The universe got a little brighter, because she’s everywhere now.
I was initially thinking I’d say the world got a little less bright with the loss of our mom, Marty Lewis, who passed away on January 9th, 2026 after an inexplicable health crisis. But it’s not less bright, the universe is brighter, because I’m choosing to honor how Mom thought about the one-ness of all things. “There is only one,” she’d often remind me.
Although I am not so inclined towards the metaphysical as Mom, I want to believe that our consciousness beyond this life is capable of whatever we dream we can manifest. It doesn’t quite matter if that’s true, just as it didn’t really matter whether Mom believed everything she liked to say was real, dream-like concepts like portals to other dimensions, the proof of angels in the rainbow-colored lights from a crystal near the window, the promise of benevolent aliens that will someday visit. She was completely herself, completely of sound (and delightfully weird) mind, and we would not have her be any other way.
I have a lifetime of memories I could share, but here I’ll limit it to a few that have been on my mind in the last few weeks.
In 1993, Mom was set to move to the island of St. Croix, while I was still in High School. I had the option of going, but chose to stay and finish out school in Maryland. Before she left, we were sitting in the room that my Uncle and Aunt had built for me in their basement, listening to music. At the time, I was still using the cochlear implant that I’ve not used in 20 years. There was a song that became our song. I realized recently that it was always a goodbye song, even though it’s a happy song: I Can See Clearly Now – The Jimmy Cliff version.
Over the years we’d bring up the lyrics, because it was shorthand for our closeness.
When I saw her on the hospital bed that last week, I could barely recognize her. To me she seemed to be suffering. She was in and out of consciousness, not able to talk. I asked her if she remembered the song, and she fixed her eyes on me and her cheeks smiled. So I played the song on my phone, holding it near her head. Even now grief presses at me, hard, but in that moment I was overcome with the juxtaposed memories of that 1993 day and this day in 2026, so close to the end. I lost it, really, I had to turn away so she wouldn’t have to cope with seeing my grief. It was as if seeing me in tears would convince her that it really was the end of her life, and I didn’t want her to believe that.
In her last few days after that, with some adjustments to her care, she was able to have more peaceful moments and seem more life herself, despite the unchangeable fact that she was dying and the doctors could not figure out what triggered it all.
The memories came resurfacing, both the times of conflict and the times of celebrating life in a Marty-guided way. We did clash, of course, usually caused by frustrations with communication since she did not sign and it became more difficult to lipread her over the years. But captioning technology used on my phone dramatically improved all that, and we had many many great conversations in the last few years.
I thought about what she called the Lewis Memorial Holidays, where she would pull my brother and I out of school unexpectedly, just for the day, and take us to the movies, thrift stores, and a meal out. This was about making memories together, something she valued to the end. She’d talk about this with me throughout her life, the importance of being intentional about going out and doing things that would make a good memory later.
I thought about all the countless times (really, countless) she’d be doing something weird and fun and inviting others to do the same, like gifting all of us steampunk hats to wear, just because, or driving down the Pacific coast to find a specific tree she’d proclaimed was a portal to another dimension.
When she was on the hospital bed, at one point, feeling like nothing else actually made sense, I asked her the absurd question with both a sense of wanting to make her laugh and partly wondering if she’d convinced herself of this: “Are you in another dimension now, Mom?” She met my eyes, slightly smiled, and winked. And then she slipped back into her semi-consciousness.
How fitting it would be, really, if she defied all logic I could present, and dreamed herself into another dimension. When doctors can’t explain it, perhaps we can make room for the idea that the mind will do what it will, even occupy a different dimension. It doesn’t matter if it’s factually real.
She is missed and will always be missed by far more than us. Marty Lewis was IS a character like no one else, a dreamer with a quest for world peace. She was a connector of people, a bridge, a creative mind, a storyteller, a person who could be both very distracted and very present in the same conversations, a mom who loved her kids and never hesitated to remind us that she did.
Everywhere she still is, she is existing as a bright, rainbow-accompanied peace.
