Take Five: Synchronicities
by Mary McHugh
Do you believe in synchronicities? According to Jung they’re a “fortuitous intermeshing of events.” Julia Cameron in her book that changed my life, The Artist’s Way, describes them this way: “We discount answered prayers. We call it a coincidence. We call it luck. We call it anything but what it is - the hand of God, or good, activated by our own hand when we act in behalf of our truest dreams, when we commit to our own soul.”
You can call it a universal force, a cosmic power, the flow of events that carries us along with it. It doesn’t matter. Whatever causes them, these minor miracles have been popping up in my life at regular intervals since my daughter died of a heart attack just before Christmas last year, and they have helped me through the most difficult year of my life.
What I needed was to heal, to learn to accept Kyle’s death, and I got help all along the way in often strange and whimsical ways. I’m sure some people would say they were just coincidences, but I can’t believe that. Let me tell you about them and you can come to your own conclusion. Kyle loved Christmas and she always found just the right presents for her friends and family. She shopped from catalogues all year and whenever she saw a particularly appropriate gift, she would order it. So when I started the infinitely sad process of clearing out her apartment in Boston, I found the presents she had already wrapped and put in shopping bags to be labeled later by me, because Kyle was blind. In the bag I knew was meant for me, I opened a music box with a painting of a Cape Cod lighthouse on it and John Lennon’s “Imagine,” played. One by one I opened thoughtful, loving gifts from my sweet daughter. When I came to the last one, I took off the blue and white paper and there was a little bear dressed in a white angel’s robe with gold wings. A red sticker said, “Squeeze me,” and when I did, a child’s voice said, “I’m your guardian angel.” Somehow Kyle knew I would need an angel to help me through that most terrible of Christmases, and I cried healing tears. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.
When I went to see her headstone for the first time with my older daughter and my husband, it was a cold and rainy day in April, soon after Kyle’s birthday. We planted blue hydrangeas around her grave and touched the granite stone engraved with the words: “Kyle McHugh. April 3, 1959-December 4, 1999. She brightened the world.” The owner of this wonderful old Cape Cod cemetery saw us huddled together in the rain and invited us in for tea. Inside, her whole family had gathered for Sunday dinner. The fire was warm and welcoming, and the lady brought a beautiful little child over to meet me. “This is Kyle,” she said. So on the day I saw my daughter’s headstone for the first time, I was given the great privilege of hugging a child named Kyle. That couldn’t have been a coincidence, do you think?
And finally, when I went to visit her a month later, I drove up to her grave at the top of a hill overlooking Swan Lake and got out of the car. A man with a white, New England sea captain’s beard was working nearby.
“Hello,” I said, “I’ve come to visit my daughter.”
“Are you Kyle’s mother?” he asked
“How did you know?” I asked, amazed.
“I’m the one you called the day she died to ask if I could find her a
resting place near the water,” he said.
I hugged him and told him how much it meant to me that Kyle was in such a beautiful place. Then he said, “I have something to show you.” He went to his car and came back with a photograph of a spectacular orange and red sunset he had taken from the very spot where Kyle now lay. “Turn the picture over and see when I took it,” he said. On the back of the photo was the date, April 3, 1998, Kyle’s birthday two years before her death.
We both cried and then talked for an hour beside her grave about Kyle’s neighbors in the cemetery and about life.
I just don’t think all these things were coincidences - do you? Write me at Senior Women and tell me if you have had similar synchronicities in your life. I’d love to hear about them.
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