I don’t understand about the Hereafter because I am Beau-Be-Gone, not the Brainiac Bad Boy Andy-Long-Legs. One minute I was moseying along, the next I was deathly sick, not the garden variety $300.00 at the vet to fix all your troubles, no I was the thousands of dollars at the vet and no guarantees on recuperation type of sick. Not a good scene!
The last thing I remember Momma is stroking me, then boom, I catapulted through space to heaven, landing in RIP Daddy’s arms as if we had practiced in advance. Winding around Daddy’s legs were all the cats I had lived with through the years.
I always (well, sometimes) wondered where they had gone….. but would never have believed it if I had not seen it with own two eyes. There was the once psychotic Cat Mandu, friendly and welcoming. Gee, would I change that much? Also there to greet me was, our feral cat Casey, who like Humpty-Dumpty (and me) could never be put together again, and look, shy little Cat Mao, with her Raccoon Friend. Well, I be!
You probably are wondering about the passage from this world to the next. It makes me want to share a story Momma told me about she was growing up in country in the 1950’s – just don’t tell Jakita I told you. She thinks that the privilege to share the Mystery of the Reality belongs to her solely. But hey, I am in heaven, she can not jump on my back and chew my ears now.
It came to pass, in Momma’s small town that a father left his family behind and the Single-Mother (unheard of in the 1950’s), had to find a home for herself and four children. She heard there was a three bedroom bungalow, close to the beach that stood empty. No one had lived in it since the end of the Second World War.
Made of white clapboard, with a black thatched roof, the house made you think of a cottage that may have been found nestled in any New England town on the Eastern Seaboard. You could watch the sun rise and set, painting the water in magnificent hues, different colours, every day. As storms came in, you could see the waves turn menacing, watch the ice floes in the winter, or marvel at the shadows the full moon blanketed the water with, on a moonlit night.
It was a location city folks would have given their eye teeth to own. How could any one have left this Paradise behind? The challenge was to locate the owners, to see if it could be rented.
The owners were found and a deal was worked out. The family moved in, a new segment of life to begin. The youngest child, Little Lilly, was still taking daily afternoon naps. One day, after a nap, she asked her mother, ‘Can you see the Soldier Boy in the room with us?’ Single-Mom looked around and saw nothing. ‘Not over there, sitting crossed leg at the foot of my bed. He seems confused about why I am in his bedroom, although he never talks to me’, her young daughter explained.
Single Mom thought maybe she should find out more about this family who had rented them what she thought was a God sent home. She established that the couple had only one son that went off her World War Two but never came home. The room her youngest daughter slept in, was Soldier Boy’s bedroom. It was whispered that after his death, he started making visitations to his parents, in their home on the beach, according to the old-timers, who claimed they had been sworn to secrecy.
Totally appalled and with total disbelief that the dead would appear (even if it was their son), the parents had abandoned the only home they had ever lived in as a family. But those in ‘the know’ said, ‘don’t tell anyone but’ even after the parents had moved, Soldier Boy still found them at their new home, appearing to them until such time as his parents joined him in Paradise…. Kids, eh????
Single-Mom decided that it was probably better to move her family on. She had no way of knowing the long-term effect this could have on her youngest daughter and the older children longed to have eyes to see (but they didn’t). Meanwhile the owners, without being told, intuitively knew what had driven the family from their former home. They felt they had no choice but to have their bungalow pulled down, clapboard by clapboard, then two by four by two by four, so as to prevent other families from being exposed to the unknown, that they themselves struggled to put their heads around.
But still, it was said that their son’s apparition could be seen by some of the locals, (not sure if there was some sippy juice consumed before the sightings) on Moon lit nights, a lone figure, with a bayonet, sitting on the rocks, as the waves crashed on the shore. It seemed our Soldier Boy was looking out toward the bay, wiling away the time until he could join his parents, extended family and friends in the hereafter.
From Morguefile
By: Pellini
We have it (on very good authority), that since his parents passed on to their glory, no one has seen him sitting on the rock, looking out at the bay, or anywhere else in Momma’s little town. They all believed he has crossed over into the light, with his parents to his greater reward.
What we know for sure, is the waves still crash on the cliffs and the tide still goes in and out, without him.
