Speaking her Name

Speaking Her Name

Last weekend Mandy’s graduating class celebrated their twenty year anniversary. I didn’t know until the day of the parade that they had painted a large sign which they attached to the float:

  

“SHS ‘94’ Remembers Mandy Foster”

They spoke her name. They spoke it all the way through the streets of town and in that I felt somehow comforted, somehow validated…

Mandy didn't actually graduate with her class. School was a nightmare for her. School, which, I've always thought of as my great savior, the one thing that was safe and constant, the place where I knew the rules and could count on them. The place of great adventure where letters and numbers made sense, more sense than anything had before that. School, the place I loved and revered was the very same place that was a place of fear and torture for Mandy.

The only good year she had was the year that she was in the group home. I visited her school program once while she was there. It was a special off site school where Mandy thrived. The teachers, the kids they all loved her. She was popular. She was able to succeed both socially and academically.

I wished we lived in Burlington so when she came home she could still attend school there, but we didn't and she couldn't, so when she left the group home it was back to public school in Springfield where after some brief success in the special program in middle school she moved on to the high school where she fell apart all over again.

But, here they were -  the class she grew up with claiming her and remembering her. I felt Mandy come to me in the moments when I first heard the news. I felt her in my chest, not on the left side like usual, but just off center and to the right, a tiny little tickle. She was pleased, not so much for herself, but for me – she was pleased that I was pleased.

I suspect that they have no ego’s in the afterlife. It feels like that to me, like Danny and Mandy are pure spirit and that it is connection to spirit that makes me able to feel her at all. It’s that little tickle in my chest, other times a warmth or fullness in my heart or that secret smile that I feel in my throat that lets me know how close they really are.

She doesn't really speak to me with words, but rather with signs and physical reactions. I can feel her in a hundred ways, but that took almost two years and even then the occasions were far and few between. Over the last two years her presence in my life is more regular, more constant.

The theme on the float was Disney castle. No one could have known the significance of that, but it is… very significant.

Early on in Mandy’s life she conjured up a castle in her mind. It didn’t look exactly like the Disney Castle but was very close to it. She called it her Safe Place. She went there whenever things became too threatening or too overwhelming for her, which was quite often.

She wrote about it with regularity and described it as a place where children could go to play and grow. It was safe for children because nothing could hurt them there, nothing at all could come through to harm or threaten them in any way.

She described green fields, rainbows, large stone castle walls and plenty of animals including a unicorn or two.

Besides the sunny playful place for children there was a place inside, a room where she could go to find peace and comfort and safety.

Over the years some professionals and some relatives thought it was a bad idea to encourage the belief and escape to the Safe Place, but I never had the heart or the stomach to try and take it away from her. Why would I? How could I?

In my early thirties I found the Safe Place for hurt and damaged children inside myself. It too is a castle and came about while working on my first book Kunda Mountain – a not so fictional work of fiction that is in a constant state of editing.

Like Mandy I know for sure that the castles are not here in the physical way – however real in the way meditation and visualizations are.  For Mandy, the castle was her safe place and I always supported that. I even made her a fabric wall hanging with a castle in the middle. I still have it. I packed it with some of her other precious things.

Even though I know the Disney Castle float was not the replica of her safe place castle, it was close enough to make me smile inside.