My Illuminated Pocket
By Kimberly C.
kimberlycooperstudio@gmail.com
When I first came into Alcoholics Anonymous a year and a half ago, I found myself clinging to one line in A Vision for You: “Abandon yourself to God as you understand God.” The words struck a tuning fork somewhere deep in my ribs. I had lived so long submerged in a vodka haze that my conscious contact with anything sacred had calcified. Yet sobriety stirred a memory I had tried to forget—an encounter with a higher power on the night my father died. It was the only spiritual experience in my adult life that had felt tactile, luminous, and unmistakably real.
My father had called it The Death Tour 2001. He was one of those men who faced mortality with a blunt sort of humor. When he phoned my sister and me to say he had cancer, we immediately set weekly calls, trying to repair twenty years of distance in tidy one-hour increments. He had lived halfway across the country since I was twelve. By then I was a full-grown adult spiraling into my own chaos, often standing in the shower crying for the man who had once been my closest companion.
On those renewed calls, we tiptoed clumsily around the crater between us—speaking of my daughter, my dating life, my artwork. My sentences always felt thick and clunky, as if spoken through wet wool. Then one day he said, “If you want to see me again, you’d better hurry.” I booked a red eye to Minnesota without thinking twice.
Death has a way of rearranging a person’s hurt locker. When I saw him gaunt and exhausted with a baseball-sized tumor swelling from his throat any old resentments evaporated. What rushed in instead were childhood reel-to-reels: me crouched illegally in his drag car during a race; the exhilaration of flying down concrete ditches on his motorcycle; the two of us bent over a cassette deck making mixtapes; laughing at Spiderman cartoons because sarcasm was our shared native tongue.
We didn’t speak much that first day. Instead, I watched him do small, bewildering things: tossing out uneaten food, shuffling around in mismatched socks. Words felt pointless. I curled into him as though I were ten years old again, and we watched NASCAR for hours. He kept gesturing to the end of the couch where he claimed my dead grandfather was sitting, waiting to walk him to the other side.
I didn’t find it strange. My background in metaphysics had shaped me into someone who accepted that the soul didn’t begin or end with the body. If anything, it felt like the veil between worlds was thinning only for him, and I was somehow meant to witness it.
Before flying back to California, my daughter and I found a dead butterfly on his sidewalk. We tucked it into a small eyeglass case, not knowing yet that it would become sacred.
The week after returning home, grief came for me sideways. I went out drinking for days with my best gay male friends, a futile attempt to outrun the ache of that visit. By the eighth day my boyfriend gently suggested we slow down, and that night we meditated for my father. Afterwards my daughter and I held a ritual of our own, placing the butterfly on the living room floor, turning out the lights, and dancing around it for hours. She was barely in her pre-teens but already spiritually attuned. That night she whispered, “Butterflies mean transformation. I think we are helping Grandpa cross over.” Her words melted something inside me; I went to bed with quiet tears drying on my pillow.
Around two in the morning, I was startled awake but not in my body. I found myself floating near the ceiling, aware of my sleeping form below. I looked at the glowing digits of the bedside clock without using physical eyes. I was pure consciousness, pure presence: no skin, no boundary, no fear. Just an open field of knowing.
I drifted toward the sliding glass door and saw a deer in the backyard, gently nosing the earth.
And then it came, the unmistakable, engulfing peace. A peace that didn’t announce itself as emotion, but as truth. I knew with absolute certainty that everything was all right. That I was held. That nothing I could lose—money, relationships, status, even my own life—could disturb this fundamental safety. It was as though I had slipped behind the world into the original layer, the one made of unity. The one we forget we come from.
I didn’t question it. I simply inhabited it.
The next morning, I learned that my father had died during the night.
Later a friend told me the deer is, in German folklore, the guide who accompanies souls across the threshold of death. To me it felt like my father had stopped by on his way out, granting me a peace we hadn’t been able to reach in life. A soft, wordless goodbye.
A week later, I sat my first Buddhist sesshin in downtown Los Angeles: a full weekend of silence and eight hours a day of meditation. Afterward a young man introduced me to the term kensho—a moment in which one sees one’s true nature. I knew then what name to give my luminous night.
I have carried that moment with me ever since. I kept it tucked in a private inner pocket during the years I continued drinking, though I refused to look directly at it. But once I got sober, I could no longer ignore the memory’s gravitational pull. It became a compass pointing me back toward a presence I had abandoned. Back toward a higher power that had been waiting quietly for my return.
Sobriety has not recreated the exact sensation of floating above my body, but it has revived the essence of an inner quiet that feels like a homecoming. These days, as sunlight splays across my cheeks each morning, I pause before rising. I talk to that loving source. I remember that I am not separate from it. I breathe into the stillness I once tasted outside my body, the one that whispered there was nothing to fear, not even death.
My higher power and I are acquainted again. Reunited. What was once a single mystical flash has become an ongoing conversation, one formed through meditation, prayer, and the simple, daily sobriety that cleared enough space for the divine to return. And each morning now, in the soft light of my 11th Step practice, I recognize that same illuminated pocket glowing quietly inside me, reminding me of who I really am, and who walks with me still.