Treasured Find

Excerpted from When Grief Calls Forth the Healing

Photo by Michael C. Rockefeller

Bill and I moved back to New York City, spending two years in a beautiful apartment belonging to a cousin, which overlooked Central Park. Before we moved in, we stayed for a week in my old home in Pocantico Hills while I packed my things left from my life before my marriage. Throwing out old papers from my desk drawers, I found a brown envelope marked with Michael’s name in his handwriting. Inside was a beautiful photograph he had taken of a screen door with two small lizards on it; one on one side of the screen and one on the other side—two lizards trying to reach each other separated by an impenetrable barrier.

That night I had a dream:
I am tiny; I’m trying to follow the little lizard and his voice up and down the hills and valleys of the Quonset hut’s corrugated tin wall. I cannot keep up. The high, twittering voice fades and drowns out in the wind—the waves of tin become the ocean—I cannot swim . . .