A Note from the Universe By Laura J. Oliver

Five hours of jet lag and no air conditioning at the English Airbnb we rented in Woking last week may be why I have death on my mind, but I want you to know that I’m planning to attend my own funeral, so you better come. I have to admit that I’m hoping I’ll find out then things none of us can know now– that I was loved by more people than I might have predicted (four), that my work reached more readers than I was aware of, that my holding others’ writings in sacred trust as an editor was meaningful to them not because they eventually published but because their truths were witnessed, mirrored, and made beautiful by collaboration.

I want to find all this out during my celebration of life while “It’s Okay” by the Piano Guys plays over a sophisticated sound system. I want the mourners who came in sad, to start to smile because, well, it’s okay. Oh, and I want only super-flattering photos of me placed around the reception. Or a video montage.

I’ve come downstairs just now because it is lunchtime on a Monday, the only day I have to write this column each week and to run some story starts past Mr. Oliver. I will offer my usual disclaimer that I don’t know if any of these ideas are going anywhere. My creative self is 8 years old at this moment and scuffing the toe of one worn white sneaker on the oak hardwood, afraid to look up, full of hope.

He sees I’m carrying my laptop, knows it’s story time, so he picks up the scrappy rescue terrier, aims her in my direction, and says in Leah-the-dog’s voice, “So this is what my mama calls spit-balling.” And now I’m laughing too hard to read because that’s exactly what I’m doing. Spit-balling. Throwing thoughts against the wall. Plus, Leah is always funny.

And here’s what I’ve got so far, I tell him.

At my funeral I’d like someone to use the Rumi quote on my website, “From the moment I heard my first story, I started looking for you.” The quote moves me profoundly. I’m not sure why.

 Because the you, is you?

Because it is the illusive goodness in myself?

Because the search is for God?

I don’t know, but my daughter Audra, smart and preternaturally competent, whom I’m assuming will attend this event, corrected me when she read it. “Mom!” she admonished. “The quote on your website is wrong!”

I was horrified. How wrong was it?

“It’s ‘From the moment I heard my first LOVE story, I started looking for you.’”

Every story is a love story, Rumi. I thought you knew this. Because every story is an attempt to connect with another.

I read for a minute, then look at Mr. Oliver to see if any of these story-starts have landed. He’s nodding, but not saying anything, so I continue. Leah sits next to me on the blue and white window seat in the kitchen overlooking the pink hydrangeas by the garden wall keeping an eye out for squirrels.

Since the pandemic, a high school reunion, and the writing of this column, I’ve had the miraculous good fortune to rediscover friends from my childhood, adolescence, college, and a far-flung past—from elementary school when we lived on Eagle Hill, from high school when we lived in North Shore, from our time in New Zealand, and it has all been a miracle of grounding.

When you grow up with parents who split up when you were very young, you are left without a firm foundation on which to stand. It may be hard to imagine, but you never see your mother and father standing in the same room again. You exist as something that came from an amorphous space between them but not of them as a couple because you have so little experience of them as a unit. You have a mother. You have a father. But you don’t have parents. It is hard to build a self on a cloud.

This is why finding the friends now who were part of that amorphous life is such a gift. The kids who spent summer afternoons sharing crab nets, who were castmates in high school productions like Guys and Dolls, who also worked on Cape Cod, are my witnesses, my proof-of-life that I existed. That I exist. That I came from somewhere.

I stop and look at Mr. Oliver again for encouragement. He never meets my eyes at this stage. But his silence means “go on.”

A boy who lived at the end of the road when I was a girl, where we biked and swam and built forts in the woods, has been in touch since I started writing this column. He just told me that when we were about 8 and 10, his mother found a note he had stuffed under his mattress upon which he’d written “I love Laura” about ten times. I was astonished to hear this and was smiling, of course. I would never have guessed that he liked me at all.

That’s what I think death itself will be like. A revelation of affection you never dreamed existed. Only it will be astonishing in magnitude and unconditional. I imagine that more than any other emotion, what you may feel first when you die is simply surprise.

Like you’ve found a note from the universe stuffed under the mattress. It’s been waiting to be found your entire life.

You pull it out, unfold it, and it says, not ten times but to the end of time:

 I love you, I love you, I love you.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.