"Listen to Your Mother!"

(a previously-published micro essay, in memoriam on her birthday)

A few months after my mother died, she warned me not to get on a plane to Holland. I was excited to be going on my first European book tour, but she apparently had other ideas.

I heard her voice as clearly as if she were by my side one afternoon while I was walking my two West Highland White Terriers down their favorite shady street lined with towering maples, oaks, and blue spruce.

“Don’t go!”

It was a very different experience from her contact right after she died, which I’ve written about in Paranormal Magazine.

I wasn’t just shocked to hear her again, I was surprised that this voluble, highly educated woman could be so terse. Maybe she only had limited minutes on her Contact the Living Plan?

My supportive husband of many years said “Well, don’t go if you don’t want to,” but didn’t comment on whether he believed my mother had contacted me or not. He’s like that: calmly nonjudgmental especially when I contemplate stepping off any kind of cliff, so I wasn’t offended.

The warning from my mother was like having my hair pulled, but I didn’t think I could tell my German publisher that I couldn’t do the tour because a ghost told me to stay home.

The trip over from Detroit was excruciating. Someone puked in the aisle close to my narrow, non-reclining last-row narrow economy seat. The nearby toilet door whooshed a vile chemical miasma every time it was opened and closed. And we had to turn back over the Atlantic to land in Newfoundland after a few hours because the captain announced someone had fallen ill and needed a hospital.

Our Canadian detour meant that I was so late I had to run through crazy Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam to make a later-than-planned connecting flight which got me to Berlin with less than an hour before my reading. Sweaty, dazed, I had just enough time at the hotel to wash my face, spritz some cologne, and meet my minder downstairs to be whisked off to the venue.

En route, I waited for my mother to hit me with “I told you so,” on the worst fucking day of my writing career, but I guess she figured I’d been punished enough already.

Lev Raphael is living his childhood dream of being a published author and manages to make it through the bad patches thanks to a college mentor he’s still in touch with. His work has appeared in fifteen languages and been taught at universities in the U.S. and abroad–-which means he’s become homework. Proudest moment: his novel The German Money was on a syllabus at Fordham University LAC along with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

(This essay appeared in Oddball, photo Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay)