A Message

One of the things I do in order to stay sane following the passing of Daniel, is that I belong to a number of Mother's Bereavement Groups. These can be very helpful because most of us live life on a roller coaster and when I'm up a little, I can help someone who is where I was last week, and vice versa. This also serves the integral purpose of talking about our children to someone. People who have lost a child need to share their memories of their son or daughter, and too often, others who have not experienced the death of a child, cannot understand this, or be comfortable with it. Many times on these groups, we just talk about funny things that happened with our child or about his favorite foods, etc. On one of these lists, we have three psychics, two of which have lost a child themselves. Although these lists do convey that occasionally WE are the best people to talk to our own children, they do occasionally pass messages they believe they have received from a particular child. One of the mother's passed this one to me.
She said that she thinks this message is for me. She said that she saw a very clean and pretty calf, black and white, in a vibrant green field in a beautiful setting. At that moment, a blue butterfly lands on his nose, and for a moment, he goes cross-eyed to see it. It is comical and she says it runs over and over again. She asked me if it meant anything to me, because she does not understand it.
Two weeks before, in the process of building the barn, the contractor asked me what I would like on the weathervane. I had been wracking my brains as to what animal or symbol would be a remembrance of Daniel. He loved so many animals, that it would be hard to pick just one. I thought about an angel, but I wanted to memorialize things he did in a tangible way, and not related to his passing. Finally, after looking at the internet for about an hour, I cried at the prospect of living life here without him and I said, "Daniel, you are going to have to show me what animal you think will work on the weather vane". Perhaps, I told her, this is what he is doing.
Later, I remembered that when he was small and we used to go to the post office together, we would pass a dairy farm with all the young calves tied to what looked like doghouses. He loved calves ! I thought this was likely the message.
In the confusion of my daughter's graduation from college, I forgot to mention this to her, so this week in the car, I did. It had an additional meaning for her. She said that when Daniel was small (She was 12 when he was born), she used to play a game with him called, "Buppey-fly". She would pretend her fingers were a butterfly and would pretend to fly them until they landed on his nose. He would laugh and sometimes go cross-eyed, and then everyone else would laugh. I had forgotten this ! I told Stephanie that our list friend had said it "runs over and over again". "Like an animation !" Stephanie said. Yes, certainly, I thought. Daniel was a master at computer animation. Perhaps he found a way to send us one.