On the morning of my 54th birthday, I woke up at dawn and instantly realized that my partner,

Raya, was in the bedroom with me.

Welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton.

Because at that point, she had been dead for more than five years.

Today, all the way to the river by Elizabeth Gilbert.

A churning, energetic current of pure rayoness,

roiling through my tiny New York City apartment in wave after unmistakable wave of her.

I was neither alarmed nor frightened. I would know her anywhere, I would love her anywhere. But I was surprised,

for it had been a while since she'd made such an appearance. And oh, how I had missed her.

She used to visit me like this all the time in the raw and bewildering months immediately

following her death. Back then, she'd been so incredibly present, so consistently accessible, so funny and loving

and demanding, that I used to joke, Rea is more vivid in death than most people are in life.

It wasn't that I could see her in those long ago visitations.

She was not some spectral Victorian ghost bride, but I could

feel her unmistakable presence, and I could distinctly hear her voice, speaking straight into my

consciousness. The clarity of communication between us had been extraordinary back then, right after she died. It was as though

she'd rigged up a strikingly effective supernatural Dixie Cup telephone system, through which she could

chat with me across the cosmos using a long, long strand of yarn. The effect had been so intimate

as to be sensual. Sometimes it was even fun.

I would be out there in public, smiling and nodding and trying to act like a normal person,

but Rea and I would be having private conversations inside my head the entire time.

Now the book I chose for us to read in October was all the way to the river by Elizabeth

...