If there's one thing we can agree on, I didn't expect it to be angels

Sixty-nine percent of Americans believe angels exist

I was scrolling YouTube when I saw him. I was supposed to be on a zoom call but my client texted, said running late, give me ten. Tiny sweet boy, standing in the door of a bedroom. Two, I’m thinking, maybe three. So small and cute.

He turns, waves bye-bye into the room and I smile, thinking what a sweetness overload he is. Just standing there holding up the world.

Mommy is holding the camera and I hear her ask. “Who you waving at, baby?” He looks at her. Looks back in the room, back at her again. Then he says “Papa!”

In the background, Mommy says “What?” Little boy turns, looks in the room. Points a chubby little finger into the room and says it again. “Papa!”

Mommy’s voice saying “where, Baby, where?” The camera is shaking like she can’t get there fast enough, and she’s breathing shaky, and then I’m looking into an empty bedroom. Little boy points into the room. Joyfully repeats. “See? Papa!”

Hear her whisper oh, my God.

Her voice breaks a little. Says one word. “Dad?”

Muffled, she says her dad passed away but in the middle of the sentence the video loops and starts over, little boy standing in the doorway. I watch it loop over and over until I hear my client call my name in another tab. I can’t stop seeing the way the camera shook. The sound of her voice when she said “Dad.”

Something in her voice won’t leave me alone.

---

The email subject was one word. Angels. He’s a writer I enjoy, so I clicked. Seventy percent of Americans believe in angels, he said. Remarkable, considering there’s no one religion seventy percent of us agree on.

Seventy percent? Wow, that’s a lot, I think.

I looked it up because that’s how I’m made. Turns out it’s true. Gallup poll says 69% of Americans believe in angels. He rounded up a percent, but I’ll give it to him. But still. If there’s one thing we can all agree on, I would not have expected it to be angels.

It’s not the first on the list of what we believe. The poll says 74% of Americans believe there is a God or some higher power. But it’s angels in second place that gets me.

Here’s where my mind goes. To every tragedy in the news. Remember Gabby Petito? Pretty little van-life girl, her dad crying when they found her body. George Floyd on the cement calling mama. Alan Kurdi face down in the sand because his daddy wanted the same freedoms for him that we all take for granted.

Where were the angels? I don’t understand why there is so much suffering in the world if there are angels. It hurts my heart some days, living in this world. And I don’t understand how there are angels. Here, in this hurting place.

Where were the angels when we put children in cages? Where were the angels when they turned on the showers in the camps or dropped bombs on Ukraine?

It washes over me slowly, the realization that I don’t know what I believe. I am stitched together of more questions than answers. And strangely, I’m okay with not knowing.

I wonder if certainty should be reserved for things like paper and pencil, poplar trees and night blooming jasmine outside the window. Like hugs and the love in a pet’s eyes. Truth is, I find peace in accepting that I don’t know everything. I can’t.

Why are we so attached to knowing? Why are we so attached to being right? Seems to me the older I get, the less I am sure of anymore.

I do think there is a higher power. And some days I think he watches the world and weeps the same tears I do. But the one that guts me? Is angels.

---

I remember not so long ago. Dad and me at the kitchen table. I put his oatmeal and coffee on the table, sit to keep him company. He’s not eating, he’s staring at me and smirking like he knows something I don’t know. Pleased with himself.

Smirking, he picks up his spoon. Casually asks, “So who spent the night?”

“What?” I say. He’s laughing silently. Shoulders shaking. Like I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar, but trust me there’s no cookies in that jar.

“Dad, what the heck?” I laugh. “No one spent the night.”

He’s still laughing. He tells me it’s fine. Says I’m a grown woman, I can do what I want and I don’t know if I should be irritated or worried about the state of his mind.

“Dad,” I say. He looks over and I tell him again. No one spent the night.

He asks, real soft, if I’m sure. Yes, Dad, I say. I’m sure. There is no one here but you and me. No one here last night but us. Just you and me, Dad. No one else.

I watch his entire demeanor change. “Okay,” he whispers.

He sets his spoon on the table. Carefully places a hand on each side of his bowl like he’s bracing himself. And then he just breathes. Slowly. In and out. Then he turns his head, looks at me through milky eyes that don’t see anymore. And asks softly —

“So who turned on the light?”

“What?” I ask.

He tells me he woke in the night to use the bathroom but he forgot to turn on the light. Went part way down the hall and stopped. Standing in the dark, scared. Wondering how far the light switch is. Where the stairwell is. Afraid to fall. Afraid I won’t hear him. And then the hall light turned on. So he said thank you, Linda. But it was a man’s voice that softly said you’re welcome.

Chills run my spine and I feel the hairs stand up on my arms. Goosebumps. My mind grasping for sense like a man falling off a cliff with nothing to grab hold of.

Watching my father’s face, I know. He’s telling me God’s honest truth. And I have no answers. No answers for anything. Just. Bewilderment.

Two years after I bury my father, he’ll wake me in the night. Sick with bronchitis, I’ll hear him yelling. Linda, wake up, you’re choking. Linda, wake up. Wake up, wake up. His voice. Screaming my name. I bolt awake with dad’s voice still in my ears and I don’t know. If it was a dream? Or real. I don’t know, and I don’t need to.

But I understand. The way that woman said Dad. The tears and joy in her voice. That much, I understand with every ounce of my being. And I think? Maybe it’s enough.

After spending his life studying science and the universe, Einstein said we must live as though either everything is a miracle, or nothing is.

I don’t know what I think about angels. I don’t know why there has to be so much pain in the world. But I know there are moments when this old world is an achingly beautiful place. Thank you for being part of it. Love to know what you think...

“What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they’re angels.”
Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, 1953