Bridge to Heaven

I read Broken Music, Sting's memoir of his childhood until the Police. I highly recommend it, but have a dictionary handy; he's got quite a vocabulary.

When he was in his mid-30s both his parents died of cancer a few months apart. He said he didn't really deal with it for a long time, just kept himself busy. So I was reading through the song sheet from his "Soul Cages" CD which came out in '91, about five years after his parents died, and found lots of tiny references to them and his loss of them including this one:

If a prayer today is spoken
Please offer it for me
When the bridge to heaven is broken
And you're lost on the wild wild sea
Lost on the wild wild sea...

And for the first time in the fourteen years I've been listening to that song, I finally understand that part. It's unfortunate that I finally get it, but I'm grateful for even a single line that puts it into words for me.

Our parents are our "bridge to heaven", that buffer between the life we think we know now and the life that comes next, which is always a mystery. But how much do we really know now? We think we know what's coming, but we have no idea really.

You can be chatting with co-workers at a completely micro-managed job when someone coaxes you into the restroom to tell you your mother has died. Then, instead of complaining about managers and slow computers, the room starts spinning and the floor drops out and you're on the phone with your brother who , like you, can only say in the saddest worst voice ever, "Oh NO. Oh, God, no!" And suddenly you begin to understand those pictures of old babushkas wailing over rumpled bodies that used to house their children.

You can be driving back from a weekend of meditation, feeling centered, peaceful and calm and that you really felt the prescence of God that evening at 5:30. But then you walk into the house and find your husband in the silent living room with that look, a look you've never seen on him before, but nevertheless you know.

"Who died?" you ask. "Someone died, didn't they?" He says, "Yes, someone died. I don't know who. You need to call your brother." So you call your brother and brace yourself. His wife answers and tells you to call your brother's cell phone right away. She won't say more. So it's not one of the kids, or she wouldn't be able to speak. It's likely to be one of your grandparents, they're in good health, but old. But if it had been them, she would have told you, probably.

It's Dad. It's probably Dad. And it was. You call your brother who's driving back from the hospital where Dad's body had been taken, but not allowed to be seen--just as well. You're still calm from your weekend and ask, "How are you doing?" Your brother says with a sigh, "Well, you know. We just did this," referring to when your mother died three years earlier. You begin to wonder if your calmness is a result of all the meditation you've been doing this year or the relief you're not surprised you feel. And should you feel bad about that?

And a few days later at your brother's house in NY you learn that your father died right before you felt that strong connection to God. You don't know what that means, but it feels like a sign. A sign of what? That you're being cared for in some way? Maybe, except that now that you truly are an orphan at the age of 33, you feel completely untethered, definitely at risk of floating off into space to slowly die of heat or cold or starvation or suffocation and certainly isolation. And maybe no one will notice.

When the bridge to heaven is broken
And you're lost on the wild wild sea
Lost on the wild wild sea...

And then he doesn't even finish his sentence...he's just lost on a wild wild sea.












That makes sense to me now.