The Rainbow Connection

For weeks, I had been planning a party at my house for the night before the show at Red Rocks. In retrospect, hosting more than a hundred people in my home on the eve of the largest performance of my life was a completely bananas idea. But by the time I realized that, the wheels were already in motion. The catering order was placed. The karaoke booth was booked. The invitations were sent. Our friends were excited to gather in Andrea’s and my home once more.

Friends Andrea had known for decades stood beside people who had only recently entered my life. Some cried upon returning to the house for the first time without Andrea in it. Others marveled at how much the trees had grown, how lush the yard had become. Life insisting upon itself. We drank Tajín-rimmed palomas named for Andrea, Sara, and Brandi’s song, “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet.” We crowded into a ramshackle photo booth that spit out Polaroids: evidence that we had all been there together.

My friends Susan and Kevin brought their nineteen-year-old son, Gable. Halfway through the night, Gable added his name to the karaoke queue. His selection was “The Rainbow Connection,” originally sung by Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Movie.

I hardly remembered the song. The film came out years before I was born, though its melody lived somewhere in my psyche, tucked into one of the hidden drawers of my brain. I couldn’t have told you the last time I’d heard it. I might have been in diapers.

Everyone seemed tickled by the nostalgia of Gable’s choice, especially his uncanny Kermit impression. Here is a video of him singing while Kevin supports him with a series of backup lamps for reasons I cannot quite explain:

It was a sweet moment, but the night kept on singing. “Goodbye Earl.” “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” My parents, divorced since I was twelve, even came together for a duet. Perhaps love never leaves us. Perhaps it only changes shape.

By the end of the night, Gable’s Kermit had become one excellent performance among dozens. Something I would have put out of my mind.

Except the next afternoon, at soundcheck for Red Rocks in the relentless sun, someone handed Sara Bareilles a guitar.

She began picking out the notes of something vaguely familiar, waking a sleepy melody in the back of my mind. I recognized the feeling before I recognized the song. When she reached the chorus, I knew.

She was singing “The Rainbow Connection.”

I could not believe it.

I scoured the side of the stage for anyone who had been at the party, a witness who could collude with me in the magic. What were the odds of hearing that particular song two days in a row? It wasn’t a Top 40 hit enjoying some sudden resurgence thanks to a summer hip-hop remix. It felt totally random. Totally magic.

Two of my closest friends are atheists. I could already hear one of them telling me that hearing the same song twice in two days was not “statistically significant,” a phrase she uses often with me. I could already hear myself arguing with her about it.

Not that I was raised religious. My mother went to Catholic school, and my father was bar mitzvahed, but I never went to church or temple growing up. If anything, ours was a pagan home, where only Santa Claus and Leonardo DiCaprio had achieved god status.

Since Andrea left their body, though, I’m less of a materialist. How could I not be after all the signs that began arriving almost immediately? I don’t pretend to understand exactly how to connect to the spiritual Wi-Fi. Sometimes paying attention improves the reception. Other times, Andrea comes through loud and clear while I’m looking the other way.

Backstage, Susan and I squealed about the incredible coincidence and wondered what the rainbow connection between all of it might ultimately be.

Andrea had always taught me to think of serendipity and synchronicity as reassurance that I was on the correct path. And so I interpreted the song as a sweet nod of approval: Andrea was pleased that the Red Rocks show was happening. Pleased by the night’s sacred unfolding and by how I was upholding their legacy. People like Kevin and Susan and Gable and Sara were meant to be part of the new life I was weaving without Andrea here, even if my hands were shaking while weaving it.

I held that thought close.

Still, it might have faded into the enormity of the week if, the next day, I hadn’t received a message from a former student who had attended the show.

She told me that while driving to Red Rocks, “The Rainbow Connection” came on shuffle in her car. She was about to skip it, but then had the thought, I think Andrea would probably like this song.

So she let it play.

An hour later, she sat among ten thousand people and watched Sara sing it.

The song had found her, too.

The following day, Susan and Kevin texted me from their flight home. Who had been seated next to Kevin on the plane? Someone he knew through his years in the entertainment industry: Jim Henson’s daughter.

Kermit the Frog’s daughter!

What’s the difference between a coincidence and a miracle? I guess it’s your perspective. I guess it’s ten thousand goosebumps. Still, three appearances of the song and one Muppet-adjacent seat assignment. Was that statistically significant yet?

Time passed. I tried to come down from the adrenaline of Red Rocks and return to the three things that anchor my life in Colorado: writing, going to the gym, and walking my dogs. Ordinary days have been hard to come by this year.

One evening, sore from returning to weight-lifting, I decided to take a heated vinyasa class instead. The room was dim and thick with humidity. By the time we reached my favorite pose, half-pigeon, I was relieved to fold over my bent leg, lower my forehead toward my shin, and breathe through the tension as it began to release.

The song changed.

A few familiar notes.

Then Willie Nelson singing, “Why are there so many songs about rainbows, and what’s on the other side?”

Immediately, I began to cry and laugh into my mat.

Okay, Andrea! I’m paying attention now. What are you trying to tell me?

That night, I looked up the lyrics, searching for whatever message might be tucked inside them. Whatever secret clue.

The song begins with what sounds like the materialist’s conclusion: rainbows are “only illusions.” But Kermit refuses the certainty of that claim. “I know they’re wrong, wait and see,” he croons. He doesn’t claim to know what lies on the other side. He only believes that one day we’ll find it.

It reminds me of something Andrea once wrote:

“There was a time when people found solid proof that the earth was flat. When Pythagoras declared that the earth was round, I imagine his Facebook friends dropped off like flies. Humans have a history of building bunkers to keep the universe from blowing our minds.”

Andrea went on to essentially ask: What do we currently believe as firmly as we once believed the earth was flat? What might we still learn that contradicts something we now consider indisputable?

I think about this all the time. Everything we know for certain could be one proverbial boat ride away from being proven wrong entirely.

We may still have no idea of the true shape of our world.

Think about it.

Only thirty years ago, we had not confirmed a single planet orbiting another sun. Now we know of thousands beyond our solar system. We’ve built telescopes capable of catching light that has been traveling toward us for more than thirteen billion years! We’ve detected ripples in spacetime caused by black holes colliding more than a billion years ago.

We have discovered all of this in the tiniest sliver of human history. Still, everything we can see and touch, every ocean and mountain, every human body, every frog and rainbow, accounts for only about five percent of what scientists believe the universe contains. The other ninety-five percent remains largely mysterious.

We know an astonishing amount.

We know almost nothing.

So how did we become so certain that death is the end?

Two weeks earlier, I had stood onstage at Red Rocks and performed “Love Letter from the Afterlife,” a poem Andrea wrote for me about how they’d communicate with me from the other side.

“The Rainbow Connection” also wonders about voices calling to us from a place we cannot see: “Have you been half asleep, and have you heard voices? / I’ve heard them calling my name.”

What were the chances that a song Andrea and I had never shared could hold so much of what I’d been pondering this year, then keep arriving in all these different forms?

Maybe every appearance of “The Rainbow Connection” was Andrea saying: Listen, I am going to be completely unsubtle about this. Any time you slip into doubt, I will hit you over the head with a frog.

Much of the last four years of our relationship followed the same rhythm: Andrea doing qigong in the yard; Andrea meditating on the porch; Andrea pacing the room while writing a poem; Andrea staring off toward the Rocky Mountain foothills; Andrea a little high on medical marijuana in bed.

Then, from whatever room they were in:

“Meg! Come here.”

“What?”

“I just figured something major out.”

Andrea could not keep an epiphany to themself. The moment some new understanding arrived, they called me into it.

Near the end of their life, I sometimes felt I was watching Andrea walk between the living and the dead. I could not follow them into the land beyond this one, but they always returned with souvenirs of truth so vivid that made me feel I had glimpsed it myself.

How else had Andrea written so strikingly from a place they had not yet gone?

I never imagined an end to those moments when Andrea called me in to share what they had discovered. Maybe I didn’t have to.

I don’t know how far away the room is now, or how long it will take me to reach it. But perhaps each appearance of this song is Andrea calling my name through the wall. Perhaps, wherever they are, they have figured out something major and are trying, in every language available to them, to call me in.

Meg, come here. I have to show you something.

Love,

Meg [+ Andrea, Forever].

PS. For the last year, I’ve had one guiding principle for continuing Andrea’s Things That Don’t Suck: the writing itself should remain accessible to anyone who needs it.

That isn’t changing.

I have created a few optional memberships for anyone who would like to help fund my new writing and the publication of Andrea’s unpublished work. You can learn more about them below:

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