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If You Could Bring Someone Back to Life, Would You? – The Mater’s Series Part 2 – VM Franck

Part Two of The Mater’s Series
Love, Loss and Resurrection

Mahogany-brown eyes gazed back at me from across the table.  Aaron’s eyes.  Sipping rosé I absorbed his soul, drawing it unto my own, hoping somehow to keep it there forever.  Shades of love wavered in from the past, shades I had known as experience transformed illusions into reality.  Fractured by violence and the indifference of others, including a condemning husband, I had grown from a young woman with hope to one of vulnerabilities.  Mid all the heartache, time I spent with Aaron helped more than anything else.  He cared enough to take time to listen, to be there as best he could.  We shared fishing trips to the mountains, intellectual conversations invoking mental gymnastics, concerns about personal and family issues and lovemaking in unusual places.  During the years we had known each other, our love grew into an inner connection, an interweaving.

On that day in the pizza parlor over thirty years ago I came to know the tapestry would remain incomplete.  I needed to end the illicit relationship and design a life with someone who could be there for me full-time.  It fractured my heart, as well as his, to do so.  Years later when I learned of his death I, again, experienced the loss.  He was gone from this life, permanently.

The Mater's Series coverBut is permanence, permanent?  What if it’s not?  So, I’m asking you, if you could resurrect a lost sweetheart so you could be with him or her again, if you could return life to someone who had lost theirs, would you?  Yes, no, maybe, I don’t know…these are plausible answers.  Honestly, there are circumstances under which I would consider it.  Maybe you would too.  There are people I miss, those taken from this reality prematurely, as well as those I could have loved better, those who could have taught me more just by being themselves and those I cherish.  If I had to the power to fix that, I just might.  This was especially true when I was younger.

When we are young we believe in fairytale solutions.  We will grow up strong and proud.  The tools we use to sculpt our lives will generate our most desired outcomes.  All the choices we make will be the right ones.  Even if bad things happen, we know we are smart enough to emerge on the other side of these catastrophes unscathed.  So it is in our dreams.  We are certain this will continue to be true as our lives blossom before us.  What we don’t realize during our youth is that there are no abracadabra solutions.  Oh, in our inexperience we don’t call them that, but it is a correct label, nonetheless.  We are confident that those whose lives do not turn out as they hope, just don’t plan correctly.  They do not have the savvy, the inner fortitude, the looks or destiny that we possess.  Our inexperience and naivete lead us to believe we will prevail against all comers.  When insecurity and contradictions hit we push them aside.

Then life happens.  It becomes more personal, more subjective, and we become the proverbial I.  That which I planned didn’t work.  I try again.  Again, it doesn’t work, or it’s only partially successful.  People I encounter do not adhere to my ways of thinking.  These other people fail to be even slightly compliant.  As it turns out, they have their own ideas which seem valid to them.  Imagine that.  They are wrong, of course.  I am right, and I  “know” it.  I become sure that if these misguided individuals could only see their mistakes in discernment, they could find their own true way.  They don’t, but neither do I, at least some of the time.  I try other solutions.  The results are similar even though the circumstances have been altered.  The changes I make do not implement the expected outcomes.

Fretting about the way things can go so haywire, I nurse disillusionment and despair.  To pull myself out of the rut I take a class, go to church or to bars and/or engage in one fling after another.  I employ my favorite crutch, consider alternative solutions and try them.  The solutions seem to be working, when all at once someone I care about does something which harshly impacts my life.  There is no way I can avoid it.

I cry out to God, the universe or an empty room for relief.  Time passes.  Nothing happens.  I slosh on as life’s ocean sucks me under, wave after wave.  In an inkling, in a time and a way I did not anticipate, a stranger appears.  He is kind, concerned and offers sympathy when others have abandoned me.

That’s truly how it happened for me.  I met Aaron four months after my brother committed his crimes.  My husband at the time was ashamed of me for what my brother had done.  He forbid me to tell his old-money family.  My entire support system, including my huge extended family, deflated like a soufflé during an earthquake.  My brother was charged with murder.  As I navigated the undercurrents of the legal system and functioned as my parents’ life vests, I was tugged into the whirlpool.

Never during my youth could I have imagined my life would morph into this kind of horror.  Going under in a turbulence not of my making, I took the hand Aaron offered.  Over a period of two-and-a-half-years, he and I developed a friendship.  He, too, was married.  Friendship blossomed into more.  As I had anticipated at its inception, this relationship created its own separate issues.  After six-and-a-half-years of friendship I decided I needed to end the affair, dismantling my haven of comfort.  Still shattered by the murders, I divorced my husband and charted a new direction.

Resurrection Rose coverWhen I learned of Aaron’s death, it had an unsettling impact on me.  To work it through I decided to create a work of visionary fiction whereby he and I could resurrect our relationship and be together.  Thus, my novel, Resurrection Rose, became a reality, evolving into the second book in The Mater’s Series.  To lighten the tale I employed the crazy old women, Tater’s Maters.  They plopped themselves into the protagonist’s life at unlikely times and in ways which were not necessarily welcome.

Bethanie, a professional portrait artist, paints people back to life.  She just doesn’t know it until they start showing up.  While attempting to make sense of her skills, she runs into her former lover, Gabe, a man with an environmental mind set, working on a project to clean trash from the ocean systems in hopes of extending life on the planet.  A gutsy gal, Bethanie risks further heartache by resurrecting their once forbidden love…along with Gabe’s deceased grandfather.  When she and Gabe catch Gramps fooling around with Lottie, one of Bethanie’s deceased relatives, Bethanie is propelled into a world peopled by nosy, old dead women insistent on helping her abilities unfold and transforming her into something she had no idea she already was.  The old women knew, like old women sometimes do.

Exploring the known as well as the unknown, this story reveals the unpredictability of love across time and condition.  It explores inaccuracies and perceptions about things which seem to be facts and reveals the role understanding plays in becoming creators, actors and manipulators of our own destinies.  Unique in its presentation the work provides the stage for the group of characters to demonstrate love in many of its variations, all circling the romance between the heroine and her lover.

We live in the core of creation.  We are that creation, the initial products as well as the creator.  So again, my question to you is, if you could paint someone back into your life, no matter the implements used to create this new reality, would you?

Lady Phoenix

The answer is contingent on many variables.  As in other aspects of our lives, anything could run amok at any time and turn our plateaus into sinkholes.  One of the ways to resolve this conundrum is to realize that life is an experiment with multiple possibilities.  Some we can control, but most we can’t.  When the waves hit and bowl us over, we can learn to swim parallel to the shoreline and allow those waves to carry us back to beach rather than fight them and drown.

Editor (Saleena Karim): With sincere apologies for the lateness of this post, for which I take personal responsibility!

This is Part 2 of a 3-part article.

Part 1 can be found here
Part 3 can be found here

A full description of the Mater’s Series novels is available here.


About the author

V. M. Franck grew up in a highly religious working class environment. After working at a series of unsatisfying jobs, in her late twenties she earned a B. S. from Oregon State University. Thereafter, she worked with abused and disadvantaged children. A family tragedy changed her perceptions permanently. She wrote and published a book about its impact on herself and her family. She met Philip, who had always wanted to be a writer. They married and moved to the mountains to write full-time. She is currently writing her eleventh book. All but one of them are works of Visionary Fiction. She is also an exhibiting artist with her own online gallery.

Visit her website: whereartmeetstheheart.com

Her works of Visionary Fiction include:

For What Is To Come
Tater’s Maters of Hootenanny Flats, Part 1 The Mater’s Series
Resurrection Rose, Part 2 The Mater’s Series
Final Entry, Part 3 The Mater’s Series
Jesus’ Little Sister Ruth
In Ways We Can’t Imagine, Part 1 The St. Germaine Chronicles
The Pacifist’s War, Part 2 The St. Germaine Chronicles
Once Without Dying

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12 Comments

  1. Fantastic post and question. Would I rebirth someone from my past that I had loved or still loved…? I’m not sure I could be that brave. There are some farewells that were painful enough the first time. To repeat them again at the end of a book might be too much to endure.

    I love the ideas behind your mater books. My biggest frustration is only that I seem to have so little time to read lately and so many good books, but this one really struck me. This one is on the short list!

  2. Thank you Michelle. I think writers spend so much time writing, that they don’t have much time to read the works of others. And when they need a break from reading and rewriting their own stuff, they want to relax watching a movie or going for a walk or some such thing. It’s been like that for me since I began my writing career years ago. I read a lot more of the works of others before I became a writer.

    Yes, Drew, we do. But it’s not the same as being able to actually hug someone, to feel their skin, to hear their voice and to just be with them. I’ve never accessed the Akashic Library. I don’t know how to do that. When I have lost those closest to me to the deaths of their physical bodies, I wanted them back in the flesh on the same level as I was.

  3. Would I bring a deceased sweetheart back to life? My first reaction comes shaded with the realities of having suffered such a loss at age twenty-nine. No. The abrupt end of a life visualized together calls for an enormous effort to look at the remaining half full glass of life. This brought about a profound change in me. I would never be the same young woman my husband had loved, and I would not honor his death if I traded my awakenings for another moment with him. That aside, the writer in me loves your story. Your writing is lyrical and charged with the emotion of your own experiences. Yes! Bring back the lost lovers.

  4. Christina, I’m so sorry you lost your husband at such a young age. I’m sure it ripped you open. Did you become a writer because of your loss? I agree that the persons we once were before the losses, were different. I like what you said, “I would not honor his death if I traded my awakenings for another moment with him.” Those are the words of maturity…maturity that usually only comes through pain, loss and choosing growth. I, too, am grateful for mine for those reasons.

    Thank you for your kind words about my writing and my “lyrical” style. I can only write from my experiences. There’s no keeping them out. If I try, they beat down the door. If I ignore that, they break out a window, climb in and present themselves..

  5. Vi, you always write with such fierce honesty and passion. Thank you for sharing your story with us. I don’t know if I would consider repainting a lost loved one back into my life, but I like the idea of being able to do so.

  6. Thanks, Saleena, honesty, passion and integrity are primary, as well as love and respect. Life teaches some amazing things as we work through the pain. Pain can gave a positive function if we give it a chance.

  7. V.M., The call to write came into the world with me, but I didn’t take it up in earnest until later in my life. I wrote a book about the loss of my husband, back in the day of the typewriter, but burned the manuscript before ever reading it through. I have never regretted that. Death comes for all of us—and we are equipped to handle its reach, even if it takes a loved one earlier than we had expected.
    Save me a place among the crazy old women, if you get there first!!

  8. Christina, Will do. I’m nearly there now. Grin. I think it’s the only viable way to a healthy survival. Otherwise, life is too depressing.

    I remember this old woman, Easter Lily, who attended the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference in the late ’80s. She was 75. She’d had a hard life. Her mother gave birth while she was picking cotton. Her mom had a raft of kids. They were incredibly poor and discrimination against black people was rampant at the time. In the bar after the classes at SBWC were over for the day, guys, young and old, wanted to dance with her. Why? She knew how to lighten up and let go. She was genuine. I was a child compared to her. And I thought, when I grow up to be 75, I want to be like her.

    We can make it together. That’s what this is about. If we don’t realize that it is to our detriment.

  9. Took me awhile to get to your post, Vi, but it was worth the wait. As a historical VF writer, with novels focused on reincarnation, I like to think that much of what I recreate while writing has a base in previous reality. This would certainly include previous romantic relationships, although I won’t speculate here whether those I wrote are personal or plucked from the Common Mind (I don’t completely know.)

    Regarding the loss of loved ones and the grief and perhaps regret associated with it, it makes for heart-rending stories. Some of my earliest stuff was sparked by what I called “beautiful sadness,” much of that recast later as “merely maudlin.” I still experience that tug on my heart strings but, lest it get too extreme, I resort to a saying our Unity minister often repeats: “You never get it wrong because you never get it done.” I think that applies to relationship as well as to the VF novels we write.

  10. Thank you, Victor. “Beautiful sadness” is a good way to put it. Have you ever wondered once we leave this level of existence and decide to move on to explore other realms, which lover you would be with and if you’d have to choose?

    1. Just saw your question on this today, and it is a good one (really two). Yes, I have wondered but never came to a conclusion on it. Now that I am thinking about it, I will take it into the grokking space, maybe into my dreams. Curious if I will come up with an answer.

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