Conversations with the Dearly Departed

“ I can't look at the stars

They make me wonder where you are

Stars, up on Heaven's boulevard
And if I know you at all,
I know you've gone too far
So I, I can't look at the stars”

 The moment when I realized that everyone who could, and would catch my fall was gone occurred as I was driving down the highway. My sons were sleeping in the back seat. The song that reminded me I most of my father (one of the dearly departed) was playing. The tears burst forward like they were sent from celestial fountains.

"But I'm still here." he said.
"When you are, I cry even harder, because you aren't really."
"I'll always be here. In you. In the boys. In the aura around you all."
"That won't help when the world is crashing down around me, and all my pillars have crumbled."
"They haven't all crumbled. You are one. You have to be now."

It was a similar conversation to the one I had with my uncle, (another of the dearly departed) before he left this earth.

"I know you went to your father for advice often." he said. "Now you have to be to others what he was to you."
"What if I'm not ready?" I asked.
"You have to be. You have no other option."

Two months later my uncle was gone. He had become one of the few people I would listen to, unquestioningly. He replaced my grandmother in that role. She had joined the ranks of the dearly departed earlier that same year. I had gone to her first when I found out I was pregnant with my first son. It was an unplanned pregnancy that would lead to an unplanned life.

"Grandma, I'm pregnant." I said over the phone.
"Congratulations!" she said, always an optimist.
"But I was taking the pill."
"A pill won't stop a soul that wants to use you as a vessel to be here." she said.
"The father doesn't want a baby." I said. "He told me this. I'm going to disappear. Raise my baby alone. I'm going to move in with you."
"You can't steal fatherhood." she said. "Tell him. If he doesn't want anything to do with it, you come and move in here then."

A little over a year later she was gone. A year after that, her house was gone, with any evidence that my safe haven had ever existed erased.

Her first born, my aunt, became the first to depart only 6 months before her mother.

"You are jumping from the frying pan into the fire." she said.

I had just left my husband, and took up with a man going through his own divorce.

"I know what I'm doing." I said.
"But I see what you're doing. What you know and what I see are 2 different things."

When I was young, she had sat with me and held my hand as I had gotten stitches. It was what no one else was strong enough to do when I needed it the most.

How do you become 4 people in one when you still need those 4 people yourself?