Doubt and the Ring

During my writing process pulling memories and stories together for this book, a heavy cloud of doubt settled over me. Opening my heart and sharing the reality of our spiritual marriage felt deeply vulnerable, and a quiet panic began to whisper that maybe I shouldn't be writing this at all. 

The weight of self-doubt felt almost too heavy to bear, threatening to delete the words and messages I was trying to secure on these pages before they faded and disappeared.

In these dark moments when anxiety tried to take over, I found I became captivated by a Beach Boys Song.

"Wouldn’t It Be Nice."

I played the song continuously on loop as I cleaned the house, watered our garden, and took the dogs to the beach. It made me feel good. It chased any threat of anxiety away. I kept writing, playing the song over and over like a lovestruck teenager. 

During this time, I kept feeling a soft, persistent inner nudge encouraging me to watch the movie Love & Mercy, which tells the story of Brian Wilson's life—his brilliant musical genius, his profound creative struggles, his heartache, and his eventual journey toward healing.

I ignored the nudge and watched familiar films where I knew the storyline by heart and could fall asleep without missing anything.

Along with doubts about my writing, entered doubts about my relationship. Were we truly married? We missed the opportunity to marry in our physical life. Time ran short and we didn’t get the chance. We talked about it on and off. We thought about getting passports from our home countries. Mine being Spain, my grandparents were born there and immigrated to avoid the war. Scott’s parents were Canadian and he was born here early, a surprise and unexpected. He always dreamed of returning to Canada and wanted to get married so it would be easy for me to travel there as his wife.  We were not interested in getting married for financial reasons or to promise monogamy and commitment. That was a given. We shared everything. We had no desire for other partners, we both knew how lucky we were to finally meet. Both of us had been through our share of relationships that didn’t work out and knew what was out there if we left each other. 

Still. The doubts rose as my vulnerability and heart spilled out on the pages I was drafting for this book I did not know I would write at the time.  I posted bits and pieces of writing and photos to the Facebook group “Love After Life” I belong to that supports the continuation of relationships with significant others through the veil. Anxiety started banging on the door. I didn’t want to open it. 

An automatic writing group posted a get together on the group page. I had struggled with communicating with Scott this way over the years. I couldn’t tell if it was his voice or mine. I doubted the answers that came through. Recently, though, I had picked up the pen and tried again. I tore out some pages of an old journal and started clean with the fresh lined pages that remained. This time, he came through and I was led on an incredible adventure. I was hooked, maybe this tool, automatic writing, could finally work for me after all these years.

Sunday evening I sat quietly behind the zoom screen surrounded by a small group of supportive women. The gathering began with a short meditation to invite our partners to join us. We were asked to feel them, visualize their bodies, their form and presence beside us. Right away, I felt pressure in my left ear. Scott was with me. This was his signature, a way he could connect with me and let me know he was present. By gently applying this pressure to my left ear, it’s always my left ear, he can reach my intuitive side bypassing the mental chatter and doubt. It’s a comfort to me and I appreciate every time he can connect with me this way. Knowing he was here with me in the automatic writing class, I was infused with the possibilities of what we might learn from each other. 

As I listened to the meditation, I glanced to the left of me and a vision flashed of Scott’s hands. His hands. I hadn’t seen them or felt them for so long. He turned his knuckles towards me and there I spotted the wedding ring. I was taken aback. I never thought of Scott wearing a wedding ring. After he died I asked him daily to send me a ring if he still wanted to get married and miraculously he did, but I never thought of him wearing one. I don’t know why. Was it because I was “single” most of my life, never married. I wasn’t attracted to traditional marriages, I didn’t like going to weddings or showers. I always felt so uncomfortable being “single” and feeling “singled out”. Did I feel a ring was not important to him?  Vibrations ran through my body and I got shaky, bowled over by the understanding that he wanted to wear a ring as much as I did even from the “other side”.

After class, I turned on the television and chose the movie “Love and Mercy”. It was my second time watching it since seeing it when it was first released on streaming several years before. The movie is intense and it was difficult to watch Brian Wilson’s creative struggle, the abuse he suffered from his father and later a therapist who took advantage of him, but through-out the film I watched as his future wife, his soulmate pulled him out of the darkness. The ending was worth it as they reunited to begin their life together after all of the heartache and pain. As I watched them look into each other's eyes, the song I had been playing over and over for the last few days “Wouldn’t it Be Nice”  closed out the credits. 

Later, I would dig up the lyrics and find it was a song about marriage and creating a world together in a world they belong in.