Chapter thirty-nine

Sunshine

One afternoon Zeke visited his mother’s grave. Not wanting to leave, he stayed there until the sun went down and evening rolled around. It was nearly dark when a little girl came and sat next to a fairly new grave close to his mother’s. The girl was around ten years old and holding a little doll in her arms. She lovingly set some flowers by the grave and sat there, talking to whomever was buried there. Zeke was curious as to why she was there alone, so he said, “Hello,” asked her name and whom she was visiting.

“I’m Angela. Mommy used to call me her angel. That’s her right here,” the little girl replied as she pointed to the grave. “Daddy is over there by that tree visiting Grandpa. We’re going home in a little bit.”

She told Zeke she lost her mother just a month ago and that she died while giving birth to a baby boy, who was small and frail. Angela was sad, but she wasn’t complaining. She told Zeke that she wasn’t angry with God or her mother, either. Instead, she simply stood by her grave and said a beautiful prayer, wishing that she would be happy wherever she was. She promised her mother that she would take care of herself, her little baby brother, and their father so she didn’t have to worry from up in heaven. She had brought her mother’s favorite flowers so she could smell them and be happy.

She turned to Zeke, “Mommy loved daisies. They’ll keep her happy in heaven.”

Zeke kept looking at this little girl. He didn’t know who she was, but he knew she was there to teach him a lesson, to show him that he wasn’t alone. There were other beautiful souls, other innocent children and lightworkers like him, who had to endure pain and loss. He smiled at Angela. “Don’t worry, our moms are neighbors now. They’ll look after each other.”

The little girl looked up and smiled. “Really?” She took some of the flowers from the ones she had put on her mother’s grave and placed them on Audrey’s. “There, now they both have daisies.”

That evening, the little angel he met at the graveyard taught him a very important lesson – a lesson in faith and patience. Pure souls, like him and Angela, have to learn to live with pain and loss because, as the guides of other human beings, it is their duty to rise above tragedies. Precious souls like them need to know how to transcend human boundaries. It’s not the pain, but the way they handle it, that make them different from others, and thus Zeke was reminded of the fact that all beings of light return to the light, and hope for them is never truly gone. They become greater souls because they know how to handle worldly pains, losses, and grief differently.

Meeting Angela helped Zeke rise from his depressive spiral and return to his path towards achieving greater enlightenment. He realized that, even in the darkest time of his life, it was not fitting of a lightworker to blame anyone for his loss. He realized that he, himself, was the light he had been seeking. He was a beacon of hope for all others. He didn’t have to blame God or his mother, nor did he have to wait for an external source of light to save him. He was his own light, and it was his duty to guide others who needed him in times of crisis.

After he went back home, he realized he had been selfishly engrossed in his grief and that he had overlooked the pain felt by others around him. In his own pain, he had overlooked what his sisters and his father had been feeling. Zeke decided to set his personal grief aside and become the beacon of light for his family’s gain. Audrey’s death had brought an end to the happily-ever-after the Tartal family had been living for the last year of her life. It had left them all shaken and broken.

Ben took Audrey’s death harder than anyone could have imagined. It damaged him so badly that he started falling back to his old ways of drinking and staying away from home for days at a time. He was literally falling apart. Maya and Leia were also left heartbroken.Maya had only recently started to have a healthy connection with her family, and she had relied greatly on her mother’s support as she was healing from her own trauma. She was trying to find happiness and joy within the family, and her mother had been her anchor. Now that anchor was gone forever.

Leia, on the other hand, had just begun turning her passion for car mechanics into her vocation, and she had chose to deal with her grief by diving into her work. With their mother’s death and their father turning away from them once again, both Maya and Leia were left to fend for themselves, emotionally weak and vulnerable. All of them needed help. They needed Zeke.

Zeke often remembered his mother’s counsel and advice. He treasured those lessons of love, patience, forgiveness, compassion, and empathy. Even in death, he couldn’t afford to lose those beautiful values she had instilled in him. As a lightworker, she had been his first teacher, his first guide, and his source of light. He knew he needed to get his life back on track. He needed to be in charge so he could guide his family through this difficult time.

“Healer, heal thyself,” one of his first lessons, came back to him. He began spending more time with his father again, trying to bridge the gap that had been formed after Audrey’s death. He slowly guided his father with gentle words and even gentler feelings. Once Ben realized that he had done all he could and that his wife’s death was the will of a higher power, he found the strength within himself to face his fear, guilt, and shame head-on. He needed to bear both the emotional and financial responsibilities of his family and be their support system, so they could learn to smile again. Leia needed him to be her mentor once again and to guide her back to her dreams, and Maya needed unconditional love, so she could heal the psychological wounds that she still carried.

It took Ben a lot of time and effort to learn what it meant to be both a father and a mother to his children, but he did learn eventually. He became a much gentler man, a kind man who loved his children more than anything else. Once he put his family on the path to betterment, Zeke could finally focus on himself.

The black cat still followed him. He saw it every single day, looking sad, dejected, and abandoned. Zeke launched a million accusations almost immediately after his mother passed, directing all his anger and frustration towards this poor, little creature like a scapegoat. From the time he lost his mother, he had begun considering the black cat a bad omen and blamed it for all his loss and pain. He needed to make things right. It was time for him again to correct his mistakes and heal himself.

One day, as he sat thinking deeply about it, he had a sudden realization that his feline friend had returned to support him. The cat had come to him in his time of need as a carrier of love and care, not as a harbinger of death and destruction. It was for his own good, even if it had come to warn him against a fateful event. The cat was a simple messenger, one who cared for him. Zeke now knew that it had come to him to give him the support he needed in his time of crisis, as it could sense an impending loss in a friend’s life. He himself had a very strong intuition of pending doom for a while before the incident even happened, didn’t he? He connected his mother’s death to the horrible aura he had been sensing for months.

Zeke now understood that in no way the black cat to be blamed. Death was ever-present. Certainly, it was written, and thus it occurred. He could not fight it. The cat was just a friend, a true friend. True friends are a rare find, and they are meant to be respected and cherished, not dishonored or hurt. He knew how kind and loving his mother had always been to all that lived, and this cat was a gift from the universe. He could not turn his back on it.

He remembered his mother’s words. “We should love and care for plants and animals just as we care for our children, the elderly, the underprivileged, and the disabled, for they are as much a part of our experience as anything. They are loved by Nature as much as we are.”

Zeke needed to forgive his friend from the bottom of his heart once and for all. He couldn’t live with regret or guilt any longer. He decided to spend an entire day with his one-of-a-kind friend, so he could release all the pain and the dark thoughts he was carrying.

He stepped out of his house, and sure as ever, the cat was sitting right by the fence, waiting for him. He opened the door and waved his hand, inviting the cat straight to his room. He fed it milk and leftover salmon with his own hands, sat beside it, stroked its back and tail, and genuinely apologized for his rude behavior. He did not know if the cat understood his words or not, but his sincere apology took a load of guilt off his own shoulders.

“I am sorry,” he said, kneeling by the cat. “I know you wanted to warn me, to help me, and to prepare me, but I directed all my rage at you. Please forgive me.”

That evening, he decided to visit Noah again after a long time. He wanted to go to his wise old friend and share his story of anger, frustration, and forgiveness. He also wanted to take his new animal friend along with him to meet his human friend. As he left his house, the cat followed him as it always did. Walking past the woods, he suddenly stopped once he realized that his friend had paused a little further behind him.

The cat stood there silently for a while as if thinking deeply about something. It then walked ahead of Zeke and turned its head, almost smiling at him as it pulled its whiskers up and called out one last time, “Meeeooowww!”

It did not look back again after that and disappeared into the trees. Something inside Zeke told him that the messenger had left him the message it came to deliver. Its job was done. His friend had bid him a final goodbye and left forever, never to return. It took him a while to come to terms with it, though. He had finally asked for forgiveness from the bottom of his heart and had released all his grievances. Though he felt a little sad, he was still happy because he knew he had been forgiven.

When he met Noah that evening after such a long time, he was greeted with the same loving smile and a warm hug. “I know how difficult it must have been for you to lose someone as dear to your heart as your mother, my boy. I wanted to visit you, but I know what the pain of losing a loved one is. You needed to face that on your own terms.”

Zeke told Noah about all he had been through. Noah listened and then he spoke. “Do you still remember the dream we shared of the underworld when I was feeling just like you — when was I trying to come to terms with the pain of losing my family? Do you remember the lesson we learned together, the lesson you helped me understand? There is nothing called death, my friend. It’s a simple transition to another world, a better world,” he said with the usual smile on his face. And Zeke understood. His mother was not gone. She was simply in a higher place.

He had lived through the darkest time in his life, and now he was a better person. He was stronger in both body and spirit and had become a better man. That night, Noah invited him to stay over, and he gladly accepted.