Eyes Like Oceans Of Infinite Love

Abridged version originally published at TooWrite.com

I was more embarrassed than surprised one night as I was undressing for bed and suddenly saw my little girl, Kalimba, standing in the doorway. She remained silent, surrounded by a softly shimmering field of tranquillity. I pulled on my robe, sat down on the bed, and wondered why she was there.

Then I noticed, as I had many times before, that she looked younger than she would have if she were physically alive. Had she survived infancy, Kalimba would have been 19 years old, almost six feet tall like her mother had been, with her mother's skin the color of a golden dawn, and her mother's thick jet black hair running wild down her back. That was how she had looked the morning she came with Serenity, her fraternal twin sister, both of them surrounded by the same gentle twilight aura, to tell me their mother had joined them in spirit.

Her appearance now, as I sat on the bed, was how she would have looked at the age of four or five. It was because I sometimes saw my twin girls in dreams, or in fully conscious visions like this one, that I had been able to survive the brutal grief of losing them to complications a few days after their birth. Until this night, whenever I saw them, they always looked the age they would have been had they remained alive in the physical sense. Maybe it was just a reflex of my heart's wishful thinking. But why this ambush of unexpected emotion after all these years? Before I could figure it out, tears burned my eyes and she was gone again.

A few nights later, I dreamed that I was visiting my friend Carlton and his wife Brandi in Atlanta. In the dream, Brandi was bent over the keyboard of a computer while ignoring whatever was on the monitor and Carlton was asleep in front of a blaring television. I spoke but neither heard me. Then, before I saw her, I felt Kalimba standing beside me.

"Hey baby girl of mine. Look at you." As I knelt down, she reached up with both arms and wrapped them around my neck. A flush of warmth, like a shade of flame, expanded throughout my chest, rushed up to my head and down to my feet.

Kalimba pulled away and said: "You have to let us go."

"Let you go where?" I asked, trying to sound as pathetically baffled as possible. The truth was I knew exactly what she meant the moment she had spoken but I didn’t like it at all. She was saying that I would no longer be able take comfort in the spiritual visions and visits from her and her sister. Despite the unmistakable radiance of love flowing from her being, this idea of being unable to see my daughters in either the physical or the spiritual sense struck me as violent and criminal. They had not remained alive long enough in this world for me to collect the photos, baby shoes, baby spoons, clothing items, and golden-framed memories that others often held onto after losing a child. How could I possibly accept the thought of letting them go? 

Still within the dream, Kalimba walked away from me and went first to Carlton snoring in front of the television, then to Brandi at the computer. When my daughter looked at me, her eyes were like oceans of infinite unconditional love that flooded the room with their gentle beauty. My breath caught in my throat and I woke up.

Why had I experienced such a soul-torturing dream? The first thing I recalled were Kalimba's words: "You have to let us go." Go where? And why? Although I asked these questions, I knew the answers and rejected them at the same time because the thought of living without a deep sense of spiritual connection to her or Serenity was not acceptable to me. My days as an author and caregiver for my octogenarian mother were full enough with their own challenges and rewards, but none of my four children had survived birth, or a few days beyond it, and the visionary visits from Kalimba and Serenity filled a void within my heart that nothing else could. What would I have if I let that go?

The following week, after having dreamed about him, my friend Carlton called me from Atlanta. He had dislocated a shoulder while street rollerblading and wanted to make his wife and I feel guilty about it because we, he charged, had not protested forcefully enough to make him stop. Over the course of our 14-year friendship, I had become accustomed to such calls and accusations. We had met when he moved from Jacksonville, Florida, to attend college in Savannah, Georgia, for a year before moving on to Atlanta. I was 12 years older than he and much of our friendship had been based on his trust in my advice about the affairs of his younger life.

The rollerblading accident turned out to be only one incident in a chain of negative events that seemed to be developing into a trend. Only four years into their marriage, he felt already that he and Brandi were growing apart and he knew they argued too much over simple things. His small business was surviving but not expanding and it sometimes seemed to Carlton that he would do a lot better if he were “distracted” by his marriage. He felt, he said, like a blind man on a raft rushing toward a thousand-foot waterfall.
"I mean, I'm surrounded by all this fantastic potential, right, but none of it is materializing," he moaned. "You know what I'm saying?" I opened my mouth to say something about his need for a positive outlet for the excessive energy he always had. I was surprised when I asked instead, "When is the baby due?"

"Say what?"

"When's your baby due, yours and Brandi's?"

"Ain't nobody in this house pregnant!"

Just as those words left his mouth, an image of my second twin daughter, Serenity, popped into my head. I saw her standing between Carlton and Brandi and holding their hands. I didn't know why I felt so certain—it must have been an effect of the dream I’d had and of seeing Serenity at that moment––but I stated very clearly, "If your wife’s not pregnant now, she will be soon. There's a little girl who loves you both very much and wants to be part of your life."

"Yeah, well, that little baby's gonna be waiting for at least another five years because Brandi's too busy with her job and research to worry about starting a family and I'm too busy with the world to think about puke and poop." I smiled as I halfway listened to him rant one reason after another why they would not be having a baby any time soon. I closed my eyes and the picture of Serenity became more clear in my mind. Whereas her sister had her mother's complexion, Serenity's was closer to my mother's, a lustrous amber-colored honey. Both, however, had a long glowing black mane of hair and both had the same singular oceanic eyes pulsing wave after wave of undiluted love.

One final rant and Carlton hung up the phone. My eyes opened. I no longer saw Serenity and laughed nervously at myself. I wasn’t sure, really, why I had spoken to Carlton the way I had. Maybe the twins would show up in a dream later that night and give me some clue to what it was all about.

Only I did not dream at all that night. It was not until the next morning that I woke up to the cool pressure of a kiss on both sides of my forehead. I heard the words, We love you. My daughters had come and gone, leaving my heart trembling with sorrow and joy.

Carlton and Brandi were vacationing in California the next time I heard from them. They sounded happy. In my own life, I struggled, as many were struggling, with the increasing challenge of being a caregiver and told myself it was time to finish a novel I had started years before.

Then one day I realized I had not seen the twins for weeks. I yearned for their visitations and the life that we––along with their mother––had never shared. It occurred to me, painfully, that staying away might be their way of telling me I had been living too long in the past and needed to look more to the future.

A few months after their vacation, Carlton called to tell me he and Brandi were expecting their first child. Whatever doubt or agitation he had felt previously about having a child had apparently disappeared and there was more than a little boasting in his voice. I told him his daughter was going to be beautiful and he pointed out that they did not yet know the sex of the baby. A month after that, he confirmed that it was a girl and wanted to know how I had guessed that it was.
"She told me," I said.
“Who told you? What do you mean?”

There was no way for me to answer that question for him. Carlton knew that I had lost twin daughters and he knew that I was spiritually very sensitive, but what he did not know was that my daughters’ spiritual presence had been a mainstay of my emotional life for years. He wouldn’t know what to think if I said my daughters had communicated this information to me. He wouldn’t know how to take it if I said I believed one of them was getting ready to become an important part of his and Brandi’s life.

Their daughter Janelle was born in September, 2003. When the Christmas holidays arrived, they stopped by for a visit on their way to Carlton's family in Jacksonville. We sat around the dining room table and Carlton cooed with pride over his bundle of joy until she began to squirm with agitation and he quickly handed her to Brandi. The child had unquestionably infused their marriage with greater vitality and harmony. I smiled at the baby resting in the crook of her mother's arm. To her parent's surprise, she appeared to be smiling back.

"Look at that Carlton! You see Janelle smiling at him?" "That's gas. You know she don't like other people. Not even grandparents! When she smile like that she gettin’ ready to blow poop." “Baby I don’t know,” said Brandi, “I don’t remember seeing her look like this.”

I went to Brandi and held out my hands to hold the baby. She looked apologetic and said Carlton was right, that even though the baby appeared to be smiling she really didn't like other people and would scream if she handed her over to me.

"No, she won't scream,” I said. “We're old friends, aren't we Janelle?" Her parents' eyes widened and their mouths dropped open as the baby actually leaned towards me and came quietly into my arms. The eyes that had been half closed opened completely, dazzling eyes, unmistakable eyes like oceans of infinite unconditional love. The beautiful eyes of my beautiful daughters. The hair already thick and black as coal.

I held her and cried.