My own Mom passed in March.  She always believed strongly in afterlife.  Recently even moreso, often repeating , “I don’t know what form it will take, but i know you’ll get all the answers to your questions.”   That’s verbatim.

Haven’t had a hummimgbird incident in well over a year. Haven’t even seen  a hummingbird since #14.   So, as much as seeing Phyl again is what I live for, and despite the past hummingbird incidents and the multiples of books and testamonials, as time goes on, hope dwindles, doubt doesn’t, and I’m back to 98% ain’t -gonna-happen.

I was in Florida with my Mom most of March.  (My Mom is the greatest person I’ve ever met, but that story follows later.)  Without delineating tsuris, things went from bad to worse in a few weeks.   The last 5 days and nights we were there with her, while she was in a coma in Hospice House in Port Charlotte.  I talked to her, watched her leaving, and doubted a lot more.  I asked one thing over and over.  “When you get ‘there’, I want you to tell Phyllis to send another hummingbird right away.”  OK, so there’s the 2%.

The funeral was in freezing, snowy Boston, and I came home.

Phyl bought this ugly birdbath sculpture.  It’s sat for ten years, with never a bird, at the edge of our walkway.   The first day home I slept. All day.  Each of the next three days three days, there was a humongous black bird, like three feet long, sitting on the dry birdbath,  and, when I went out., it would swoop right over my head to Joan’s roof next door.    I had never seen such a bird.  I had never seen any bird on the old birdbath.   So I’m thinking……Phyl’s lifelong favorite authors , by miles, were Agatha Christie,  Dr. Seuss, and Edgar Allen Poe.    The only thing we did together at school, was a Halloween program where my drama class would act out  funny and scary skits, and Phyllis would read, really dramatize, “The Telltale Heart” and “The Raven”.   So I’m thinking…..

Ok, before I even go ‘there’, you have my word, everything I’m writing here is what happened.  I’m NOT making ANY of it up.  I’m NOT exaggerating.  It’s NOT eye-of-the-beholder.   I’m NOT nuts.

I’ve lost weight.   I still eat like a pig, but I exercise a bunch.  On weekends, I run at the Agoura High track.  The fourth day home was a Saturday.  I finished my run and was walking past the girls’ softball field, back to the car.  It sure looked like it, but there it was.   I don’t know if it were the same raven, though i’d never seen one at the high school either, until this fucking giant bird was swooping in front of me, about fifteen feet away.   For a full twenty seconds, less than a foot, right over the raven’s head, flying with it, was a little purple hummingbird.   See the preceding paragraph.