Weeping Skies

when we get to heaven, can I taste the Milky Way?

a view from my umbrella in 2018. Mike’s not dead yet but the skies are weeping already.

“And do you think that God could use another angel
To help pour out the rain?"

Mike plays this song for me, once. It’s after he plays Love in an Elevator, because priorities. But that’s an off-color story for another day. I am coming home from work early, pre-pandemic, back when offices get closed early for snow because most of us are in them all the time. I brush the snow from my car at the light rail station, turning the car on so the windows can begin to defrost. And when I get in, suddenly, of its own accord, my car is connected to Mike’s phone, playing his music.

He plays Love in An Elevator first. An astonishing answer to a question I had just asked him. But then he plays this song - Help Pour Out the Rain by Buddy Jewel. It’s a song I’ve never heard of, and when I look at Mike’s phone it has taken itself to a folder called “Mike’s Music” - I wouldn’t have known how to get there if I had tried. It plays these two songs, and then his phone, which had been at 68% power when I left the office, goes completely dead.

Nothing will ever convince me that it wasn’t Mike playing those songs, because no other explanation makes sense. I hadn’t connected his phone to the car, had in fact been trying to do it without success since he died. I didn’t know his music had folders, and I listened to music on his phone all the time at work, but had somehow never noticed either of these songs. Everything about it was weird. My worldview had been evolving since Mike died (maybe since I met him really), but this, this challenged so many previous assumptions. Energy can neither be created or destroyed…is a thing grieving people seeking validation often say. Because we are assuring ourselves that those we love spectacularly are still with us. Still, as C.S. Lewis says, a fact.

This song about rain and death is not how we typically think about rain and death symbolism. It’s a child asking whether she’ll be able taste the Milky Way in heaven¹ and see grandpa there. And was grandpa brought there to help pour out the rain? We probably aren’t meant to overthink this one, but too late: I’m already there. Was grandpa walking around just fine one day, but heaven was short on rain pourers, an important heaven job, so God thought:

Welp, let’s take this guy?

I don’t question the song when Mike plays it for me. I am too busy being delighted and amazed that he has played me songs. And it seems to be sent as extra insurance - in case I miss the previous, obvious message - that this is my dead husband speaking. In Heaven.² It is only today that I am thinking about rain symbolism. While I am on vacation I read a substack that mentions that many people make the huge mistake of failing to tailor their welcome letter to new subscribers and instead send out the default one. Whoops, that’s me! I have given it exactly zero thought. So I write a new one this morning, and I say that even though the skies should be weeping when your person dies and the universe ends for you, life impossibly goes on anyway. Skies weeping, like in an Eric Clapton Tears in Heaven way.

In the initial months, it is amazing that life goes on at all. That the skies are not continually weeping, with or without grandpa’s help on rain-pouring detail. It is astonishing that you can even be in this much emotional pain and even be alive. That other people can walk around like normal, not experiencing the obvious hole in the universe.

For me - and maybe most people? - this weeping skies phase comes a few weeks in because at first, you have a lot to do. You are planning a funeral/celebration of life/memorial service whatever the heck you call it. And a burial. Making a thousand decisions like you do with a wedding but it’s much less fun. This is especially true if you weren’t planning on this happening, which I wasn’t. This is all happening while you are trying to figure out how to keep breathing, crying because you have to take a shower, and putting food in your mouth when other people remind you this is a thing you need to do to be an alive person. Right at the moment when you’ve never cared less about being an alive person. For me this was followed by a week of figuring out how to drastically cut my spending as my income was cut in half. Whee!

And then, weeping skies. Even when the person you love dies on a sunny September day.

It will be seven years, this September, and I have started saying “almost seven years” when people ask how long my husband has been dead. The way you do when your child is almost four, or you’re almost fifty-five. The math seems as impossible as ever but the world keeps on spinning, skies keep on weeping (sometimes, anyway, when grandpa’s not too busy doing something else). It’s surprising sometimes, that it feels like the skies should still be weeping, but it feels like that for me.

I go to Home Depot to buy new cutting line for my weed whacker and ask what is probably a dumb question, which is whether I am buying the right kind. I look before I go - my weed whacker is Ryobi. The cutting line brand is also Ryobi but is it the right one for my weed whacker? The Home Depot employee does not treat me like I am stupid, but he says that cutting line is universal. And at almost seven years I am crying in the self checkout at Home Depot, because the last person to have said something like that to me is my husband.

I think I might need to use his drill but the drill is Blackendecker and the drill bits are all DeWalt. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I ask him why he doesn’t have the right ones and he says

Drill bits are universal, sweetheart.

A thing I might have known if I had used a drill even one time. Which I hadn’t. My talents lie in other areas.³ He goes on to explain the rudimentary basics of how drills work. That’s what I am crying about in Home Depot, ten years after Mike explains drills and almost seven yers after he dies. Because a Home Depot employee says a thing that reminds me of my dead husband.

When you are this sad, this long, the skies should be sad too. And I guess they are sometimes. It’s not only sad or always sad, especially almost seven years on. But I’m weeping skies sad sometimes. My husband can play songs to show me he’s still here. But he’s not here here. He is in the after, and I still have to buy dumb things like cutting line. How impossibly trivial.

I won’t stop appreciating that he’s here, even if he’s not here here. That he loves me, even when the skies are weeping. But if I am going to overthink songs - which I have been doing as long as I can remember - I hope the Milky Way tastes like homemade ice cream. For the record.

1. If it tastes like the candy bar, I am taking a hard pass. Those are gross.

2. I don’t believe in heaven precisely, more that heaven is one way to refer to after. The way many people understand after to exist.

3. Unlike Mike, I knew the different between descent and decent, spelling-wise, so that’s the kind of thing I brought to the table. Among other things.