Like a Light From a Distant Star

With three and a half days left to pack up the rest of my stuff (or what little I can take with me. It's more like triage than actual labor), I finally went through the last of Barb's presents to me in the final Xmas we'd spent together (2022). It was the first time I had the guts to go through that paper bag (By Xmas 2021, she couldn't wrap presents, any more). My son had to chaperone her when she did her final round of shopping on December 23rd so we could split up and do our shopping in privacy.
With Barbara that year, it was hit or miss. I suspect it involved little more than picking items at random and throwing them in the cart. Some things I could use (like the ugly plaid shirt that would fit Charles Barkley but which is the most beautiful shirt on earth because it was the last one she ever got me. I wear it nearly every day.), some things I couldn't (Like the Old Spice set. We dads and husbands and boyfriends keep getting it as some default or consolation gift when imagination or ingenuity fails. I keep thinking of Hannibal Lecter's withering appraisal of it).
But then I came across this- A beard trimmer that I tried to interpret at the time as something less than a tacit suggestion from Barb to manage my whiskers (she never complained about them). But I unpacked the trimmer for the first time since Xmas 2022. I painstakingly installed the batteries then began trimming my white beard, which is now a fine stubble that, fortunately, is fashionable, for some reason.
And life, and death, is like that, I suppose. It rarely if ever travels in a clean, linear direction, one that guarantees impeccable timing and desired outcomes. It often if not always travels circuitously with no conventional timetable or trajectory.
Sometimes the dead aid us in our moments of greatest confoundment, such as when we've run out of ideas and default to Old Spice during Xmas shopping. My whiskers often get out of control because, frankly, I hate shaving. Then, I have to get out the trusty old scissors that, yes, Barb brought up from Florida in 2009, and trim them painstakingly before I can put a razor to my face.
But the trimmer Barb got me nearly 15 months ago works like a charm and performed magnificently during its maiden journey across my weathered face. This poor old woman who's been gone from us for six months was still capable of an insightful idea and gave me something I can now use for the first time even if I didn't have the guts to open it.
And I can only offer my own words in Hollywoodland as to why I refused to go into that bag of final gifts from the love of my life. In a certain chapter, page 88, when Sarah discovers she'd just slept with the man whose son she'd murdered just a week before, he points to the presents his son bought him for his birthday that Sarah saw him buy just moments before she killed him. It was a pipe and pound of tobacco. They'd remained unopened and Zeke tells Sarah,
"I haven’t opened these presents because… I guess if I do, it’ll be the last thought Clem ever had of me and then once I know what it was, then he’ll be silent forever."
Barb was still very much alive and still capable of good days when I wrote those words in the earliest months of the pandemic in 2020 but, as proof of what I'm saying, sometimes our characters know more than we do and the wisdom and motivations we give them are often passed down to us like heirlooms. Then, like a light from a distant star, it finally arrives with the magic of serendipity attached to it.
Yes, I finally reopened Barb's final presents to me but she's far from silent. She speaks to me even though she's dead and through my characters because there would be no Scott Carson novels without her. She will never be silent. She was too wise even while she was staring down her worst adversity.