Skip to main content

Pennies from Heaven

“Pennies from heaven” is a phenomenon oft-referenced by advice columnists in their discussions of grief. It is not uncommon for the bereaved to find pennies that seem to have been sent from their deceased loved ones.

I never gave much thought to the origins of the coins I found at my feet. I’d occasionally come across a penny—find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck!—but I never considered that they could have come from anywhere more remote than someone’s faulty pocket.

That changed after Anna’s death. A few weeks after her funeral, I found a dime on the garage floor. I found another one in a parking lot…and then another one in my bedroom. Dimes were popping up all over the place, seemingly out of nowhere.

At first, I figured it was random, just a weird coincidence that I was pocketing ten cents on such a regular basis. It took me a while to connect the dots between the specific denomination of the coin and Anna’s birth date, October 10. Might it be some kind of sign?

I received a definitive answer at Key Lime Cove, a water-park hotel, when my sister and I took the kids there for the first time. We paid for a locker at a centrally located keypad and waited for the computer-assigned door to swing open for us. The portal to our unit was labeled 1010.

When you start to notice a pattern in the events of your life, it seems to appear more often. This uptick in frequency could be attributed to heightened awareness. It may well be that you’re looking for it on some sub-conscious level, that your brain is more tuned in, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it happens.

I mentioned Anna’s propensity to send dimes in my direction to Sammy, and she promptly found a dime. Scott reported that he too had been finding dimes in the strangest places—in the washing machine, atop the dryer, in clothing pockets that he had no recollection of ever using for money storage.

I told my nephews about it as we walked down a city street and guess what they found in the road at the next intersection? That time, it was a whole handful of dimes—enough for each of the kids to have one to keep.

I’ve learned not to question it. Rather, I embrace each dime as Anna’s way of making contact, letting us know that she’s somehow with us, just out of reach. Magical thinking? Perhaps.

But just last weekend, as we stood in line ordering single scoops of Peppermint Patty and Toffee at a carry-out cone window, Sammy spied something shiny under the counter. Anna must have wanted ice cream, too.

Seated at the kitchen table Sunday evening, I noticed our dog chewing on yet another unsanctioned item. Scott reached into Teddy’s slobbery mouth to retrieve said object and pulled out…a dime. We’re not sure where or when he found it, but we do know who gave it to him.

Incompatible with Life: A story of hope
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The Tortures of Tamoxifen, Part 2

Though my oncologist was not thrilled with me quitting tamoxifen, she did give me her blessing. “Take a break and see how you feel. Just promise me that you’ll consider starting up again.” I stopped taking the pills and within a few weeks noticed an improvement in my energy level. My hot flashes were less frequent, weight management a bit easier. Running, my favorite leisure activity, stopped feeling like a chore. I couldn’t quite ratchet my pace back up to pre-cancer levels, but I could finally hold my own with my running buddies again. I harbored a small hope that stopping the medicine would put me back into my previous ovaries-still-in-action hormonal state of being. Sadly, aside from one scant period right after I abandoned the drug, my body stayed stubbornly stuck in menopause. My symptoms weren’t nearly as bad as they’d been on tamoxifen, but they were still there, mocking me. I started to have doubts about my decision. The drumbeat of, “What if?” reverberated in my ...
Read more

Reflections on Chemotherapy

When I began chemo five years ago, my oncologist told me that her goal was that I would get through treatment and say, "That wasn't as bad as I expected it to be." Chemotherapy is a systemic treatment meant to kill cancer cells, but it does not discriminate between cancer cells and other fast-growing cells, which is why it changes blood counts, disrupts hair and nail growth, and causes mouth sores.  My chemo regimen began with four rounds of dose-dense Adriamycin (also known as the “red devil” because of its coloring) and Cytoxan, administered at two week intervals. The Cytoxan was infused by IV, but the vial of Adriamycin was shot directly into a vein. Each infusion lasted about two hours. Adriamycin causes hair loss within two or three weeks of the first dose. My oncologist cautioned that hair loss was imminent, and like clockwork, the first tufts came out in my hand the day before my second dose. It was the strangest thing—one day my hair felt like hair, the nex...
Read more

Blaming the Victim

“Everything happens for a reason.” It’s one of the most common rote responses we have when we hear of someone else’s tragedy. I’ve been on the receiving end of this comment more times than I care to count…and I hate it. Seriously, I’d love to see it eradicated from the English language. When people tell me that there’s a reason I got cancer, it implies that there’s a reason why they didn’t. When they tell me that there’s a reason I lost my baby, the unspoken message is—well, you know. Those words, strung together in an overture of sympathy, provide comfort only to the person speaking them. They represent a very convenient and human reaction to tragedy—seeking meaning in a way that enables us to distance ourselves from the possibility that such a thing could happen to us. Interestingly, I’ve never heard this phrase uttered by a parent who’s buried a child, or a widow who lost her beloved spouse. I’ve never heard someone with a life-threatening medical condition suggest ...
Read more