Photo above is the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, NYC

My son and I got through Thanksgiving and Christmas and as the months passed, I knew we really should have a memorial service of some sort for Tom before we moved away. I had absolutely no idea how to pull that off. In the first place, who would come? We really had only a handful of close friends, and no church. In my lowest moments, I could just picture what the service would be like. Some unfamiliar church where a pastor or priest who never knew Tom would say a few words to mostly empty pews. That vision was so pathetic, it seemed better for all concerned just to skip the whole idea.

There was a church in the theater district in the city to which Tom had retreated quite often between auditions, because that church was always open during the week. This was the church where he’d met the angel, ( I will post an account of the angel later.) so I did feel drawn to that Church as a very special place.

But the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin was in New York City. The few friends I can rely on to attend were in New Jersey. It seemed hopeless. I felt terrible for our son. He should have his father's passing honored in some way. But I was at a complete loss and had no ideas at all. Depressed. Grieving. Hopeless. Overwhelmed.

However, one of Tom's long time best friends had invited me out to lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station in the city. He and Tom had been friends since Steve worked as a stage manager on the soap opera the Guiding Light over twenty-five years earlier. Steve had long ago left soap operas to direct sports and the nightly news. He’d been a great friend all our life and especially through Tom's illness, when he came with us to doctor's appointments, chemo sessions, and medical procedures whenever he could. We shared the terrible loss of Tom. Our Oyster Bar lunch was a chance to reminisce and drink too many martinis to ease our pain.

The night before our lunch date, every time I fell asleep, I was plagued by the same recurring dream, which was so vivid it kept waking me up. In the dream, there was a party going on, and I was the hostess. Everyone was drinking, laughing, and having fun. And strangely, Tom was very much present, too, as if he were a guest at the party. He kept looking at me, as if to say’ pay attention’. Looking around at the guests, I recognized some of them as former cast members from the Guiding Light.

But my dream self was outraged by this party. Furiously, I confronted Tom, demanding, "What's going on here? You're dead. Why is there a party?" He didn't answer. Then the doorbell rang. I knew I had to answer it and let some more people join the party. Again, I scolded Tom "You're dead! Why are these people coming to a party when you're dead?" Even more baffling, no one seemed to notice that Tom was dead; it didn't seem to matter. My sense of irritated bafflement was overwhelming. I kept hurling accusations at him, "You're dead! Why is there a party?" And the doorbell would ring again. I have since wondered if bells ringing isn’t one of the signals used to wake up a person’s spiritual self. Many religions include the loud and continuous ringing of bells in their worship services.

Another strange thing about the dream was the way I kept reminding Tom that he was dead, but I was speaking to him as if he were alive. Yet, I was clearly aware that he was at the party in the state of death. Furthermore, in life when Tom was sick we’d never mentioned the word dead or death. But my dream-self was very insensitive.

All night long, that same dream kept playing over and over. I got no sleep and woke up in a terrible mood. A party when Tom is dead. A party when Tom is DEAD? What the heck was that all about? Why were those Guiding Light people at the party? And why did Tom keep looking at me so steadily like he was trying to tell me something?

Then, like a mental head slap, it dawned on me! A party for you when you're dead is a memorial service and a wake. Maybe Tom was trying to tell me (frantically, over and over again) that I had to have a party for him when he's dead. And he was certainly very emphatic about it. Frankly, as overwhelmed as I was, it's amazing I managed to figure this out, which is not to say that I initially believed the dream was anything other than a dream, but it weighed on my mind as I rode the bus into New York City that morning for lunch with Steve.

Although I was pretty sure by now that there was such a thing as the paranormal, and that there were people with psychic powers whose dreams told them things, the actual possibility that this might be happening to me seemed quite farfetched. I really think deep down inside, I didn't want to accept that these were communications from the spirit world, because I just wanted to be left alone. I wanted to give up on life, not expand its meaning. I resented the burden of these extrasensory spiritual duties and awareness on my conscious world.

After a couple of martinis with Steve, I relaxed a bit and confessed I was very discouraged about having a memorial service. (I didn’t dare mention the dream! For heaven's sake, I didn't want him to think I'd lost my mind.) But Steve was more than glad to talk it over and advise me. I mentioned to him that Tom had a special church he loved in New York City where he often went to pray during the week, but this would be a big trip for our New Jersey friends, many of whom were older people. And I didn't know if the New York church would even do a memorial service for Tom. Besides, the main problem was who would come.

Steve understood my dilemma, but to my complete astonishment, he told me that several of the people who had worked on Guiding Light back when he and Tom were on the show had contacted him since Tom's passing to express their sorrow. It had been so many years since Tom had anything to do with Guiding Light or any of those people that it had never occurred to me that any of them were still around or interested in Tom. But Steve felt sure they would come to the service and the wake. He also felt that New York City was a good place to have the service because it was a central point for everyone in the area. He still had his apartment on the upper West Side and would be glad to help host the wake there.

Once Steve mentioned Guiding Light people coming to the wake, I got a scary feeling in the pit of my stomach and felt sort of bypassed. Some power outside of normal was acting through me. This wasn't just a dream where my conscience was pricking me; there was real information in this dream that I had to act on. The undeniable clues were too blatant for even skeptical me to ignore. Every time I thought about those Guiding Light people appearing in my dream and then Steve mentioning them, I couldn't explain the dream away so easily.

A dawning sense that things were not in my control, and that powers beyond mine were urging me forward, gave me the confidence to believe that I was supposed to do this. At least the memorial service and wake wouldn't be the small, sad little affair that I had feared. Guiding Light people still remembered Tom. And, from his years of living in New York, Steve also knew the perfect caterers to handle the 'party' for Tom, (even though he's dead).

Gathering all my courage, not knowing if The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin would even consider doing a memorial service for someone who was not a member, I went to the Church, where I met Father James Ross Smith, who couldn't have been nicer or more accommodating. Father Smith and the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin were indeed a dream come true. They had a lovely side chapel for services just the size ours would be. Lost in the dark night, I just kept walking by faith, and someone was guiding those footsteps in the right direction.

I had gone through the whole memorial service's planning and accomplishment in something of a trance, never for a moment believing that it would actually work out, staggered when things went well. My halting, uncertain, fearful steps forward felt very much like the incident in the bible where Jesus asks the disciples to walk on water. Insanely, by my rational standards, but trusting that, somehow, I really was being guided by Tom in the afterlife, I had closed my eyes and stepped forward onto that watery surface. Miraculously, I had not drowned, but instead had succeeded in carrying out something very important. My life had become a pure act of suspending what I had formerly thought of as reality and substituting faith in a higher power which could probably be called God. How else to explain it?

The memorial service dream and experience fundamentally transformed me, although I didn't realize it right away. But it was the beginning of my trust that somehow there was real communication between Tom and me. He had shown me what to do and given me a shove to do it. I was convinced that the dream was real. I had to begin to accept as fact that Tom's spirit was alive and well, somewhere, and talking to me and perhaps even taking care of me. Maybe there really was a God and much closer and more involved in my life than I'd ever imagined. Some part of myself that I never knew before was waking up and making a new person out of me, a person who had a strong sense of being partly in this world and partly in the spirit world. As a result, I became more attentive to the clues in my dreams that might be telling me important things.