After getting up at 5AM for a morning flight out of Rome, I am finally in my Alitalia seat and begin to write over Italian clouds into international skies, through the tiredness into the memory…

For the season of turning thirty, I elected to go to New York City for the weekend and have dinner with friends at March in Sutton Place. Among other things, we ate truffles. Six months later, X elected to drive up to Ojai for the weekend with friends. Among other things, we had psychic readings. My question for the psychic—actually a serious shaman —was whether, after eight years of trying, I would be able to have a baby.

Perhaps I have told you this. He said: yes. It will be a boy. Then he paused. “Wait a moment. No. It will be a girl.”

Over the following year, I drove up to Santa Barbara a number of times to work with him and receive energy treatments. I felt like I was flying back to LA, I felt so light.

When we lost our boy, X was in the middle of a massive project, but as soon as he could, we went back up the coast on a cold, blustery day for an overnight respite and a visit to the shaman, Michael. He took us on an extensive journey in which he guided us to deliver our son to someone’s safe keeping. I envisioned taking our boy in my arms and handing him to a person whom I later described as wearing brown robes with a rope around his waist. A cross between my mental image of Father Jeremy, a family friend of X’s whom I had never met, and the better known St Francis. This was the first such journey I had ever taken.

*

The following summer when I turned 32, Father Jeremy came from his monastery in the Pacific Northwest to officiate our son’s funeral and burial. He seemed enchanted that I had thought of him, and our connection became the most thoughtful I’ve ever had in the Catholic faith––a faith in which I was educated but never belonged. I remember Jeremy remarking on how there was scant liturgical guidance for such a ritual despite the significant number of children who are lost in premature birth.

By the time of the funeral, I was freshly pregnant for the second and final time. I had seen Michael a few times in the intervening months and had begun to work in earnest on the shadows of my relationship with my mother. While I would see Jeremy once or twice in the decade to come, all of the shamanic journey and my time with Michael fell deeply into my subconscious.

*

For the season of turning fifty, a group of college friends planned a trip to celebrate our collective rite of passage. I received the invitation fifteen months in advance and couldn’t remotely imagine if I would be able to attend. This past February I booked a fully refundable room at the villa. An act of promise. A month later I started looking at flights. Over spring break, I got a push from G and X to go, and found a free non-stop ticket with my credit card points. Riding on this affirming energy, I filled out my global entry application, too. I was committed to go to Umbria, Italy. Life got so busy I rarely stopped to think about it, but when I did, my thoughts were of food, wine and (ok, I will admit it) men.

What I never imagined was my brief, unplanned sojourn in Rome caused by my delayed flight and subsequent missed train into the countryside. With two hours to spare, I walked out of Roma Termini and asked a taxi driver for a quick trip to the Coliseum and back, a la Audrey in Roman Holiday. Roberto, my delightful taxi driver, wound up giving me a private tour of Rome: the Coliseum, the bridges and town centers and places where Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius walked and talked and decreed. He drove me to St Peter’s and showed me Pope Francis’s favorite church of the two faces. He told me everything he could in his broken English, and with the assistance of my hazy Spanish, we made do. Rome has over 200 churches. Here is Berlusconi’s apartment. And here is where Mussolini spoke. I leaned out of the window like Audrey herself on Gregory’s moped, a smile emblazoned on my face, soaking up the blue skies and the vividness of the moment. Leaving my heavy luggage while Roberto double-parked, I raced out into Piazza San Pietro, said a quick prayer and took a few photos. Then he circled back and returned me to the station. Before heading inside, I bought two little rosaries in honor of being there. This, I assumed, would be the extent of my spiritual experience in Italy. On to food and wine.

*

After my joyful arrival in Umbria, we piled into two vans and left for an incredible dinner by the lake. For what reason I will never know, en route to dinner, I spoke of my childREN, (which I pretty much never do) and the conversation circled around the abundance of women who have late term losses or full term losses or any losses at all. And how there is no place for that grief, no acknowledgment of its happening, no ongoing honoring of it having happened. I have cells in my body that say he was here; I have scars on me from his passage. But to say I have childREN is a step into bravery, into the unknown, into a vaguely apologetic space of potentially “sharing too much” even something so essential to me.

But this was a safe crowd and I never regretted my candor. For some reason I felt it was necessary, albeit making me feel unusually vulnerable. It set the stage unknowingly for the week ahead—what wound up being what I privately called a re-tooling of my heart—although it was never spoken of again unless I brought it up.

*

The next morning when we met for a truffle hunt followed by a “truffles on everything” luncheon, I could not help but think back to my thirtieth birthday. How could it be that I now have a tiny apartment not far from that restaurant; I am no longer married to the man who so gallantly hosted us; and my anticipated child just graduated from college? Here I was eating truffles again with a vision far beyond that view, yet mysteriously melded to it.

At some point that first morning, I walked from the main villa to the swimming pool area passing olive orchards, a clay tennis court, multiple oversized terra cotta pots of citrus trees—redolent of a physical sacredness—and a small, simple chapel. I stepped into the chapel and said my prayers quietly in the cool dark space, admiring the beauty of Mary and her child frescoed above the altar.

Each day I visited the little chapel as we explored town after town finding far greater glories to God in architecture over and over again. The day after truffles was mid-week for everyone else, and a division of destination for the group: Spoleto, Siena and Orvieto. Where would I go? I chose the latter and what an extraordinary day it was! Apocalyptic images of Judgment Day juxtaposed with angels and saints had an impression on all of us. As I did in every duomo or basilica, chapel, church or cathedral, I lit a candle and said a prayer. (In some cases this meant flipping a switch rather than striking a match. Or buying a candle but not being allowed to light it.) Making my way to light a candle in the Duomo di Orvieto, I knelt and said a few words with a special missive to my boy. Minutes later, I glanced at my watch. 2:24PM. That meant I was kneeling, praying for him at 2:22. His sacred hour. As always when this moment of kismet happens, I take it in, treasure and honor it, while quietly recognizing that not everyone would think this is magic at work. Many would say it’s my imagination. My illusion. Maybe it is.

*

The day before we went to Assisi, on my way out of the villa’s chapel, I looked up and to the right side of the door. I thought I had registered this sculpture before in my mind, and it was Mary. Maybe I had assumed it was she? Maybe I hadn’t really looked at all. But upon closer inspection I saw clearly it was San Francesco. With a little boy in his arms, the child seated on a book. I was flooded all of a sudden with the memory of my first shamanic journey to put the spirit of our boy in safe hands.

Another scene in Assisi in fresco form (in the Basilica di San Francesco): Mary with her toddler-sized son in her arms and St. Francis to her right. Our guide interpreted this for us as Jesus asking his mother: after me, who will look after my church?

Later, in Castiglione del Lago, I saw another statue of San Francesco, a young boy in his arms once again.

No lo so.

I do not know. I certainly don’t know what all of this means on a grander scale, but what I do know is that our week in Umbria, while a deeply treasured connection with friends also wound up being a powerful, unexpected connection to spiritual source as well as to the loss that was and remains my greatest spiritual portal.

*

As the plane leveled to its cruising altitude, I tried to synthesize my experience. I find I am still doing it, many weeks later. Being among my college mates gave me back fundamental bits of myself that they seem to house, having known me for the past thirty-plus years. They say “Hey Cressey!” and it rings bells within me of a playful, light version of me who lives in the timelessness of my fundamental being.

But being amidst all of this devotional space—faith for centuries on such a grand, visual scale—delivered something else. A sliver of sight into a burgeoning theory of mine: that there is no veil at all, except in our minds. As D.H. Lawrence wrote, “there is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.”

And that is how I left Italy and yet Italy came home with me. My parents, my pup, my one child on the other side left me and yet they travel with me.

I am left to conclude this: we may experience signs that make us recall someone or something, or random passing moments that make more sense many years down the road. In time, detail may be added to a mystery, or memory gets resuscitated as if to say: it is whole, all of this.

It is whole. It is all one.

And sometimes I hear this faint whisper: as fragmented as we may seem to ourselves, we are, too.

*”if you need to dream, dream big”