Angelic Pathways (2 page)

For me, change was downright unbearable at times, but the angels dragged me through it kicking and screaming. Thankfully, on the other side of it all was clarity, as well as a better understanding of myself, this world, and worlds unseen.

“The career that is coming to you does not require a resumé,” he said to me one night as I fervently folded fancy linen stationery with my resumé and cover letter printed on it. In between licking envelopes and sticking stamps on them, I cursed Gabriel for luring me into a situation that now seemed more stressful than the job I once had. At least with the job, I had a paycheck every Friday. Now, I was facing debt faster than I had anticipated because I had foolishly neglected to consider my COBRA payments when I resigned. They were five hundred dollars a month.

After two months of tangling and tussling with the archangel over searching for employment, he finally won. I returned home one summer Sunday evening from church and a luncheon with friends. And then I collapsed.

Three days later, I woke up paralyzed in the hospital.

Three months later, I was throwing thirty years of my life into industrial-size garbage bags and heaving them into a car in order to keep my belongings from being set out on the curb. I had lost ownership of my house. Friends I had talked to every week stopped calling. The one family member I thought I could trust labeled me as a financial liability and disowned me so fast, it left me dizzy.

After watching one person after another abandon me, I expected kindness from no one. But before I was set out on the streets like discarded rubbish, a family took me in, and it was in a ten-by-ten room that I would lie and stare at the ceiling for weeks, months … years, all the while cursing Gabriel and every other angel in Heaven. Yes, I cursed God quite a few times, too, despite the fact that at least I wasn’t in a homeless shelter … yet.

I wanted to die. And I was so furious with God over Gabriel’s seeming betrayal that I didn’t even care if I went to Hell, too.

Needless to say, I wanted nothing to do with the angels ever again, but they are a persistent lot. Archangel Raphael, the angel of healing, remained close, and Gabriel offered words of wisdom, but nothing provided solace. Nothing could quell my anguish.

“Hold on, Chantel. Be patient,” Archangel Raphael would whisper as I wept ceaselessly.

“Do you think we would bring you this far to let you falter?” Gabriel said one night, to which I responded, “If I hadn’t listened to you, I wouldn’t be in this situation!”

“Yes, you would have,” his voice was firm. “All of this is a part of God’s plan. All of it.”

“Well, let me tell you where you can stick
God’s plan
…”

But then another angel came into the fray, Archangel Michael, chief archangel and Heaven’s master general. One might think that he was sent in to bring me to heel and press me into listening to God’s messengers, but no. He brought with him a bright smile and a sense of humor that was able to crack through the wall of angst I had built around myself while wallowing in total poverty and utter solitude. It was a loneliness so profound that I often found myself picking up my cell phone to make sure it was working. No one called. And no one came.

No one, save the angels.

Slowly, Michael’s charm and gentleness wore me down, and I became a bit more receptive to God’s messengers again, but not by much. Still, my doubt in Heaven lingered as the dark clouds of uncertainty loomed low over my head every single waking hour. I was hearing the angels’ messages, but I refused to listen. What they had to say seemed like all the wrong answers to my unending barrage of questions as to why my life had taken such a harrowing turn for the worse.

All Raphael had to offer was, “This too shall pass,” while Gabriel and Michael harped on about God’s plan and how my circumstances were meant to be. After a while, it became far too easy to tune the angels out. I had gotten to a point in my life where all I expected was misery anyway—misery with a heaping side of mistrust in God and in my psychic ability to hear him and his messengers.

And so, it hardly surprised me that my health took another nosedive in 2006.

This time it was pneumonia.

I felt so ill the first night that I thought I was having a heart attack. The chest pains started around two am, and my spirit was so downtrodden that I didn’t even bother calling for an ambulance. I merely sat up, wrote out my will, and then lay back down to wait for death to come.

When the light of dawn seeped into my room from beneath my door, I was disappointed that I was still alive, angry even. Angry and indignant. But I was in unbearable pain as well, and that motivated me to finally go to the hospital, where I was admitted for three days. I cursed in frustration because at the time I had no medical insurance. I knew I would incur a medical bill so huge that it would surely follow me into the afterlife.

Since I was still suffering from complications from the stroke, excruciating pain had become the norm for me, and it was even more so because I was now in a hospital bed without all the blankets and pillows I normally used just to make lying down somewhat bearable. By time I was admitted, I was sobbing and begging for someone to put me out of my misery. That’s when the physician ordered heavy-duty pain medications so I could at least sleep.

And there, on the third night around three in the morning, I lay in bed staring at the crucifix on my hospital room wall. A patient in the adjacent room was blasting Mass on her television as loudly as if it were three in the afternoon. I assumed she was elderly, partially deaf, or both. And even though I’m not Catholic, I still listened intently and welcomed the soothing voices of the priest, choir, and congregation. It brought me a bit of peace that night. Well, that and the morphine.

As I lay there quietly drifting back and forth between self-pity and apathy, like a rowboat in breezy waters, Archangel Michael strolled into my room. Glorious and beautiful, charming and sweet, he walked like he owned the place. It was a slow, confident lope that commanded attention and perhaps even admiration. This archangel is not bad on the eyes, to say the least.

Gathering his white robes, he sat on the side of my bed and chuckled at me with his usual lopsided grin.

“What’s so funny?” Even to my own ears, my voice was thick with the effects of pain medication.

“Do you know how difficult it is to talk to you when you’re on that stuff?” He leveled his eyes at me. When I was in the hospital for two months after the stroke, I had my first experience with morphine. As someone who didn’t even take Tylenol before all this happened, my tolerance for the drug was ultra low. And though it didn’t tune out the angels, it did ease me into not giving a damn about anything they or God had to say.

“Well, good lookin’, ” I giggled back, “apparently it’s not that difficult. We’re talkin’ now, aren’t we?”

With a knowing smirk, the sun-kissed angel nodded, his piercing eyes bright with mirth. “That’s ’cause I’m making sure you remember this.”

“I don’t get it, Mike,” I sighed in defeat. “Why this? Why now? I’m down to one can of food and I have eight dollars left to my name. I can’t afford a ten-thousand-dollar hospital bill.” Earlier that day, a hospital representative from the billing department had come to visit me. With a clipboard in hand, he gazed at me with cold, scrutinizing eyes.

“Our records show that you didn’t list any medical insurance,” he said as he stood just inside the door. He kept his distance as if I had been diagnosed with some type of flesh-eating plague. “We were wondering how you intend to cover the bill for this stay.” I had to give him credit—at least he went straight to the point. He didn’t even bother to say hello.

I shifted in the bed with a grimace of pain and cursed under my breath as I tried to get comfortable. I then looked up at him with an equally cold gaze. “I own nothing. I have no house, no car, and no assets. For the most part, you can consider me homeless.” And that was the truth. Though I was not houseless (because I was living under a roof), I was homeless. I was living at a place where I wasn’t really welcome, not even during holidays. So, yes, I was very much
homeless
. To say otherwise would be like saying that a person wasn’t homeless because they were living in a shelter.

The man’s expression hardened as his eyes narrowed. I, however, didn’t so much as blink. And then, seemingly without a breath, he turned on his heels and left with a curt “thank you.” The visit had only made real what I had been dreading since I had been admitted: I was going to wind up with a bill I couldn’t pay. Great. I could add it to the already growing pile of bills that had gone into default.
Take a number and get in line
, I mentally projected to the man as I drew my hands over my face in weariness and hopeless resignation.

And now, here Michael was paying me a visit some twelve hours later. His disposition was the polar opposite of the billing rep, his presence was warm and comforting. With his eyes aglow with pure love and compassion, the archangel leaned over and kissed me tenderly on the forehead. “Tomorrow morning you’ll understand why you’re here.”

“And?”

“And hopefully the flood of doubt you’ve been wading in all this time will ebb, kid. Get some sleep.” With that, he vanished.

The next day, the hospital was ready to release me. No doubt, they weren’t willing to keep me an hour more than the law absolutely required them to. And though I was more than happy to know that the time meter on my bed would cease racking up fees faster than a New York taxicab, a sense of dread seeped into my soul as I thought of what I’d be returning to—a dark room full of loneliness, isolation, and hunger.

I had never in my short years encountered money problems of this magnitude. My parents had been determined and dedicated workers who did everything they could to put me through school. Adopting their work ethic, I got a job when I was thirteen and worked every summer thereafter. Once in high school, I also worked after school and on the weekends. So as a kid, I never really knew what “going without” was like. To be suddenly hit with that reality in my adult life was more than a rude awakening. It was raw, agonizing torment not unlike what I imagine would be the equivalent of being set upon by a swarm of soul-eating demons. And since it was caused by things I couldn’t control—a massive health crisis with no end in sight—I felt that it was an outright cruel and unusual punishment from God.

Then there was one of the most painful notions of all: if I had died right then and there, I would have done so penniless and without so much as even an insurance policy to cover burial costs. The thought of being a nameless body in a pine box,
if
I even made it that far, washed over me like ice water. Without friends or family, there would have been no one to even check to see that I hadn’t been chopped up and sold on the black market for whatever usable body parts I had left. Still, one unbearable truth remained: I had tumbled gracelessly from the status of the contented middle class to that of the faceless, voiceless impoverished.

Unable to stand the shame and humiliation a minute longer, the dam of my emotions crumbled and I broke into heaving sobs, screaming at the injustice of it all.

Just then, the nurse who was charged with the task of releasing me entered the room with paperwork. I was weeping so hard, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. Without a word, she sat on the bed and put her hand upon my shoulder; and after another moment, I finally regained enough dignity to stop my tears and look up into her eyes.