30.

A Reason to Live

Thursday, April 18 - 5:45a.m.

Jennifer was weak with grief and jet lag when she arrived in Las Vegas early on Thursday morning. She had a pounding headache and felt sick to her stomach. The flight home had been filled with memories and heartache. She had made all the arrangements from Israel to have Mike’s body shipped back to the United States.

When she got home, she had a hard time accepting the fact that he was dead. She paced up and down the length of her livingroom. Sometimes it felt like he was standing right next to her. She was sure it was him by a faint wisp of his unique scent but then she would turn around and see nothing, and of course, there was no smell.

Other times it seemed as though he was just a minute away. She thought, Surely there’s been some kind of mistake. Any minute now he’ll call me and ask me out to dinner. Several times, she heard the rumble of an approaching Harley outside her window, and wondered if it was Mike, but as the sound faded into the distance, she felt the emptiness return.

Mike’s funeral came and went. She was feeling sick, but forced herself to go anyway. The service was short, but hundreds of his fans showed up, a quiet, somber crowd. She cried, but she had been doing that all along. Hers was just another gray face in the crowd.

She didn’t quite accept that he was really dead until the funeral. That night, when she returned to her apartment, she screamed in anger. She dropped to her knees on the floor and raised her fists toward the sky. “God damn it, Mike. Why did you have to leave me like this? You promised you wouldn’t leave.” She was so pissed at him. And pissed at God, too, for allowing it to happen.

When her anger subsided, she prayed. “Please, God, I’m begging you. You can’t do this to me. I’ll do anything you ask, just please bring him back to me. Please bring him back. The world needs him. I need him.” Then she realized the futility of her prayers. What’s done is done, she knew, and she would never get him back.

Depression set in. For three days she stayed inside her apartment, drifting in and out of restless sleep. She sat on her beige couch, curled into a fetal position holding her legs, and sobbing into the cushion. The telephone rang, but she didn’t answer it. Her boss’s voice spoke to her through her answering machine. “I don’t know where you are, Jennifer. I’ve been trying to reach you ever since your flight back. The article you e-mailed me from Israel was great. We’ve had more calls from readers on this article than any other story we’ve ever done. Call me.” But she didn’t call her boss, or anyone else for that matter. She was sure that no one would understand.

Later, she heard the phone again. She let it ring until the answering machine kicked on. This time it was her mom. “Jennifer, honey, I’m worried sick about you. I called your boss and he said you were doing a story in Israel. Israel of all places. Don’t you know how dangerous Israel is these days? People are shooting at each other over there. You’re lucky you weren’t shot by that lunatic preacher. What were you thinking? Running away with some rock singer like a star-struck teenager? I knew he was trouble when I first laid eyes on him.” There was a pause, then, “Call me, dear.” The machine turned off with a click.

She didn’t call her mother. How could she begin to understand what Mike had meant to her? How could anyone understand?

To make matters worse, she still had a headache and felt sick to her stomach. She must have picked up some kind of cold or flu in Israel. Her skin was pale as a ghost and every time she stood up, she felt disoriented and dizzy. Every time she tried to eat, it came back up. So she stayed on the couch, holding her knees, feeling barely alive.

A black cloud of depression engulfed her. At first she prayed to die. She thought, Can’t you please just let me die? Can’t anyone or anything take away my pain? But then she remembered to whom she was praying; the same God who ripped Mike away. She didn’t want anything to do with Him, not even to ask for His mercy. Or Her mercy. No, she thought, God isn’t a woman. God must be a man. All of the people who had ever hurt her were men: her father by raping, Mike by dying, and now God by taking him away.

As the hours passed, her thoughts became darker. She contemplated committing suicide. She wondered which way would be the least painful, and decided that she preferred sitting in her car, listening to her favorite music, with the exhaust pipes plugged. Maybe even a recording of Mike. She wondered if The Original Artists had made any recordings. Carbon monoxide poisoning isn’t too bad, she thought, I’ll just fall asleep and when I wake up, I’ll be with him again.

But taking her own life somehow seemed wrong. Mike told her that the very fact that we’re alive on this Earth implies that we have something else we’re supposed to do, some lesson to learn and if we don’t get a lesson right the first time, we have to come back to repeat it. Retake the class. Reincarnate. She wondered if she would have to endure the same pain of losing Mike a second time if she reincarnated. She just couldn’t bear that.

She knew she couldn’t go on living with a black cloud of grief overshadowing her life. She was a fighter. If she learned anything at all from her father’s abuse, it was to never give up. Hope for a better day. Take the worst, learn from it, and get on with life’s next lesson. But no matter what she did, she could not find her direction. Somewhere in the dark hours of early morning, she came to an important conclusion: Contemplating suicide is not normal. She needed to talk about it with someone, anyone. She needed someone to tell her things would get better, that her life was not over, that there is a way to work through the depression.

In a desperate act of defiance, she got the Yellow Pages from a drawer in her kitchen and brought it back to the couch. She thumbed through the pages until she got to “P–Psychiatrists.” Las Vegas had lots of psychiatrists who treated everything from depression to gambling addiction. But one ad jumped out at her, an ad for a psychiatrist who treated depression and grief. What caught her attention was a graphic of roses encircling the ad. Roses like Mike gave her. A pair of angel wings was drawn in the center of the ad, an obvious play on words. The guy’s name was Dr. William Flite.

Monday, April 22 - 11:45a.m.

She looked haggard when she entered the small office of Dr. Flite. She waited in the reception area while he finished with another patient. At last he came out of his office, shook his patient’s hand and said, “I’ll see you next Monday then.”

Turning to Jennifer with a warm smile, he said, “You must be Jennifer. I’m William Flite.” He extended his hand.

She shook it. “I know this was short notice for you, Dr. Flite, but I just had to see you today. I am desperate. If you hadn’t agreed to see me, I don’t know what I’d have done.”

“Why don’t you come inside and tell me what’s wrong?” With a sympathetic smile, he beckoned her inside the warm, inviting office. There were plants everywhere in the office, which made it seem like a tropical rain forest. Very inviting compared to the arid Las Vegas desert outside. She found Dr. Flite a charming man, easy to talk to. And she did talk. She opened up and let all her grief and pain pour out. She told him she was a journalist, working for the Sun. She told him about meeting Mike and about the articles she had written about him. She told him about Israel.

Much to her surprise, Dr. Flite knew Mike. He had come to his office to be hypnotically regressed. In a way, he was the reason Mike understood his past-life connection.

He asked, “You want to hear my Mike story?”

Hope started to return to her heart. There were other people who were affected by Mike, and she didn’t feel quite so alone, quite so abandoned. “Sure.”

“I used to suffer from chronic migraine headaches. I had them every day of my life from the age of twelve. I had a mother of a headache when Mike came to my office, but before the session was through, it was gone. Just like that. The strange thing is, I haven’t had a migraine since. I think he cured me.”

She smiled. “He touched a lot of lives. It may be years before we know just how many people were cured and healed.” Then a single tear fell down her cheek, not for herself, but for what the world had lost when Mike died. Her own pain somehow seemed smaller now that she realized that the whole world shared her loss.

They talked about Mike for the next half-hour, not psychiatrist to patient but sharing Mike stories. As the session was coming to a close, Dr. Flite had a suggestion. “Jennifer, I’d like to propose a way for you to deal with your grief.”

“I’m open to anything, because I’ve got to shake myself out of this. I can’t go on this way. What do you suggest?”

“You’re a newspaper writer, right? Why don’t you write a book about Mike? Writing about him will help you work through the grief and move on. You said that it may be years before we know how many people were affected by Mike. As a journalist, maybe you can dig out that information. You can write his story from the point of view of the people he touched; about how people were healed by Mike, how their lives were changed, and what it all means. You can use my migraine story in the book as a starting point. And you can write about what Mike meant to you.”

Jennifer liked the idea. After all, she was a journalist, so maybe she could make sure that Mike did not die in vain. Lots of people saw his picture in the paper, but very few people witnessed the miracles like she had, and very few people saw him die, except for a bunch of praying Muslims. She already had interview material from the woman from Bellagio, and that was a start. Her boss’s answering machine message had said that people had called the newspaper with Mike stories. Maybe she could interview a few of them for the book. Maybe she could even interview the remaining band members.

She knew dredging up all the memories would be hard on her. This last hour had been extremely painful at times, but she had survived. She felt better knowing that Dr. Flite understood some part of her loss. Talking to the people Mike had healed would help her feel that her loss was shared by others. Besides, writing had healing qualities; it had helped her work through her abuse. She knew that Mike would approve. Maybe she could share some of the insights he gave her about God. He would have liked that too. He had even asked her to write about it.

Jennifer pulled herself back to reality and thanked Dr. Flite for all his help. They shook hands again and she headed for the door.

“One more thing,” he said as she opened the door to leave, “Your color is off. Maybe you should see a doctor about that virus.”

She smiled and said she would as she left Dr. Flite’s office with a renewed sense of purpose and an uplifted heart. She had a new reason to live.

She went home and called her mother. She said, “I love you, mom.”

Her mother could hear her voice waver and knew something was wrong. “What’s wrong, honey?”

She told her mother the whole story, including the book she wanted to write. She did do some creative editing when it came to her relationship with Mike. Then she waited patiently for her mother’s lecture. It never came.

Monday, April 22 - 5:55p.m.

At Dr. Flite’s suggestion, Jennifer decided to kill two birds with one stone. She remembered interviewing Dr. Gerald Elders for one of the newspaper articles she did about Mike. Elders had told her that Mike’s broken ankle had been healed overnight, and that was nothing short of a miracle. He even had the x-rays to prove it. Maybe, now that Mike was dead and there was no more doctor-patient confidentiality issue, she could get a copy of the x-rays and put them in her book, along with her own arm x-rays and another interview.

She set up an appointment with Elders. When she told him she was the reporter from the Sun, he remembered her and Mike. He agreed to do an interview for the book, but he didn’t want his name to be in it. He told her to meet him at his office at 6:00pm, after his last appointment. She arrived early and paced the halls.

Dr. Elders was an observant old man. He saw her pale complexion and insisted on taking blood and urine samples from her and submitted them to the lab while they talked about Mike. He also sent for a copy of Mike’s ankle x-rays and her arm x-rays, but told her they wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow.

They sat down in his office. She clicked on her tape recorder, recited the date and time and set the recorder on his desk. He spoke at length about his encounter with Mike and he reiterated that he had never seen a recovery so sudden, so complete and so out of the ordinary as Mike’s and hers. They spoke for more than an hour.

After the interview, he asked her to wait in his office while he checked on her lab results. She waited, but was anxious to leave. She wanted to get more interviews for her book.

Dr. Elders walked back into his office with a clipboard in his hands and a grave look on his face. “Well, I found out what your virus is,” he said, peering over the top of his glasses. “It’s influenza, also known as the flu. But the lab tests showed something else. Jennifer.” He didn’t know exactly how else to say it. This wasn’t his area of expertise. He looked at her pensively, wondering how she would react. Finally, he said gently, “You’re pregnant, Jennifer.”

Excerpt from The Gospel According to Mike

He said, “Your going to have to face yourself sooner or later. I hope you like what you see. You’re going to own the consequences of your actions. You’re going to feel the pain you caused others, and the joy you caused them. I hope you like what you feel.”