Spooked - Smell Ya Later

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

After Laura’s husband gets a fatal diagnosis, he promises to contact her from beyond the grave. But how will she know it’s really him? Thank you, Laura Packer, for sharing this special story with Spooked. Laura’s a storyteller in Minneapolis. You can learn more about Laura at her website. Original score by Leon Morimoto, produced by Anne Ford, artwork by Teo Ducot Episodes now drop weekly on Fridays. Featuring brand new stories -- along with episodes previously available only by subscription. Listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jack and Jill crept up my hill to try to steal my water. Jack gave a squeal and screamed for Jill, but I'd already caught her. You're listening to Spooked. Stay. It's kind of a lark. I've talked about seeing this band, A-ha. Live in concert, you might know the song Take On Me, Take Me On. And whenever I bring up seeing them, people are all like, aha.

That one hit, wonder, they still around? Ain't they from Iceland or something? Norway. They're from Norway. Where's Norway? You're corny, dude. Whatever. Then I hear they're going to be in Napa, not too far from Oakland.

A new friend who somehow has never heard of them either. I convince her to go with me. And we arrived. And there's a sea. of happy as far as the eye can see, filing into the outdoor theater, grinning, laughing, everybody electric with anticipation.

Then the rumble of the bass, the shouting, stage lights flashed on, and like they're stepping out of my childhood through the smoke, aha, strolls onto stage, and along with 5,000 of my newest,

closest friends, I lose my mind. I'm jumping, singing blue skies, blue skies. And it's crazy. I didn't even think I knew these songs, but I know these songs. Every word seared into my mind from a different age. Living a boy's adventure tale, I'm loving it, I'm grinning at my friend

who's laughing at my joy at these songs she's never heard. And I don't know why I don't see it coming. This thing, I know I'll be hunting. and low There's no Staggered Like a gunshot I feel my legs

collapsed beneath me In the middle of this concert I'm on my knees shaking Suddenly sobbing Because no This isn't my favorite band It's his favorite band My brother

The only other person In all of America Who knew aha had 10 studio albums. My brother, who ripped his jeans to create an outfit exactly like the guy on stage. My brother, who should be on this lawn dancing next to me. Instead, somehow he's whispered, tugged, cajoled, led me to be right here, right now, and it feels like he's almost, almost, almost next to me on this.

lawn but almost isn't good enough and I wail raw as the day I got that phone call I wail it's not running down my nose like there's no more air left in the world raw ocean of sadness raw

he'd love this song but I'll be hunting high and low things I'll go to I can't even imagine the spot I'm putting my friend in hauling her to this concept so I can collapse on the ground and lose my mind.

I can't. But she is so kind. So kind. She's like, hey, hey, I get it. It's no problem. No problem at all. If we need to just go, I'm trying to catch my breath. I tell her now, I'm so sorry, but right now, this is exactly.

Story comes to us from Laura Packer, and many years ago, Laura realized that her friend Kevin was becoming more than just a friend. It took us a couple years to realize that there was something else there. I remember noticing that tingle, kind of at the back of my neck when he was talking. I had just come out of another relationship that had ended pretty badly, and I wanted a break. But there were these feelings. We went for a walk in the woods at about midnight. and it was very cold.

And I was standing there, looking at the moon, and he walked up right behind me, and I could feel the heat of his body. Very slowly, he put his hands on my shoulders. And I leaned back against him, and I said, I shouldn't do this now. He said, is there ever a right time? I was very still, and then I said, okay.

We held hands as we walked back to his apartment, and necked for a really long time. Holding him was like embracing a tree or a mountain. It just felt so safe. By then I knew that I was falling in love with him and he was falling in love with me. It was a really fun wedding. I was barefoot because I don't like wearing shoes.

Kevin was wearing a pair of jeans and one of his Hawaiian shirts. We set our vows. We promised to shovel snow and shovel shit together. We kissed, and we turned and looked at everybody, and they were all laughing and crying and cheering, and that was it. I found us a house.

The first floor was open and bright, and the second floor had a room that would be a great office, and another room that would be a great guest room, And then the third floor had an enormous closet with a high bar that would work for Kevin's clothing. There was room for this tall man to stretch and not feel like he was going to break something. The kitchen fit me well. I could reach things readily. The only problem with it is the way the cabinets were set up. If they were open, the corners were at the exact height to bang me in the eye or in the forehead.

within a week of moving in, I was walking into the kitchen and I wasn't paying attention and Kevin had left the cabinet open and I slammed into it and got a gash in my forehead. I called for him and I said, you've got to stop doing this. When you do it, I get hurt. He kind of smiled and he apologized, but he would forget fairly often. I would close them and remind him and close them and remind him. I was very cranky about it. But he got the hang of it after we'd been there for a while. We had lived together before, but we had roommates living with us. Having it be just the two of us meant that we didn't have to worry about someone else in the house.

It wasn't like we went out of our way to burp and fart at each other. It's just that we stopped. worried about it in front of each other. If he let one loose that was really bad, I would usually ask him if something had crawled up his butt and died. And if I let loose one that was really bad, he would usually ask me if I was planning on fumigating the entire house. We moved into the house in January.

By August, he was starting to have some back-and-stomach problems. And it just kept getting worse and worse. Every doctor we went to said, welcome to middle age. It was around 10 o'clock at night. I went upstairs to our bedroom, and he was kneeling on the floor, writhing. He said, don't touch me. I knew he was in pain. I started crying.

I said, could we please go to the emergency room? They sent him for an x-ray, and then they said, sent him for an ultrasound, and then they sent him for an MRI. About half an hour later, two doctors walked in and closed the door and told us, people don't come back from pancreatic cancer. They said, we're going to find a bed and admit you. He was there for three weeks. We hadn't talked much about his dying because he hadn't wanted to. Whenever I tried to bring it up, he would say, no, I'm going to fight, I'm going to fight. But by then it was really obvious. The cancer had stolen his voice.

He could barely speak. He could kind of whisper. I asked him, do you believe there's an afterlife? And he said, yes. And I asked him what he thought it was like. And he said, someplace beautiful. My beliefs about an afterlife at the time were, at best, nebulous.

It had never really mattered to me before, but it was mattering more and more because Kevin was going to die soon. By now I was crying, and he was crying. I asked him to let me know that he was okay if he could. He nodded. I said, you know you're going to have to make it really obvious, right? Because I'm tentative about this stuff. He looked at me and he smiled, this big smile, and he nodded. and he said, I know.

And then he said, I can't breathe. There was fluid filling up his heart and his lungs. He died five days later. Kevin had died at 6.20 p.m. And the next day, when there were lots of people in the house, people from his work and friends in the community, at about 618, I thought that we should do a toast. I needed to say the world now has had 24 hours without this magnificent man.

I told everyone to get up and to stand in a circle and that we were going to toast Kevin, with his favorite terrible liqueur, 99 bananas. And then we passed the glass from hand to hand to hand, each of us taking a little sip. Profound sorrow and extraordinary gratitude. and that's what I was feeling. It ended up back in my hand. I took my sip from it, and as I took the sip,

I was looking across the room at the mantelpiece over the fireplace. There was a picture of Kevin on the mantelpiece. The picture fell over, face down, with this little smacky sound, plop. There was a beat after the picture fell over when everyone was quiet. One friend came over to me and said, did you see that?

I think that was Kevin. I said, whatever. Someone must have just bumped into it. The thought of him being in any form but alive and healthy was not something that I could even come near. On the first day of Shiva, my friend John wrote over on his bike. He leaned the bike on the front porch, leaning against the living room window, and then came in and said, Laura, look out the window.

I looked out the window to where John's bike was. And there was a cardinal sitting on the crossbeam of the bike, the bright red male cardinal, looking into the house, tilting its head back and forth, and sometimes tapping on the window with its beak. And he said, you know, people say that cardinals are visitors from the dead. What do you think? And I said, yeah, it's a cardinal.

Kevin's dead. And that's how I felt. On good days, I was flat, on bad days. I was throwing up because I was crying so much. I mostly sat on the couch and watched really bad television. But when I did go out, there were always cardinals. There were always some in the front lawn. They were in the trees.

They were on the porch. More than I had ever seen before. One night, about a month later, I had been up for a lot of the night crying. I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and then walked back into our bedroom and stopped because I didn't believe what I was smelling. I was smelling Kevin's farts.

That kind of rich and unpleasant smell I used to tease him about. But I stood there absolutely shrews. shocked at this aromatic presence in our bedroom that just filled it up. I just knew it was his smell. I walked out of the room and it smelled perfectly normal. Like wood and dust. I walked back into the bedroom and there it was again. I told myself that I was hallucinating, that I was grieving so hard that I was just making it up.

It wasn't real. I finally fell asleep a little before dawn and woke up in the mid-morning. I got up to go downstairs to get some tea. And so I went down from the third floor to the first, turned the corner, and was walking into the kitchen, and something whacked me in the head. I looked up, and every cabinet in the kitchen was open, including the cabinets on top of the fridge that I could not reach. I started laughing and crying at the same time.

He knew it had to be really obvious. So he made it really obvious. It was kind of a turning point for me. It's not like I stopped grieving or stopped missing him, but things were a little easier. I was able to hold a conversation with a friend. I was able to drive by some of the places that we had liked without having to pull over and sob.

I knew that he continued in some way and that all the love that I still felt for him was not just echoing in an empty universe. He died in the end of March, and in May we had a service in Boston. I decided to drive from Kansas City, Boston. I stopped in Buffalo, New York, and visited some friends of mine who lived there. We were sitting out on the porch. This woman walked by, she looked and said, hey, how you doing?

And then kept walking. My friends said, she never talks to us. And my friends said that she was a neighbor, but not a particularly friendly one, not someone they knew. About an hour later, she came back, and she walked right up onto the porch. She was a middle-aged woman, slender, a little hunched. She stood right in front of me, and she said, you're not from around here, so I wanted to come over here and find out who you are and what you're doing in my neighborhood. She had such a big smile.

I didn't feel threatened or anything. She was just curious. She and I started bantering back and forth. She asked where I was from. and I said, Kansas City, and she said, they have some good barbecue there, and I said, yes, they do. And she said, but it's not as good as mine. And we just went back and forth.

When it was starting to wind down, she looked at me, and she tapped her chin, and she said, Kevin says hi. And off she went. I had never seen that woman before. My friends swore up and down that they had never talked with her. It made me feel warm and loved. and happy and satisfied that he came back to say hello. It made me think that wherever he was,

he was probably having a great time because he was someone who liked playing and liked learning new things. And I could very easily imagine him in the afterlife saying, so can I do this? How do I do that? And just having a good time. About a month later, I was in Atlantic City visiting my parents.

I was walking on the beach. I was feeling really sad. Kevin's favorite thing in the world was the ocean. And it was the first time I had been to the ocean since he died. There was a family nearby. The father of the family was tall and broad and built like Kevin, and I started crying. The mom of the family came over and asked me what was going.

going on and I told her. My husband died a few months ago and he loved the beach and I miss him and your husband. He looks just like my husband and I miss him so much. I said, I know this is really weird, but do you mind if he gives me a hug? And she said, oh honey, of course, of course you can have a hug. And she yelled for her husband. He came over and he gave me a hug and it was that same sensation of wrapping my arms. around a tree or being held by a mountain,

and he held me while I sobbed. When I finally was ready to let go, he was crying and his wife was crying, and they hugged, and we gave each other these awkward smiles like you do when you cry on somebody you don't know. They started to walk away, and then she stopped, and she said, this is going to sound really weird,

but was your husband's name Kevin? I burst into tears again. Her husband looked at her and said, I told you you had a gift. The only way she couldn't own was because Kevin told her. Every time one of these strange things has happened, I feel this joy and sorrow at the same time. This joy that he chose to do this and this awe that he did it.

And then this wave of grief that he wasn't there. But I wouldn't turn it away. I would never turn it away. I don't hear from him much these days, but it's okay. Wherever he is, he's okay. And I get to be okay, too. Love smells like Laura Packer. She's a storyteller in Minneapolis.

You can learn more about Laura at her website, Laurapacker.com. The original score for that piece was by Leon Morimoto. It was produced. by Anne Ford. Oh, it's that time. But first, I have a request because you know that in this age of modern miracles,

so many of us are retreating back to the very oldest traditions when it comes to questions of health and healing. And for personal reasons, I'm learning that plant lore follows very different rules that medical care and hospital

settings. Practitioners sometimes claim to be able to hear plants or to see in dreams how one herb mixed just so with the root or flour to make long suffered hurts go away

but this is not just taking and chopping and mixing this is asking singing touching medicine built on the knowing of that which grows from the earth

but there's also the opposite or maybe the twin, which is blood lore, where it takes perhaps even a single drop of one type of life force is traded for the healing of another. And if you have knowledge in the story of this world, please tell me about it, because there's nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Spooked at snapjudgment.org. And remember, if you like your storytelling, under the bright light of day. Get the amazing, stupendous sister podcast, snap judgment. It is storytelling.

Books created by the team that knows all the lyrics to every single aha song except for Mark Ristich. He only listens to people singing on street corners. There's David Kim, Taylor DeKott, Zoe Fregno, Ann Ford, Eric Yonyes, Mercedage, Miles Lassie, Yari Bundy, Doug Stewart, Leon Morimoto, The spook theme song is by Pat Mississippi Miller.

My name is from Washington, and we say cavalierly that the past is the present, and that is certainly true as far as it goes. But of course, things are more complicated than that. Different parts of what happened previously touches our lives in different ways, and often we pull forth and make manifest echoes of what's gone before. This is a power that's only granted to the living.

And while we can draw light, we can also call the shadow. This is an awesome force. And to keep in mind the enormity of that which we command, I always begin with a simple ritual. Stay grounded. Despite the darkness of this path, listen to me when I tell you. Never, never, never, never. Ever.