[As my "regular" reader(s) will have once known--I haven't posted anything here for over a year as my husband's health continued to deteriorate--this blog has been almost exclusively political.  But there are many of life's realms made up of often random-appearing dots.  It has been my mission from the beginning to be the pencil that helps others to connect some of those dots so that a pattern begins to emerge.  The following is very much in that vein.--legacyguy.]

For the past couple of decades, I have considered myself to be an atheist.  I do not believe that the Earth was created.  I do not believe in heaven or hell.  I do not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. I do not--or, at least, did not--believe that within us lies a soul that survives the body after death.  A week ago, that last part changed.

My husband/life partner of thirteen years died from Parkinson's Disease two months ago.  Last Sunday, I went to bed around 10:30 PM, as usual.  Four hours later, I woke up needing to relieve my bladder.  (This is normal behavior for me.)  Returning to bed, my mind began to churn, as it is wont to do in the middle of the night.  Often lately, it is over my late beloved, Don.  I was beginning to get into some sad feelings when I realized that I had to pee again (also not unusual).  I got out of bed and sat on the commode.  As I sat there, I reached over and took a tissue from the box on the counter.  From where I sat, I could see clearly my bed and the window behind it. (There was also a box of tissues on the table next to the bed.)  I could have missed something.  I wasn't looking that direction all the time.

When I got back to the bed, I looked down at the dark brown, fitted sheet where I had lain just a couple of minutes before. There, carefully-placed, flat and slightly overlapping, were two tissues, put there as if awaiting my return.  My heart almost in my throat and my brain scanning for any clue as to how they might have gotten there, I picked up the tissues and cautiously slid into bed.  Very soon, I was using the tissues to dry my eyes as each possible scenario was eliminated, one-by-one.  The tissues were not there when I made the bed that morning.  They were not there when I got into bed that evening nor the first time I made a trip to the bathroom.  I had not used a tissue at all until I went to piss the first time and that tissue was in the wastebasket in the bathroom.  If I had lain on the tissues at any time during the night, they would not have been lying perfectly flat.  Why would there have been two of them?

I have no explanation for what happened other than a supernatural one.  This realization has rattled my belief system to the very quick.  It is as if Don were sending me a message from beyond the grave.