"What-UncleGorby" - читать интересную книгу автора (What Leslie)

Katya joined a support group for people who had sighted their relatives after
death. in all there were twenty: five members. Their leader, a woman named
Sunny, made her living as a clairvoyant who performed past-life regressions. She
explained to Katya the five stages after death.

"Denial comes first," Sunny said. "Where you don't really believe someone is
dead because the hospital wouldn't let you in to view the body, so you suspect
they made a mistake."

It turned out that this had happened to one young man, who swore that the nurse
had pronounced his mother dead. He found out hours later, when the doctor made
his visit, that the nurse had been wrong. The shock of it all was what ended up
killing his mother.

"The second stage," Sunny said, "is anger. Where you find yourself furious every
time you see someone older or fatter than the relative you've lost."

"It isn't fair," said the plump woman sitting beside Katya. "Why did my in-laws
get to eat French Brie and live? And my poor husband, dead at only fifty-eight."

Bargaining, Sunny said, was probably the most embarrassing one to admit. "You
plead with God to take your cheap uncle instead of your father, because your
cheap uncle never bothered to send you a birthday gift, even though you'd sent
presents to him and his wife, and their three children -now grown --for twenty
years."

There was depression, the stage the support group told Katya they thought she
was stuck in. Food was one cure for depression, or shopping, or time, or
anti-depressant drugs.

"Don't worry about putting on weight," the woman who had lost her husband said.
"It's better than taking up smoking."

"I'm not sure I agree with that," said the man whose mother had not really been
dead. He pulled out a cigarette from his shirt pocket. "Smoking's not so bad,"
he said with a look toward the plump woman, "compared to other things."

Last of the five stages was acceptance, but there were no guarantees one could
get to that one, despite having gone through all the others.

"But this didn't happen when my mother died," Katya said. "Why didn't I see her
ghost?"

"Maybe she had nothing left to say to you," Sunny said.

After the meeting, Katya drove home and ate a bowl of ice cream while she
listened to her stepmother's voice.

"Honey. I have very bad news. Call me when you get in." Katya listened to the
tape, and after, could not get to sleep.