Ordinary World

By Stacy Baggett

Life does not end just because you die. This is the first of many lessons Sherrie is faced with when her life is tragically cut short at the age of fourteen. Overcome with a sense of loss and desperation, Sherrie is suddenly thrust into the unknown and a Heaven she never could have imagined. It is a Heaven where there is no clear answer to anything; a Heaven where lives are played out like movies and flowers grow tall in each individual's garden. There, with the help of her spirit guide, Sera, she must review her own life in order to move on to the next level. In order to do this, she must learn to let go of the things—and people—she cares for, come to terms with her unhappy past, accept that which she cannot change, and forgive the mother who never loved her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stacy Baggett
• Release date: Jul 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781386934363

Book preview

Ordinary

World

––––––––

Stacy Baggett

Copyright © 2015 Stacy Baggett

Ordinary World

Second Edition, Paperback – Published 2015

Ordinary World, First Edition, Paperback – Copyright © 2007 Stacy Baggett

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Printed in the United States of America.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Cheri

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Forty-five

Forty-six

Forty-seven

Acknowledgements

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me:

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree;

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain;

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply, I may remember,

And haply, may forget.

-Christina Rossetti

One

Life does not end just because you die.

This is the first thing Sera taught me when my own life reached its end on that fateful day in the fall of 1993.

And that we, as human beings, are not as important as we’d like to think in the grand scheme of things.

The world still turns. The rivers still flow. The sun still shines. The moon continues to orbit the Earth. Life goes on. Our hearts have merely stopped beating, that’s all.

The first thing you should know about me is that I didn’t plan on dying. Mine was an accident, as most deaths usually are.

I didn’t want to die. I was only fourteen years old. When I grew up I wanted to be a writer. Now I guess I’ll never know what I might have been. That part still makes me mad sometimes—not knowing.

Sera says it’s only natural, and that in time I’ll outgrow it.

My name was Sherrie. I say was because technically once our lives are over we’re supposed to shed our mortal names. I say technically because even though years have passed on Earth, I still can’t get used to it. Sera is always reprimanding me about that. He says I can go by any name I want, and besides, Sherrie is such an ordinary name.

Really, Sherrie, he’s always saying to me, I don’t know why you insist on clinging to things from that horrid life of yours. It’s true, my life wasn’t so great. A lot of awful things happened in the fourteen years I inhabited it.

But I can’t help it. I have a hard time letting go of things. Which is why Sera gets so frustrated with me sometimes.

You’ll never be able to move on as long as you continue to cling to these things. It’s words I hear Sera repeat, over and over again.

It’s not entirely my fault I can’t think of another name to go by. I’m used to Sherrie. It’s the name I grew up with.

Of course, I use the term grew up rather loosely.

Another thing Sera constantly nags me about is that I’ve still yet to shed my mortal form.

I don’t know what it is you’re afraid of! he often exclaims, exasperated. You’ve gone through this at least a hundred times in lifetimes before. You say you regret not getting to live long enough, but yet you refuse to move on so that you may live again. Until you shed all this ‘Sherrie’ nonsense, you’ll never be able to be reborn.

I’m sorry, I’ll apologize, repeatedly. I can’t help it. I’m trying. To which he will sigh and soften his tone.

I know you are. But would you please mind hurrying it up a bit? Just because we have all eternity before us doesn’t mean that it should be wasted dawdling about the way you have been. Remember: if you don’t move on, I can’t move on.

Sera always seems to have a way of making me feel guilty. But he can’t honestly blame me. After all, I didn’t ask for him to be my Guardian Angel.

I was once like you, he’ll continue. Unable to move on. Unwilling. Reluctant to let go of the past.

I don’t see you shedding your mortal form, I’ll point out to him. Which usually earns at least a small chuckle.

That’s only because you haven’t obtained that state of existence yet. Until you are able to achieve a level of pure consciousness, I will continue to appear to you as I am. Besides, for the time being, I think that it will be more comfortable for the both of us if we continue to communicate in this way. His voice suddenly turns very gentle. Do try to understand, Sherrie. Losing sense of your former self is not the end of the world.

I hate it when he puts it that way. Former Self. There’s such a permanence to it. As if the person I am—or was—is already gone.

He’s right, of course.

Perhaps that is why I am so stubborn when it comes to changing things. My life was such a mess that I never truly appreciated what I had when I had it. Now that it’s not mine anymore, I hate the thought of leaving it behind.

I was nobody special. I could’ve been any girl you passed by on the street. I was born in a small town called Petty and I lived there until the day I died. I didn’t have very many friends, but the ones I had I wouldn’t have traded for the world.

First and foremost there was Eddie. I knew Eddie since we started school together. His mom, Polly, was my mom’s older sister, but she didn’t want anything to do with her. A couple times I went and stayed with them when things got bad at my house. Aunt Polly loathed my mom with a passion, but she was always nice to me. Eddie’s dad left them when he was little and never looked back twice, so he never knew him. That was one of the major things we had in common. I never really got to know my real dad, either.

Eddie was short for his age, about five foot three inches, and he had long, shaggy brown hair, which always fell into his eyes. His mom was always nagging him to get a haircut. He never listened. And I’m glad, because the hair constantly falling in his face was one of the things which made him Eddie. I used to tease him about it, and he’d get mad sometimes. I liked to say he looked like one of the Ramones. He didn’t even know who the Ramones were. I wouldn’t have, either, except that my Uncle John and I had watched their movie together once when I was little. Eddie wasn’t big on music, or movies, for that matter. Never mind reading. One of the things Eddie always bragged about was that he’d gone fourteen years and had never read an entire book in his life—that wasn’t a comic book, that is. That’s where we were different. I loved to read and Eddie couldn’t stand it. I wanted to be a writer, and often spent my time dreaming up stories that I hoped to put down on paper one day. Eddie spent all his spare time watching cartoons and playing video games.

But we got along, Eddie and me. He’d always been there whenever I needed him. And his mom had often cared for me like she was my own mother, when my mom wouldn’t. I always liked being with their family. Even when Eddie was busy, or even if he wasn’t home, Aunt Polly would always invite me in and hang around until dinner. They didn’t have much, but it was enough. Their house was small, white with pink trim, and the paint was peeling off. They rented it from an old man who lived up the street. Most of the time their house was a mess, but I didn’t mind. It gave a lived-in feel to it. Anyway, Aunt Polly worked full time as the head cafeteria lady at the local elementary school, and didn’t have time to clean. She always found time to cook, though, and to garden. Theirs was a big backyard, and Aunt Polly always kept a garden growing in it. Sometimes I’d come over and help her. We’d plant things like tomatoes, squash, and sunflowers. Aunt Polly loved sunflowers.

I suppose you could say that Eddie was my best friend. He took it hard when I died. He was the one who sat with me, after the accident. I didn’t die right away. And I guess, looking back at it now, that I knew I was dying. Eddie was the last person that I ever talked to on Earth. My own mother didn’t even bother to come to the hospital when the police called her. She didn’t plan on me dying, either.

I had one other friend on Earth besides Eddie, a girl named Laura, whom I had known since the sixth grade. She had red hair, blue eyes and wore glasses. She was about average size for our age, and she was really smart—and really shy. She and I both had a fancy for the Beatles. In fact, that’s how I became friends with her. She sat in front of me in Math class; one day I looked over and noticed that she had a picture of Paul McCartney taped to her binder.

Do you like the Beatles? I blurted out excitedly. It was hard to find anyone my age who’d even heard of them—never mind someone who liked them—in those days.

Yeah, she replied, timidly, as if unsure what my intentions were. I could sympathize with her; many a time I’d been made fun of for the things I liked, too.

They’re my favorite group, I said. How long have you been a fan?

About two years, she smiled, beginning to warm up to me. Paul McCartney is my favorite.

Yeah, I sighed, dreamily. He’s a hunk. I’ve liked them for a while, too. John’s my favorite. And so our friendship began. The changes of middle school were often hard on us; sometimes we’d fight, and go for days without speaking, but in the end we’d always make up and be friends again. I always liked being with Laura. She usually understood what I was talking about.

Laura wasn’t at school the day I died. We’d only been in high school a little over a month, but she didn’t like it. She was always thinking up some excuse, some reason, to stay home from school. People made fun of her, she said, because of the way she looked, and besides that she was overweight. I never understood why she always claimed that she was fat. She looked alright in my opinion. After I died she did put on quite a bit of weight. I’ve always felt guilty, knowing that she had problems for years on account of me.

And then there was me. Plain ol’ Sherrie Blackwell. Like I said, there was nothing special about me. I worked hard and got good grades, and I dreamed about being a famous writer by the time I was eighteen. I liked to write poems, to read and to listen to music. As far as I know, nobody ever was in love with me. I guess I looked alright when I was alive. I had short brown hair and large gray eyes. Eddie used to constantly call me Bug eyes when we were younger. Whenever the subject of eyes came up, Aunt Polly would always get excited over my eye color, like she had never seen them before.

Ooh, they’re gray! she’d exclaim, after requesting to have a look at them. With black around the rim, and flecks of yellow in the iris. Just like a storm! Eddie would always choke, either in disgust or with laughter. I liked Aunt Polly, but she sure could embarrass me.

When I was little I was blonde and my eyes leaned more towards being blue. By the time I died, I was five foot five inches tall and about average size—not too skinny, not too fat. My favorite food was cheese pizza and cottage cheese. My favorite color was blue. My favorite movie was American Graffiti. I used to love the Monkees, the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges when I was little. I loved oldies rock ‘n’ roll; the Beatles were my favorite band in the world. I also liked Tiffany and Duran Duran. Simon Le Bon was my favorite. I used to dream that I would meet him someday.  It was one of my few goals in life. I knew I would never get anywhere near any of the Beatles, so Simon Le Bon was it. It seems shallow now, looking at it from this side of things, but I still get sad every now and then that it never happened. I didn’t really want much out of life while I was living. I never had the chance to grow. I thought that the world was mine, and that I had all eternity stretched out before me. Now you could say I really do. My life didn’t go far.

Sera doesn’t like it when I think this way.

You are only looking at the surface of things, he’ll tell me. In your mind, you wanted very little out of life, and the things you desired were quite small and shallow. In your heart, you longed for the most important thing in the world, of which you’d been deprived. It is only then that Sera’s disposition will grow dark, and it scares me. I know what he’s talking about.

He’s talking about my mother. She never loved me. I was an accident; a mistake when she was a teenager that ruined her life. I never knew who my dad was as a kid; I never asked, and she never told me. When I was a little girl, I used to wonder about him. Who he was. Where he was from. What he looked like.

Why he didn’t want me.

These questions were almost answered towards the end of my life. A month before I died, I finally found out who my real dad was. It took me two weeks to work up the nerve to call him. When I did, I was surprised to learn that he was nice. His name was Mike, and he was living on the outskirts of town with his wife, Sharon. Of course, the question that was eating at my mind was whether I could come live with him or not; I ended up calling him one night in desperation from Aunt Polly and Eddie’s house after my mom had kicked me out for the umpteenth time. He took down the address and came picked me up right away.

You always have a place in our home, he assured me. I know how hard dealing with your mother can be.

No, he didn’t. How could he? He never had to live with her; never had to feel her hatred. She was, as Aunt Polly always put it, a waste of space. She shouldn’t have been a mother. She let bad things happen to her children. Her name was Grace, though there was nothing graceful or gracious about her. She was the biggest drag you would ever meet. She was scraggly looking, always wearing gray tank-top dresses, and had long, greasy brown hair. She always had this look on her face, like she was mad and was about to hit you. She never talked to me like I was a person, only yelled. When I lived with her, that is. Once I was seven and got taken away from them, I rarely ever went back for long. When I say them, I’m referring to her and my step-father, Stephen.

She met Stephen when she was knocked up with me, and married him shortly after I was born. He adopted me, but I always knew he wasn’t my real father.

When I was alive, I had a little sister. Her name was Darla. She was six years younger than me. I never liked her much, but then our time was cut short and I never got to know her too well. She was a brat. My mom loved her, and spoiled her rotten—when she wasn’t pawning off her parental responsibilities on me, that is And even now, after all this time, it makes me angry, because she never, ever cared about me.

It still hurts, even now, when nothing in all creation is supposed to hurt me. But still the pain is there, like an old wound that’s never allowed to fully heal, before being ripped back open, over and over again.

This is the reason why Sera is so desperate for me to move on. But the sword which keeps cutting at me is a double-edged one, for it’s the very same reason why I can’t let go.

Two

"See all this? This comes from living—and dying. Each individual’s garden remains and flourishes, even once one has returned to life. When the time comes for the individual to return, the garden burns itself, so that it may regrow. There is a gap in transmission of the Cosmos, shall we say, in the period between life and the afterlife; during this transitional period one must come to terms with their last life; to understand why things happened the way they happened, and to become aware of how all this plays its part and fits in as a piece of the jigsaw puzzle of destiny. All of our lives have already been lived before; they continue to exist now, in other realms...

"Imagine our existence is contained in a massive glass ball, and that ball has been fragmented by life. The ball must be pieced back together, then, and each fragment of glass represents a life. The life does not disappear once we have finished with it; it continues to be reflected and to exist in its own realm of the glass. Right now you are in the process of piecing your globe back together; to become aware of your existence. Despite what your memory tells you right now, you are not Sherrie. You are more than that. She is merely a sliver of the puzzle; a small piece which lived and died and has its place. Eventually you will come to terms with this, and be able to shed your ‘Sherrie’ persona.

I walked this field countless times while you were alive; back when it was full in bloom and more beautiful than you could ever imagine. I accompanied you through your life, and revisited others...You must understand, this was all decided a long time ago. As I accompanied you through your journeys, your garden bloomed wide and far...but then suddenly one day, it spontaneously combusted. All of your flowers...all your lives...all up in flames. I was horrified, I must confess. The end of your life snuck up on me rather suddenly. It was a brief existence, and a sad one at that. But it has ended; is done with, now. And in time, you will let go.

Three

I always thought that when you died, Jesus or some deceased relative would magically appear to cross you over. Heaven was a place in the clouds, a city of white where the dead dwelled and passed eternity by playing harps and riding winged horses through the sky. God was an old man in long, flowing robes with white hair and a long beard, who carried a cane and sat on a marble throne inside his castle. His castle looked like a crystal version of the Emerald City. This was the center of Heaven; everything else revolved around it, like clockwork. God sat at the center of it all, watching everything. When you died the angels would take you to meet him, and all the questions in the world, the deep dark mysteries of the universe, would be answered. As a kid I would often envision this Heaven, and Abraham Lincoln would always be roaming around, ready to greet newcomers in his stove-top hat. As I got older I fancied meeting people like John Lennon, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison there. I figured that they’d be able to tell me all I needed to know, and that we would become friends, and spend all eternity drinking wine, discussing philosophy and listening to records. I soon found out that this Heaven I’d constructed in my mind was misconceived. When I died all the questions I’d held remained just as unanswered as they had been on Earth; there was no old bearded guy waiting in a castle in the clouds to clarify everything for me. Perhaps this was the hardest part of death in which I struggled to wrap my mind around: that there was no central Heaven. There was no eternity, no such thing as forever. Everything just was. That’s the funny thing about dying—you don’t always know that you have right away. There were no dead relatives, no guiding light, no choir of angels singing. In death things are sometimes just as screwy as they are on Earth.

My death was not easy, nor did it happen instantly. In some ways I’m grateful that it wasn’t, although I’ve often wondered if it would have been better if it had been. If I’d died right away, I wouldn’t have suffered. It might have been nice to suddenly disappear into nothing; to sink into the mysterious abyss. But it did not happen that way, so there is no use dwelling on it, on what might have been. I died one hour and thirty-three minutes after my accident. I was in a hospital in the next town over, with a team of surgeons working on me, trying to revive me. I suppose you could say that technically I died out along Norton Road. I didn’t lose consciousness right away. I was in pain. Eddie was there to hold my hand and try to comfort me. We both knew that I was dying. And I was afraid.

The day I died the sun was shining and the sky was a white-blue color; it was one of those days which was slightly overcast and that didn’t really feel like fall. There was a slight breeze, the kind that’s heavy and warm, and brushes through your hair like ghostly fingers stroking the head of a child on nights when they’re half asleep. The leaves were just beginning to turn yellow and red on the trees; pumpkins and scarecrows were starting to pop up on doorsteps and front lawns. Halloween was coming soon. It was a typical October day in northern California.

I was not living at home when I died. That weekend marked two weeks since I had moved in with Mike and Sharon. Things were going well. Things were finally beginning to look bright for me. It was a Friday and that weekend Mike, Sharon and I were going to go to the movies. Jurassic Park was playing at the local drive-in. I’d been dying to see it all summer. Mike promised to take me.

We’ll make some popcorn and make an outing of it, he said when I’d brought the subject up earlier in the week. Sharon had sat there and smiled.

Maybe you and I can go shopping this weekend, too, she suggested. We could get you some new clothes. My face burned in shame. I had only one decent shirt, an oversized blue Bugs Bunny t-shirt, which I’d been wearing almost every day. My mom never believed in back-to-school shopping. I was always wearing some kind of baggy t-shirt, a pair of worn out jeans, and a pair of old ratty tennis shoes. Some of the kids I went to school with called me a hippie. I knew that I wasn’t.

So things were looking bright for the upcoming weekend. I couldn’t wait for school to let out that day. The day that I died was a Friday. It was October 8; the day before John Lennon’s birthday. The year was 1993.

I’d been in high school for a little over a month. I would’ve turned fifteen that December.

Eddie and I always walked to school in the morning. He lived closer to our school than I did. He would wait for me on the corner about a block away from it. That morning I was walking along, with a pair of headphones slapped over my ears, listening to my favorite song at the time, Ordinary World by Duran Duran, on my Walkman. My dad had bought me their latest album the first weekend I’d stayed with him. He’d come home from work one evening and presented it to me at the dinner table. We were still awkward around each other, unsure of how to treat one another yet.

A little birdie told me you might like this, he said, handing me the cassette as I sat down for dinner. You don’t already have it, do you?

No! I cried, snatching it away, and flipping it over to examine it, greedily. No, I don’t! Thank you!

You’re welcome. He smiled, pleased that he’d made me happy. I noticed that you had their posters on your wall. It was the only one I could find. I grinned, but inside a little knot tightened down in my stomach. Here was this man who barely knew me, and he already knew more about me than my own mother did. She never paid any attention to the things I liked. She didn’t care.

So there I was that early October morning, trudging along with the sound of Simon Le Bon’s voice ringing in my ears. I was in love with that song; would play it, over and over again, until the batteries on my cassette player wore out. My days were spent with that song perpetually echoing in my mind. I would come home from school and listen to it for hours, intent on doing nothing other than listening to it and dreaming. Sometimes I would sit on my bed and just stare at the wall, lost in a trance, unaware of time slipping away as the sun lowered in the west. My room would grow dark and still I’d sit there, unwilling to move, never wanting the music to end. 

It’s sad, that I wasted the last of my days this way. But I was only fourteen. I figured I still had the rest of my life stretched out in front of me.

I almost missed Eddie that final morning.

Hey! he called out, as I walked right past him. I turned around, surprised.

Oh, hey, I said, reaching into my sweatshirt pocket and pressing down the stop button. The music came to an abrupt halt. I snapped the headphones off my ears. 

Sorry.

What’s with you? Eddie asked, scowling a bit. You’ve been acting weird lately.

What do you mean? I replied, confused. Eddie shoved his bangs out of his face and rolled his eyes.

You’re not listening to that Duran Duran tape again, are you?

So what if I am? I demanded. Eddie groaned.

I thought you liked the Beatles? He said this accusingly, as if I had betrayed them.

A person can like more than one thing, I huffed. Besides, what’s it to you, anyway?

Eh, forget it, he snorted, as the high school came into view.

You just wouldn’t understand.

What’s to understand? You’ve got the hots for that fag. You’re mad for him. All you can think of is hot, wild sex— I slugged him before he could finish. He pulled away, laughing. I blushed, furiously.

You better shut up! It’s not like that at all. Besides, he’s married. My voice came out weird when I said this. Eddie cackled wickedly.

Yeah, sure he is. Besides, when did that ever stop you? I sighed.

He has a daughter. He’ll never love me. This made me extremely sad. In those days I was under the impression that I was heartbroken every time I learned that a celebrity I liked was already taken. Now I see how foolish I was. Heart sick, yes. But the human heart is too strong to be broken by something as trivial as a favorite rock star being married.

Hey, you wanna come over after school? Eddie changed the subject. I get my allowance today—we could go to the movies or somethin’.

Huh? Yeah, okay, I replied, distracted. I was still hung up on the Simon Le Bon tragedy.

Eddie rolled his eyes again as we crossed the street into the school yard. We had just started across the parking lot when the first bell rang.

Shit, he grumbled, readjusting his backpack, which was slung over one shoulder. I’m gonna be late again.

Not if you run. Eddie made a face.

Ha Ha. Yeah, right. See ya later. With that we parted ways, as he hurried off to first period, shop class, which was all the way across campus. It was the only class he half-way liked. He was flunking everything else.

Our school was fairly small, with only about six hundred people total going to it. It was named after some old man named MacGregor who’d funded the building of it, back in the 1920s. It was one of those schools that was badly in need of repair; tiles were falling off of rooftops, the concrete in the quad was cracking, and only a few of the newer classrooms had air conditioning. Almost everyone knew everyone else who went there. This had its good and bad sides: the bad side was that everyone was always poking their noses into everyone else’s business. A lot of gossip was spread after I died. On the plus side, a lot of people came to my funeral.

It’s funny, how ordinary life is right before you die. People always talk about how they would like to live the last day of their lives to the fullest. But this isn’t always possible. The reality of it is that when your time comes, it comes. Until then, life moves on, as usual.

I daydreamed my way through most of my classes that morning. Usually I got good grades, but for some reason that fall, I had trouble