I once saw something I couldn’t explain.

With some trepidation, I told three people, because I thought they needed to hear about it: My grandmother, my father, my mother.

After I spilled it out, hedging and awkward, my grandmother—in her mid-80s at the time, said simply and with a certainty that was meant to help me define what I spoke of: “You had a vision—tell me again. I want to hold on to it.”

“Vision,” I thought. “What an old word, what an odd word, surely it wasn’t that …”

I told my father next. He’s always up for a good possibility, especially if it can be proven, or better yet, worked out mathematically. He listened. He said, “Hmmm.”

My mother was next, and after more than 30 years of raising several children who are, shall we say, sometimes fantastically tangential, tried to ground me back to the concrete by changing the subject.

I’m not really the vision type. But I trust my grandmother who comes from a time and a place when people were much more comfortable with the unexplained.

When it happened, I had arrived early for a meeting being held in the community room of a Catholic church. I couldn’t get to the room without passing through a service, so I entered a back pew to wait. It was the sit and sigh part of a long day. A litany was being read—the names of saints—one after another in an almost lullaby of rhythm and monotony. I think I began to rock to the sound of the words “Pray for us, pray for us, pray for us.”

I didn’t feel like praying, and put my elbows on my knees, head in hands to approximate the posture of one seriously concentrating in prayer—that way I could wait out the service, take a much-needed breath, and then find the room.

That’s when it happened. With my eyes closed, I saw two men, my grandfathers, though both had died years ago. I was with them and we were in a place that did not have harps or clouds or angels or mist. The space was defined by us standing in a triangle, and by two huge, endless tables, one spread behind each of them.

The tables were sparkling with glasses and plates and lined with people. They were looking at me. They knew me. I was not afraid. No one seated was unhappy or unsafe or in danger or in pain. There was a calm and belonging that was total and complete.

Both grandfathers, who in life had exchanged zucchini and avocados, had talked Ford and General Motors, had good naturedly competed over tomatoes, hydrangea sizes, and grandchildren, looked at me and each held me in turn. They did not speak, but their eyes jumped, mischievous, as if they knew I was going to have to try and explain this spread of family and food—this vision, or encounter or whatever, exactly, it was.

And then it was over.

This happened years ago and is as sharp and distinct as the shard of glass from the blue cup I broke yesterday. I can hold it in my hand; its heft is that real.

I sat by a woman at a wedding once. He husband had died 30 years earlier and I was amazed as she said, tears in her eyes, “He would have really loved being here.” She still missed him.

Weddings. Graduations. Birthdays, everyday for many, those gone are missed.

This year, when the rest of the crowd is moving toward sunscreen and shorts, when the rituals of spring unfold like clockwork, take the drifting trips into recall, into the sharp tug of wistfulness and longing. Linger there and you will feel them. You are not alone.

My vision? I hold on to it, like my grandmother said. I play it out again and again. The thin, tenuous, line between birth and death, and all the days that come after for the living, all that come after for the dead, pull taut like a string; pressure comes from both ends. We pull, they tug back. I can’t explain it, but I call it glorious.

I call it God.


Natalie Costanza-Chavez can be reached at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read past columns at www.gracenotescolumn.org