Tommy's vision

 Today is the 6th day of the 28th week, the 11th day of the 7th month, the 193rd day of 2025, and:

• All American Pet Photo Day
• Bowdler's Day
• Collector Car Appreciation Day
• Free Slurpee Day - AKA 7-11 Day
• International Essential Oils Day
• National Blueberry Muffin Day
• National Cheer up the Lonely Day
• National French Fry Day
• National Mojito Day
• National Motorcycle Day
• National Rainier Cherries Day
• National Swimming Pool Day
• Wayne The Chicken Show 
• World Kebab Day
• World Population Day - observed since 1987 when the Day of Five Billion was celebrated

Quote of the day:
"The act of dying is one of the acts of life"
~ Marcus Aurelius

On Friday the 13th,  laying in a hospital bed with his family around him, Tommy was informed that he had lost his 3 1/2 year fight against colorectal cancer.  And to all of our dismay, we realized that there was no way for him to come back home either to his family in Maryland or his family in Nashville.

On the evening of Monday the 16th, Tommy was admitted to the Alive Hospice under the residential program.  The transfer did not go smoothly, to say the least, complicated by our lack of understanding of the difference between treatment and management of symptoms and being initially placed in one of the few unrenovated rooms.

By Tuesday afternoon, everything had been ironed out.  The staff was friendly and attentive, the room was clean and friendly looking, and he had constant company.

Tommy was no longer afraid that he was going to be stuffed in a corner and forgotten, just left to die - intellectually he knew that no way his family [we christined ourselves the Tribe at that point, making no distinction between his two families] would do that to him, but emotionally he had to come to terms with it.  

I stayed with him and when he was awake, we talked a great deal about how he felt.  He was tense and said that if he must go through that doorway, then he didn't want to linger, he was going to grope his way forward and reach for the door knob.  When we awoke on Wednesday morning, I was startled to see him clutching the side railing of his bed with both hands, his grip so tight that his knuckles were white with the strain.  He sat up and he told me that he had...     Well he called it a dream, but it came with such force and clarity that we both started referring to it as a vision

He saw the door.  There were...  things, spirits and music and objects and wisps flowing into it, but some were dropping onto the floor rather than going through.  He thought was the door to his Arcade, and then, he heard a whisper, telling him that was his door, and all he had to do was push himself off his bed a certain way and break his neck....   But when he heard the whisper, the door shut and a Black Widow symbol appeared on the door.  He took that to mean that if he listened to the whisper and tried to leave on his on terms, that he couldn't go to the Arcade, that there was something he had to do yet, something he described as a test to pass.  He gripped the railing to make the whisper go away, and as it faded, the door receded and he could see it was on a train.  As he started to wake up, he heard the train whistle in the distance ....

We talked for almost three hours without any interruption, Tommy sitting on the side of the bed begging me to help him understand why he wasn't allowed to go through the door and what test he had to pass.  Back and forth we went, and in the end, we concluded that he couldn't try to find the door, he had to wait for it to come to him.  The suddenly his whole body relaxed and the tension went out of his shoulders - he told me the test was exactly for one of his weaknesses,  that he had to be patient and wait.  Otherwise, he would go through the door, but it wouldn't go to where he wanted to be.

When Bryan and Gem, then Chris came later, he shared his revelation.  

Tommy pointed out that there are none of us were ever going to be able to take a shortcut - that even tho he had always said that committing suicide was understandable if one was given a terminal diagnosis, that if we wanted to be  with him again, there were no shortcuts in death either.  

The hospice was in the industrial area of Nashville and we often heard the sound of train whistles echoing between the buildings.  And every time one sounded, he would lift his head and listen.  Months ago Tommy told me that he could feel the tracks starting to vibrate.  Just a week after his vision, Tommy suffered another seizure and just a day later, the train arrived and he left us behind to pick up our lives.  

None of us will ever hear the lonesome sound of a train whistle quite the same way again.