Chaunce’s light was so bright the first time I met him, I had to shield my eyes. He was shirtless in October in Pennsylvania, smoking a cigar and laughing at my rage. His laughter made me pause. Even from a distance, there was something about his eyes that made me look closer before lifting another trash bag filled with all the contents of my kitchen, and tossing it into the trash bin.

Throwing out my kitchen was transformational for me. I was throwing out my kitchen for generations of women who couldn’t be contained by a home or a traditional marriage. I was nineteen and angry and trapped.

Until I saw his kind, laughing eyes, like freedom.

I had spoken vows I didn’t mean just six months before. I had walked down the aisle five days after begging my parents and my fiancé to cancel the wedding. That day, all the women in my family who had married men they didn’t love seemed to be going to the altar with me in the train of my dress.

Now, standing near a trash bin, this strange man’s laughter, his shine, his cigar and his Levi’s – his topaz eyes looking at me from the steps of his yellow townhouse next to my yellow townhouse, seemed to make my disappointment melt away.

I fell in love with that man, left my husband, and our souls travelled in tandem for years. After dancing to Louis Armstrong and eating at Nola’s on South Street every Friday, after racing our red cars down Wissahickon Drive to our home in a barn with baby grand piano, after telling him I loved him on the Whispering Benches in Fairmont Park, I had to say goodbye to my beloved on Christmas morning.

After his funeral, where his son snot-cried on my thighs, where I tried to crawl into his coffin to open his mouth that had been sewn shut so I could see his gapped teeth one more time, he came to me in a clear vision.

I was in bed, resting. All my friends were in the living room drinking and smoking away their grief, and I went to rest into the feeling of without.

But he nudged my arm, and there he was, in his whole human body – that’s how the dead come to us, sometimes. They come in the image of who they were, because if they come to us any other way might be hard for us to recognize them.

He said, wake up, baby…before I go, I have a few things I want you to know.

I stared at his broad swimmer’s shoulders, the familiar hair on his chest, his kind hands gently stroking my sorrow, his legs crossed, leaning toward me on my single mattress.

There was that light again I saw coming from him – the same light I saw at the top of the concrete steps the first day I met him. He told me dying was wonderful. I thought it was rude that he didn’t miss me, but he said that’s just the way it is – grief is meant for the living.

Music is the language between the worlds, he said.

Dying is like a great moment of understanding and forgiveness. It’s so freeing. You understand nobody really wronged you.

He wasn’t coming back in a body on earth, not this time – he had gone light years away.

That’s when I realized he had brought his soul to me in the image of his old body. I was still looking into his eyes, but really into his soul.

He said, “in another universe you aren’t born, instead you become into a full grown body.”

“Then show me what you look like now,” I said.

“That isn’t allowed.”

“Tell them I won’t be frightened.”

There was a pause, and he turned away, then turned back, and just like magic, just like a science fiction movie, my beloved morphed into another being – human-ish, with a head and arms and legs and a torso. Not young, not old as we define years. A head that was larger on top. His eyes were so different, and yet I recognized him completely through his eyes, because the same light came out of them, even though they were larger, and positioned for a wider range of vision.

That’s when he told me every religion has it mostly wrong – about the universe and God.

Did my atheist boyfriend, who died on Christmas morning just use the word God?

But they are also all right about one thing, he smiled, and it’s the same thing. And just like that, he was gone, before I could ask about the One Thing.

Not a day that goes by in the decades since that moment when I don’t see his eyes – the eyes of the man and the eyes of the being he became.

And not a day goes by when I don’t think about the One Thing.

Hafiz said, “when no one is looking and I want to kiss God, I just lift my own hand to my mouth.’

Author Jan Phillips said, “when we drop our illusions of separateness and the biases of programmed thinking that obscures our mystical interconnectedness, the transcendent dimensions of our lives begin to emerge.

If God is the man standing on the steps smoking a cigar, he’s also the man next door who kicks his dogs when they bark too long. They are the orange Poinciana trees in full bloom on Kauai and the 140 pound boar who stares me down in Sea Cliff.

God is me.

God is you.

Lift your hand, listen to your heartbeat, kiss your fingers and say hello.

And the next time you dare to look directly into anyone’s eyes, know that they contain 137 million photoreceptors and more than one billion parts, and this is how we see each other’s souls.

Rabbi Elimelech said, “whoever does not see God in every place, does not see God in any place.”

I’d like to add this – “whomever does not see God in everyone, does not see God in anyone.”

Good morning – I see you.