SPIRIT UNFOLDING

I know I am surrounded by spirits, and that is the feeling
of the Lord.

As a heart traced in sand upon the shore vanishes under the onrushing waves of a fathomless ocean, the hand of God swept over my precious nineteen-year-old daughter Naomi, and she disappeared, leaving me with only memories. Although we had been linked tightly by bonds of flesh and spirit, the flesh was now broken but the tie between our spirits remained.

When I arrived at her side, Naomi was still in her bed, where she had died an hour earlier, wearing a red and blue T-shirt and khaki shorts. The oxygen equipment attached to her face for the last week was gone, and gazing at her through my tears, I sought to understand an expression I had never before seen on her face. The signs of her terrible two-year struggle with cancer were lifted, and it was as if I were beholding a person who had just drowned in an