Dead or Unplugged...I Wonder

  If you say you’ve NEVER wondered what an “ex” was up to you MIGHT be a fibber.

  I’m giving you an old-fashioned knowing wink here.

  I think Muriel is dead.

  I hung around with Muriel in the 90’s.  We hung around with each other for 7 years, lived in a few places in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, went on a few adventures and then it was over.

  And I’m just sensing that she’s “gone on to Glory.”

  Have you ever had a sensing like that about someone?

  It’s like that time there was a school shooting over a thousand miles away, a place where I used to live and when I heard the news I knew an old friend of mine hadn’t made it…knew it because I felt she was gone off this plane.  Turns out I was right.  In a school filled with a few dozen teachers she was one of the three who died.

  From time to time a thought of Muriel would cross my mind, wonder if she’d come back to her page on the social media, her page where her last entry was March two years ago.  I mean she used to be really active on it, railing against the establishment, trying to get people to sign a petition to stop a horse slaughterhouse that was proposed for her home town in New Mexico, protesting the war in Afghanistan, stuff like that.

  I typed her name into The Internet:  “Muriel Auzermann.”*   Her last entry in cyberspace was an entry the next month where she was offering one line of condolence to an old friend who had just become a widow.

  Do I care?

  I suppose not.

  I just wonder.

  Because I want to see if there’s anything to this feeling, this feeling that she is gone.  I believe we have senses we ignore, that once upon a time we were told to ignore.

  Now and then when she crosses my mind I search obituaries.  I search county files.

  Nothing.

  I told The Lady of the House that I thought Muriel was dead.

  “Why do you care?” she asked.

  “Because she hasn’t been on the social media in two years,” I said.

  “Big deal,” said The Lady of the House.  “She wouldn’t be the first to have unplugged from Facebook or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” I said.  “But I just have this feeling.”

  Most of the time The Lady of the House is right about stuff, she’s real smart like that.

  But I still had a feeling.

  So I consulted with the lone member of Clan McGee who can plug into the “Cosmic Electric” as I call it.  Maybe she could tell me if she could sense anything about Muriel.

  I texted Cosmic Daughter (C.D.) a bit about Muriel, told her about her whereabouts on social media, told her about her last known location in the southern Rockies.

  A few minutes went by after I texted C.D.

  “I kinda get the impression she’s dead but I’m not seeing an obituary,” she wrote.  “Then this scene came to me from ‘NCIS’ where Ducky talks about what happens to the dead when no one misses them.  After 30 days they’re cremated and the county scatters the ashes.”

  More minutes passed.  Then more words.

  “Something about it was sudden,” wrote C.D.  “She’s ghosted pretty hardcore.  It’s a little disconcerting.”

  “Yeah, it’s like one day she’s there railing against this horse slaughterhouse then she’s gone,” I texted.  “No goodbye, no ‘Adios my friends’ (wink), nothing.  What do you vibe about her character, her personality?” I texted.

  “Seems mischievous, wry sense of humor,” wrote daughter.  “Carried something inside her that made her really quiet and weird sometimes.”

  “She never found peace after the death of her mother and sister in a car wreck when she was a kid,” I wrote.  “Drunk driver hit them head-on.”

  “She’s upset about a necklace,” wrote C.D. “Oooh, wait, it happened in a room with white walls and a tan floor.”

  “What happened,” I texted.  “Is that where she is on the ‘other side’?”

  “No,” wrote C.D.  “The room where she died.  It’s like an empty kitchen.  Now she’s holding this silver necklace as if she wants someone to see it.”

  “Interesting,” I texted.

  “Hot and dry there,” she wrote.  “Now she’s yelling at the sunset and she’s not looking at me.”

  C.D. was silent for a few minutes.

  “She may have had cancer,” she wrote.  “Something in her eyes in the last picture on her social media.  She keeps showing me the right side of her head and gesticulating pain, like she had a stroke.”

  “She was fighting,” C.D. went on, “She woke up that morning to fight whatever it was.  Something happened in that kitchen.”

  “A partner?” I texted, “A burglar?”

  “No,” she wrote, “No one’s there.  The room kinda just topples up and something breaks.”

  “So,” I texted, “You perceive she’s dead?”

  “I do,” daughter wrote, “I may be wrong but I do.  She grins and says she’s not dead.  The space where she is now is open but it’s empty.  She didn’t have kids?”

  “No,” I texted back, “She absolutely wanted no kids.  She loved other people’s kids but wanted none of her own.”

  “Interesting,” texted C.D., “She regrets that now.  Oh, and she misses coffee.”

  I remember owning an electric coffee bean grinder when I hung out with Muriel.  She always wanted her coffee to come from freshly ground coffee beans.

  So I really didn’t get a solid answer about Muriel.  I think there’s a 55% probability she’s “gone on to Glory” and a 45% probability she just abandoned The Internet, after all, when she and I were together she’d have nothing to do with computers and cyberspace.  Then, like a switch got thrown in her brain, she was “all in” when it came to the cyberwebs.

  Long ago, wow, has it been 27 years?  Long ago Muriel told me a story about a cat she had.

  “I had an orange cat named Tuna,” she said as we sat in the living room one evening.  “I changed apartments and couldn’t keep him.  My brother was teaching in the Hopi Nation in Arizona and he said he’d take Tuna, take care of him.

  “So I drove to Arizona and left Tuna with my brother,” Muriel went on.  “About a year later we were at a family thing in Roswell and I asked him about Tuna.”

  “Tuna disappeared from my apartment, it was the weirdest thing,” said Brother.  “He didn’t slip out, he just wasn’t there anymore.  I looked around the neighborhood.”

  “Some time later I was telling the story at school on a Parent-Teacher conference day,” Brother said.  “There we were in this room and there was this Hopi elder, part of a family who came that day, this Hopi elder sitting in the corner.”

  “Your cat is still here,” said the elder.  “Tuna has moved on, he wears a mantle of stardust and walks the nation scaring coyote.  That gives him great pleasure.  He laughs a cat laugh.”

  “How did you know his name?” Brother asked the elder.

  “He drops by my home every now and then in the evenings and we talk.”

  Maybe Muriel just moved on too.

-End-

   *Name is made up to cover my ass in this litigious world….