Pam commented on the Blue Moon post:

Hi. I have been trying to think of what to say but can't think of anything except, I am so sorry about your friends and I can't imagine what they (and you) are going through. Do you believe that our spirits live on (in other dimensions)? I struggle with it; it seems impossible but at the same time I've heard and read stories from people that makes me ponder. - Pam

Little Beauty, I have already wept, wailed, wallowed, and cursed for them all many times over enough to fulfill any lamenting custom in several lands. I know I'm being selfish about it, especially in Sally Jo's case because I just want them HERE, not THERE. When I wah for them, it's the blindered side of my Inner Child having a temper tantrum because some really fun playmates are leaving my party.

Death IS life! It's SIDS for Seniors. We Americans have a tendency to overlook that. I'd like to thank the predominant cultural religions for that: You die, you go before your god, get judged pretty harshly for your worldly stupidities, and depending on whether you ascribe to the Vatican, Yaweh, Mohammed, or to Dante Alighieri, you're sent to various hotspots around the universe with varying degrees of unpleasantries.

I personally think all this is an opague attempt at trying to control the masses and whip them into shape. Support the church, pay the tithes, follow the leader, even if the leader is telling you to believe some really stupid and irrational things. Crowd control. Think Jim Jones, the Inquisition, the 'Holy Wars', Jihad.

I lean towards taking the responsibility of my own actions while here and cutting out the middleman or priest to intercede for me as best I can. I know what kind of Didoes I pull that I shouldn't have - I was THERE when I did it. It cuts down on the coin, lets you sleep late on holy days, but more importantly, the guilt is incised right out of the mix.

So. We're scared to death of death and it's consequences, which I believe makes us bale on life, too. We don't want to face the big D so we live as if there will be no tomorrow wasting our time on piddling shit and overlooking the fact that this is a really good theme park here with lots to see and do.

As for our spirits living on, I've had this proven to me a number of times. I wrote about one physical manifestation of this in 'The Afterlife of Sam, The Dog' in January 2007. I've also talked to the dead on many occaisions. Before you reach for the Straight 8 - the jacket with eight formal ties, try asking the 'out there' for some help on an everyday project. It's fun and informative. I 'talk' to my dad all the time to ask for help with things mechanical or carpentry because he was a worldly ace with it. I more often than not get an amazingly quick solution on how to do something that I've not done before, something totally not in the vein I was thinking. Ascribe this to spiritism or Psychology 101. I don't really care as long as it works.

I wrote almost every single college paper on autodrive using the same approach. Whether you want to call this savantism or that I possibly could have been given the ideas, and sometimes, footnotes to support them from an outside source is up to you. I've quit trying to persuade folk around to my view of living.

Can I give you some directions on where to start your query on why I think psychism and 6th sense issues are real? Read " I am Psychic", also from January of this year. Read some of the new books out on fuzzy and quantum physics.

So, young Padowan, let Yoda be your guide on this matter. Remember the training of Luke. Listen, you should. Buy or rent the entire set of philosopher George Lucas' works and watch them.

When it comes right down to it, each of us has to believe in our own theories. I just offer mine. But one thing I know as utter, unmitigatable truth is that when Death happens, it won't matter what your beliefs or theories are. What awaits us (or not) will be there.

It is what it is.

You know now that it was the blue moon in May, as in ‘Once in a blue moon’ - two full moons in the same month? Well. Yes. Annie, Teresa and I used this to go on a Red Eye Turnaround to Augusta, Georgia to see Sally Jo.

You’ll also guess if you’re a reader that I tend to pidge around when I have something serious to write about. Just one tiny bitty bit of chicken shit to my nature of balls out, hair afire, Mach 10, 60 MPH in one spot. So. Sally’s dying, don’t you know.

She has this shit ass illness called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, as I've told you. It’s a wicked bad disease that mimics Parkinson’s and Lou Gerhigs Disease. She’ll die by choking. I watched her suffer through several of these spasms as she tried to eat orally on our visit. She refuses to give up the taste of food even though she’s intubated for direct meals and medications through a tube in her abdomen.

Sally always was stubborn like that. She refused to give up on me when I was a non-responsive basket case drooling on the sofa and contemplating a trip to the woods with Sara Jane, my Rueger. She and Carol Gray saw to it that I went on holiday to the hospital.

She refused to give up on her kids, too, her sisters, and any of the cases she ever worked as a deputy sheriff. Murderers confessed to her and showed her where they hid the bodies when they talked to no one else. Loonies told her about ‘Wonderment Sticks’ and I made one for her to shake at the most reprobate of speeders complete with grape root windy-ness and jewels to get them to slow down. She keeps it under the pix of me and her and Carol.

And she’s refusing this goddamn awful disease that will eat her nerve responses until every neuron in her tall ass ole body just shuts down and quits.

I told Katy and Sue to fly me up and we’ll see her out together. None of us want her to choke to death (a horrid way to go) and we hope that she’ll fall into a peaceful coma and sleep herself into the afterlife. If not, I hope the medicoes have the cajones to help her out.

I’ve thought much about the Three Norns with all this illness and dying. The Three Norns or Fates, the Great Wyrd Sisters who card and spin the skein of our life, then weave us into being, determine the length of our days, and then cut us from the weft of experience and age when we have wended our way to the other side ever recycling,

I read my mama the Book Of Fates by Z. Budapest on the stages of life – one that I was reviewing for the International newspaper, Goddessing championed and published by friend Willow Lamont - as she was dying under the aegis of Hospice in 1999. I read the last pages and squeezed the book Z wrote – something you do when a read has been so good and you could find no other words than The End or the copyright page. Ma looked up from the bed and said, ‘Just in time’. And it was. She passed very shortly afterward. I will love anything Z Budapest writes from here on out because of that book.

Now. Besides Sally Jo, I have my mentor Shirley DesRochers in a pickle in Tampa General Hospital with a hell of a hack and whack job on her colon for diverticulitis. This is the latest in several of them and she’s been fighting fistulas, infections, and you put on plastic when you go in to see her. She left me a fatalistic message on my machine before she went in over a month ago. I save it because she tells me what a good, good friend I’ve been to her. They told her there would be no more surgeries. She doesn't have enough colon yet to digest a taco, let alone take a shit.

I promised her tonight when I trudged up huffing to the 8^thfloor from a parking lot that was built in the back forty that I’d bring my cards and play straight with her when I read to say what I see. She asked me. I will. No matter how grim the news. She can take it. She has gonads, too.

Death doesn’t scare me personally. I just hate to leave a mess. And. I hate to be left behind by all the enormous Goddess women and men my life has wrapped around. Doesn’t seem quite right, although the sidekicks and good guys always get whacked in the movies.

When I gack, I hope some friend will write a line or two about me saying that they missed whatever quality about me that struck them as worthy. I know that I shall miss my girls and their faces.