My First Angel
A dedication to a late love of my mother's life and someone I called a second father
Winter 2005
It’s been almost 20 years since I last saw David in the light of my mother’s eyes. With him, she became the summer, the glow about her that played on her floral dresses I wish I knew how to save back then. I’d savor every cool Wintergreen Altoid as tracks of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and Boston played through the open windows on our drives to the beach. And when I looked at him, I believed in anyone named David because he rescued my Padme action figure from the apartment tree and called me his Buckoo.
One day he and my sister ventured out towards the crashing tides. I was sick with longing to be as brave as them in my Powerpuff Girls swimsuit. But it was as though he sensed that and held my hand as he led me with them. The waters that were already up to my shoulders and I started to cry. Yet his voice beside me kept the panic building in my chest at bay. We got to a sand bar and he held me up by the waist over all that I feared. With arms outstretched, I saw my mother on the shore with a look of joy peeking from behind her camera. I’m glad for not knowing then that we’d lose him within the year.
Months later, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and it was as though Mom’s apartment bathroom flooded and we were submerged on the ocean floor, watching the waves roll over a future where we’d have another July. By October, it was too cold to build sandcastles the way he showed us how. I thought that if I kept every Altoid tin I could keep him too. I still don’t know which one was the last he took a mint from—and to this day I don’t buy them because I’d leave one tablet just for him.
He came to me in a swelling of music, the transition of dream to apparition in a vignette of the brightest white light. Blinded if only for a second, his smile-reddened cheeks and Virginia ocean eyes appeared in effervescent sparkle. So softly, he said my nickname, twice over without expectation. I awoke yelling “David” to the sun peeking from the vertical blinds I always swore moved if I looked long enough. I tried to force myself to sleep, but felt my Mom wrapping her arms around me, and we shared the morning light with his name illuminating the room.
I'll See You at the Beach
I believe in the sentiment of casted bottles crossing oceans to link us to the ones we lost. That the glass would reflect, fold the sky and the seas into one, Heaven, Earth, and all time in between. I don’t know if David could have been the one to save my mother from herself, but I do know that he made her want to try. I didn’t understand then why she had porcelain angel figurines, wing necklaces, or stuffed angel bears for us. I couldn’t comprehend what it meant to believe in angels beyond the beauty of them—not until I understood loss, the continuation of life despite it, and the lights that faded out of her after he told the nurses to let him go.
The waves move without touching them, the same way spirits leave our bodies before we get a chance to say the goodbye we wanted to. It was hard for me to know what forever really meant back then. But I still feel David when the cool saltwater surrounds me, and have faith in the waves I choose to dive under. In the sandy winds, I quietly hold my mother’s heart that’s at peace with him and her loved ones in an endless summer. And when I look in my husband’s eyes, I’m ever sure he was sent by the angel that shared his name. He too, has kept me brave.