My mother was an artist. In her hometown she got sick and went to see the medicine woman in the fields. The medicine woman was there and my mother’s mother was still alive and she knelt there in the fields among rows of other people that had passed on. They all knelt down in the dirt on a sunny day. Here they came to life again, in the medicine woman’s field.

My mom was sick. You only went to see the medicine woman when you were already sick. If you were healthy, the dead would make you sick anyway. When you were sick already, it didn’t matter. My mother held me in her arms. I was sick too. I was a baby too young to remember this story.

My mother knelt in the field next to her mother, my grandma. My grandma knelt there in the dirt looking very somber and worn down by being in the sun all day. My grandma held a baby boy also. He was my mother’s baby brother, John. He would have been my uncle had he not died before he was one year old.

My mother knelt next to my grandmother and communicated via the medicine woman. My grandma whispered to the medicine woman and the medicine woman turned and translated to my mother. My grandmother, via the medicine woman, told my mother that she was proud of her. She also said, holding dead baby John in her arms, that I looked to be very healthy. I was a little younger than one year old at the time, just like dead baby John.

The medicine woman said that it was time for us to go. This did not phase my grandmother. She knew that it was as things must be. She maintained her same somber disposition. Her golden cheeks eternally tanned by the sun of the dead. She whispered one last thing to the medicine woman and the medicine woman turned to my mother and told her, “She wants you to know that she loves you.” My mother cried a single tear in the soil of the dead. Then the medicine woman said that we really must go.

She led us away from my mother and through rows of other dead people kneeling in the soil. We came out of the rows and reached a road and departed from the dead. In the real world, the fields of the dead were a gift shop filled with pictures. There were many aisles of framed pictures of deceased loved ones. They hung on the artificial walls like books sorted in the shelves at a library.

The medicine woman told my mother, earlier this morning I sold the first one of your mother’s pictures. She only has four photos left now and then she will move on from the fields and rejoin the sun.

Thank you, my mom said to the medicine woman, putting her hand on the woman’s shoulder. I will come back and see her again once more before she passes on. I will have one more question to ask her. Well, why did you not ask her today? asked the medicine woman. Because I don’t know the question yet, replied my mom.

The medicine woman smiled and said that she understood. With me as a baby still in her arms my mother said goodbye to the medicine woman and left the fields of the dead, or in reality, a picture gift shop where souls waited in purgatory to pass on into the sun.