listening to people’s stories, I’ve learned that many, many people—maybe even most people—will experience in their lifetime things that challenge their sense of what is real or possible. Three sisters ask their mother for a sign that she’s okay after she dies. Each of them, separated by thousands of miles, opens up her mailbox the day after her death, and a butterfly flies out. A young man wakes up from surgery to find Saint Gerard sitting next to him. He has no connection to Saint Gerard, has never even heard of him before. He’s told that it’s an aftereffect of the anesthesia, but over the next six months until he dies, despite having no other neurological or psychiatric complications, Saint Gerard never leaves him. On a sunny day, three Pentecostal women pray over the husband of one of them. Just as the prayer reaches its crescendo, an enormous clap of thunder rattles the windows, and the wife faints. The TV weatherman that night cheerfully reports on an unusual weather occurrence that day, “a bolt from the blue.”
Each of these incidents happened to people I knew. Anyone who works in hospice could tell you similar stories. They happen to many people, whether we embrace them or refuse to think about them, whether we are comforted or terrified by them.
True, such experiences can be explained by coincidence, by medicine, by meteorology. But the people who experienced them felt something more than coincidence.
When we dismiss an experience as “not real,” what we are actually rejecting is the person’s attempt at making meaning of the experience. That’s a cruel thing to do. Attempting to find or make meaning is perhaps the central task of the spiritual life.
The single most helpful question anyone could have asked me when I was sick would have been “What does the experience you had on ketamine mean?” Nobody ever asked me that. It was dismissed as not “real,” and therefore the meaning was not worth exploring.
How much more helpful, and kind—and enlightening—it is to ask what the meaning of the angels, the butterflies, the thunder, and the hallucination is.
• • •
ELLEN’S HUSBAND, Tom, answered the door and asked me in. Their house had that smell I think of as particular to the homes of the Greatest Generation. I’ve never been able to figure out what it is. Is it Pine-Sol or Lysol or Ivory soap? Is it the smell of decades of roast beef and mashed potatoes and buttered carrots seeping out of the walls? The house I grew up in in the 1970s and ’80s didn’t have it, nor does my house now, but the homes of both sets of grandparents did. What is that smell of warmth and cleanliness and safety? It smells more like home than my own home does to me.
Ellen’s house had that comforting smell, but also the smell of sickness. That’s a particular smell, too.
Tom explained that Ellen had enthusiastically requested a chaplain visit during the admissions interview, but he was dubious about what good the visit would do her. Ellen’s long-term memory was fine, he explained, but she had no short-term memory, not even for conversations she’d had just five minutes before. “I’m not really sure what will happen when she meets you, or what good it’ll do,” he said. “She won’t remember you the second you leave.”
Still, Ellen seemed happy to have a visitor. I asked her about her days.
“You know what I do all day long as I lie here?” she said. “I try to be loveful.”
I asked her what she meant.
“We shower so much love on babies and children,” she said. “But as we grow up, it stops. No one showers love on grown-ups. But I think we need more love as we get older, not less. Life gets harder, not easier, but we stop loving each other so much, just when we need love most. I—” Her voice caught in her throat, but she took a big breath and kept going. “I need more love now that I’m so old. I need love.”
She lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes, out of breath. In another few seconds, she opened her eyes again.
“One day, when I was lying here, I realized how old God is. He is so old. He must need so much love. People are always demanding so much from him, but who is there to shower him with love? So I thought that was something I could do. That’s what I do all day: I try to love God. I lie here and try to make my heart burst with so much love. I can lie here and love God and maybe it will help him.” She sighed heavily and her eyelids fluttered. She promptly fell asleep.
I sat there quietly for a minute, thinking. When I stood up, Ellen opened her eyes again.
“Why, hello there,” she said with a wide smile.
“I’m so sorry, Ellen,” I said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“That’s all right. Who are you? Are you the nurse? Do you need something?”
“No, I, I . . .” It took me a moment to realize that she had no memory at all of our visit, or of me.
“I’m very tired,” she said apologetically.
For the first and only time in my entire professional career, I knew exactly what to say.
“No, I don’t need anything.” I leaned over and put both my hands on her cheeks. “I just came by to tell you that I love you so much. And God loves you so much. You’re surrounded by all the love you need.” I leaned down and kissed her forehead, then lay my cheek on the top of her head, the way I’d done a thousand times with my children. “I love you.”
Ellen grabbed my wrists and squeezed them. “Oh! I needed to hear that. How did you know? Who sent you? How did you know I needed to hear that? How . . .”
Her voice drifted off. She closed her eyes and fell asleep again.
• • •
THE ANGELS in the Bible aren’t lute-playing babies, it’s true. But most of them aren’t multi-faced seraphim or eyeball-covered cherubim, either. Most angels in the Bible are messengers. They appear to people on earth looking just like ordinary young men but with messages of divine love and encouragement.
I don’t know if Anna’s angel was “real,” however you define that term. I don’t know if David is “real” in that way, either. I don’t know what meaning Ellen may have made of a strange woman showing up in her room to tell her she was loved. I never saw her again. Likely she had no memory of it when she awakened.
I’m no angel. Nor am I saying or implying that any human is. But maybe the message—the message Ellen was putting out in the world as she lay there dying, the message that she’d unwittingly boomeranged back to herself, stayed with her. Certainly it’s the only message I can consistently say is real, after all these years as a chaplain. Try to be loveful. It’s the only message that makes a difference, and it does not matter from whence it comes.