This was supposed to have been the last time that I would have to worry about the necklace and charms. It had been so long since I had been able to be myself. For some reason, I'd managed to pass all the tests and yet in the real world, very little time had passed. I was tired of this whole thing and I needed to get it over with. I could barely remember how this business had started, but after what seemed to have been several lifetimes worth of problems, I thought that whoever was doing this to me would surely, eventually show themselves, probably after the last lesson.

I was not looking forward to this one. My question was 'Dying?' I looked at the charm I had just received. It was in the shape of a tombstone. That in itself was enough to make a shiver run up and down my spine. Would I have to die this time or would someone else have to die? I was afraid to find out.

With shaking fingers, I opened the necklace, put the charm on it, and closed the catch. I took a deep breath, trying to relax myself. Hesitantly, I put the necklace over my head. The world changing spinning started and I was transported to a world I was not ready for.

Once things settled back to somewhat normal, I staggered from what felt like the weight of the world. I felt hands reach to steady me.

"Are you alright, Grandma?" a young woman's voice asked to me.

Grandma? I was someone's grandmother? I turned to look at the person who had hold of my left arm. A young beautiful woman about 23 years old was looking at me with concern. She looked a lot like Jennifer did at that age, but I could tell she had other genes in her makeup.

"I'm fine, dear. Thank you for steadying me. I'll be ok now."

"Grandma, you know as well as I do that you aren't doing well. You try to pull the wool over everyone's eyes, but you can't fool me. You've been getting worse every day and you know it."

"I know dear, but the only thing wrong with me is time." I could feel the time burdening my shoulders as well as every joint in my body. How old was I? "I think I need to go sit down for a bit, dear. I'm a bit tired at the moment."

"To tell you the truth, Grandma, you shouldn't even be up out of bed. You know that your heart isn't as strong as it used to be. The doctor said that you needed to take it as easy as possible. She also told me to keep an eye out on you and make sure that you didn't do things that you weren't supposed to do. And what do I find you doing? Exactly what you are not supposed to do." She had a perturbed look on her face.

"Dear me, you certainly are a pushy little one, aren't you?" I gave a sigh. What choice did I have? I WAS tired. "I know when I'm whipped, young lady. Just help me to my chair and I'll be good."

She looked very serious. "Grandma, you know, sometimes you worry me. I would hate to have something happen to you and lose you. I love you too much to let you go without a fight."

"That's sweet of you, dear, but when my time comes, you will have no choice but to let me go. I've had a long life and I'm looking forward to the time I can rejoin my family in peace."

I could tell that she didn't like the thought of seeing her grandmother dying because she was so quiet; she even had a tear running down her face. Personally, I still didn't like the thought of having to die. If I died here, would that mean that I died in the real world? I doubted it and what kind of lesson would I learn if I did?

"Sweetie, you don't have to worry about me. When it's my time, I will go out peacefully and without pain."

"How do you know that, Grandma?" she asked with a puzzled look on her pretty face.

"Because I know that when a person dies, any pain that they may have had in life will vanish. And right now, I would gladly welcome the loss of the pain." We had arrived at a chair that looked older than I felt. "Help me sit down, dear. That's a good girl." I eased my body down to the chair as slowly as I could. Just to take a load off my feet felt wonderful. My ankles were aching tremendously, as well as my knees and hips.

Jennifer's granddaughter, whatever her name was, was looking at me in concern. "Is there anything I can get you, Grandma?" she asked.

"Well, if you don't mind, would you be so kind as to get me a glass of water, please? I'm parched and could use a quenching coolness inside me."

"Would you like any of your medications? It's getting to be time to take some of them."

"Whatever you think, dear. I'm tired and can't think well enough to remember what to take." Now that was sort of the truth. I didn't know, much less remember, what sort of medications Jennifer took, so it was best to let her get those for me.

"You just relax and I'll be back in a moment with them," she told me. She was such a good girl.

I was physically exhausted and having a hard time catching my breath after the walk from the kitchen. It was not all that far, but it seemed like I had walked a mile. I closed my eyes for what felt like an hour but could have been only a few seconds. Time seemed out of whack to me.

"Here you go, Grandma Michael," she said as she handed me the glass and some pills.

I nearly choked. "What did you say?" I was shocked to hear that name from her lips.

"Don't be so shocked. I knew that one day I'd get to meet you. I just didn't know when. Your reaction gave me the confirmation I needed. When you said you couldn't remember what pills to take, I knew that something had to have changed. That's because Grandma NEVER forgot what pills to take. Before Great Aunt Heather died, she told me to keep an eye out for you. She told me that you were a special person, although for the life of me, I'm not exactly sure why she said that."

"Heather died? How long ago?" I was starting to tear up. The one who had been with me through thick and thin was gone? It tore a hole in my heart to hear that.

"She's been gone for five years now. She told me that she hadn't seen you for nearly forty years and had expected you long before she died. She told me all about what was going on with you and Grandma Jennifer and all the visits you had made to her body."

"She told you everything?" I was incredulous over this disclosure.

"Well, I'm not sure that she told me everything, but she told me a lot."

"Did she ever say that she told Jennifer about me?"

"I'm not supposed to tell you anything about that, but it is too late in Grandma's life to hide things from you. I remember Aunt Heather mentioning that you had told her not to tell Grandma Jennifer about your quest, but yes, Aunt Heather told Grandma about you. That was about thirty years ago. Since I wasn't alive at that time, I can only go on what I was told."

I couldn't help but be curious as to what Jennifer had been told about me. "How did Jennifer react to the news?"

"From what I had been told, she at first thought that Tiffany was lying about it, but after Tiffany told her everything that had happened when Grandma had her blackout periods, she came to believe the whole thing as truth."

"Was she depressed about things afterward?"

"As far as I know, she wasn't. She supposedly accepted it because it went a long way towards explaining the blackouts and finding strange messages in her diary. Once it was explained that the messages were to help her adjust to the changes in her life she didn't remember, she was calm. She wanted to know everything about you and was told everything about your supposed quest."

"And were you told about the quest?" I asked.

"Yes, I was. And I know why you're here right now. That's why I am so sad. It means that I will be losing Grandma soon and I can't help but have a difficult time with it." With those words, she burst out crying. I think she realized that she had already lost her grandmother and that I was waiting to die in her place. I joined her in tears.

With the tears flowing down my cheeks I said, "Be that as it may, I'm still here for the moment. Let us make the best of what time we have left." I reached as far as I could and drew her into a hug. "Now, young lady, I think that there is something that I need to know from you. Would you be so kind as to answer a few questions from me?"

She looked up at me with puzzlement written on her face. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"What I mean, is that since Heather is not here to answer my questions, I have to ask someone else who knows the answers."

"Oh, I see. Sure. Ask as many as you care to ask."

"Ok. First, I need to ask you, and this may seem a silly one, but what's your name and what is your complete relationship to Jennifer? I can't keep calling you dear or young lady, can I?"

"No, I suppose not. My name is Amy Johansen. I'm the youngest daughter of Grandma Jennifer's youngest daughter, Myra."

"Ok, now how many kids are in your family?"

"There are three of us. Each one of Grandma Jennifer's three kids had three kids."

"Goodness, then that means I have nine grandchildren, including you?"

"Well, in actuality, you have several great-grandchildren. Twenty-four to be exact. I'm the youngest grandchild. I'm waiting to start my family."

"Mercy me! Twenty-four great-grandchildren? If I may be so bold in asking, why haven't you started having children?"

"It's only because I haven't been out of college long enough to worry about it. I'm still trying to build a life for myself and I'm not yet ready to share it with someone else."

"That's fine, but you really should have started a long time ago," I said with a twinkle in my eye.

"Grandma Michael, you are worse than Grandma Jennifer EVER was! She was always trying to set me up with grandsons of her friends. I'm just not ready to do that yet. You will just have to lay off me for now."

"Ok, dear. Now, would you be so kind as to tell me what year, month, and day it is and how old I am now? Also, what are the important factors in my life right now, health-wise? It would help me keep my items straight while I'm here."

"Well, for starters, you, or I should say, Grandma Jennifer, is 81 years old. Today is March 15, 2074. I guess that Grandma won't see her 82nd birthday as she wanted. She knew she wasn't going to see the end of the year because her doctor told her she wouldn't be able to carry on long enough. She had resigned herself to fate and was trying to take care of things as swiftly as she could; there are only tiny things left to do now."

"Well, they may be tiny things, but they might not get done. Some of my challenges didn't take long and some were long drawn-out affairs. I'm afraid this one will not be very long. I can only hope that I'll be able to get to know you a bit before I am gone, maybe the rest of the family too. While I'm Jennifer, I can at least learn a bit about her descendents. What's so wrong with Jennifer that she is not expected to live out the year?"

"She, or you for that matter, has congestive heart trouble as well as being highly diabetic. Between the two, her body has been shutting down and she knows or knew it. Now that you are here, I know it will be a lot sooner than I had hoped. I hope that I can make your last moments, however long they will be, comfortable and enjoyable for you."

"I can't thank you enough for that. I'm terrified of the whole idea. In my real body, I'm only 41 years old. To me, dying now is to be going before my time and I am not ready to die, no matter what. But in another sense, for me to die here means that I will soon be on my last challenge and then it will be over and I can have my life back. It's been so long since I have been able to even think about being myself for more than a few minutes. The longest respite that I've had since this whole thing began in 2003 is two or three hours."

"Wow! How much time has passed in your real life?"

"From my calculations, I have been myself for about 4 hours total. The rest of the time has been skipping through Jennifer's life, living bits and pieces for her."

"This is fascinating. Do you mind if I write an article for a newspaper about your experiences? If not for a newspaper, maybe I can write it as a fictional story and post it on the web. Did you have such a thing way back then?"

"I think we did, but I never paid it any mind. I was always too busy to worry about things like that. At the time I began this quest, I didn't even have a computer. But you can write it as a fictional story; nobody would believe it if you wrote it for a newspaper. Are there still newspapers being published these days?"

"Actually, no, there aren't. What we call newspapers is in reality on the web; all news services post the daily news on it."

"I see. I am curious about something. Did Jennifer still keep a diary around? I would love to catch up on her life since I was last here forty-one years ago, regardless of how painful it might be to read."

"I think we kept her old journals in the attic to leave more room for things. She started buying the ones that were good for five years, but they still took up a lot of space, even though each page had room for two days worth of entries."

"On second thought, would it be possible to see her most recent one? That way you can avoid digging around in the attic for them. Besides, I might not get the chance to read the others." Not that I didn't want to read the others, but if things work out the way I was expecting, I wouldn't be here long at all.

She stood up and said, "I'll be right back with her most recent journal."

She left the room and I could hear her rummaging around in a drawer. I heard a faint "Ah-ha!" coming from the room and she was back out in a couple of seconds.

"Here you go, Grandma, her most recent journal." She handed me the flower-covered book.

"Thank you, dear. Would you be so kind as to get me another glass of water, please?"

Amy got a worried look on her face, but it was only fleeting. "Sure, Grandma. I'll be right back with it. You go ahead and read." She left the room.

I sat back in the chair and opened the journal. Inside, it had Jennifer's name and the starting date. She had only been writing in it since January 1st, which made it less than three full months old. I turned to the first page.

January 1, 2074

Happy New Year. Not that it's going to be a happy year for me. I know this will be my last year of life and it's something that I am not happy about. My family is rallying around me, saying that I will outlive my doctors. I know they are being kind. To tell the truth, I'm tired and would just like to rejoin my mother, father, Dan, Heather, Grandma Banks, Mom and Dad Sparks in the afterlife. I know for a fact that I will not see my 82nd birthday. My body is too tired to go on and it's a struggle to carry through each day. If it weren't for young Amy, I would surely give up and go now. She is such a dear to me. She is so much more beautiful than I was at her age. But she certainly has my spark and spunk in her. Her Grandfather would have been so proud of her if he had lived to meet her.

I skipped a few pages to another month.

Feb. 14, 2074

Happy Valentines Day, My Love. How I miss you with all my heart. It's been forty-one years since you left me and I have missed you each and every day. I'll be joining you soon and we will both rejoice in it. Take care of everyone until I arrive.
 

March 12, 2074

Went to the doctor today. She said that I would not survive the week. My heart is barely pumping blood through my system and it does so sluggishly. I have decided not to tell anyone in the family about it and I will go out with as much dignity as I can. Michael, I know you are reading these words because I have been expecting you for a long time now. I will go out without any pain and you will have to go through my death for me. Tell Amy I love her with all my heart and that she needs to get herself married as soon as possible. She is the primary recipient of my estate, although the rest of my kids and grandkids will be getting a share. She has been my pride and joy for years. But I have a requirement in my will that she must be married within 6 months or she will forfeit 90% of her inheritance. She also must name her first daughter, Jennifer, after me.
 

Michael, I wish so much that I could have met you while I was alive. But for some reason, we were meant never to meet. I could only read about your times in my body after you had left. I thank you for the words you left to help me understand what happened while I was blacked out. Until Tiffany explained you to me after the last time you were me, I thought I was going crazy. The month when I was 17 was the most traumatic. I had a nervous breakdown trying to figure out where that month of my life went.
 

When I found out that I had a boyfriend who doted on me and that we had been dating for a month, when I had originally intended on it being a pity date, I felt my life was a shambles because I didn't remember it at all. Later on, when I was in that horrible relationship with what's-his-name, I was too afraid of him to end it. Then, lo and behold, I had another blackout and when I came around again he was gone. Dan had come back into my life again. I was near to having another breakdown. This time it was not from a nervous condition but from relief. I read your entries in my diary about kicking that man out and then going back to Dan. Then I read that he had proposed to me (you) and I was happy. I knew at that time, I was going to be ok. I still had no explanation why this was going on, but as long as it was for the better, I didn't complain.
 

I was angry when I found out that I hadn't gone through the birth of my first daughter, that I had another blackout period during that time. I did get to experience the births of my other two babies, but the first one was the most problematic; I really wanted to have that experience myself. I was able to forgive you when I knew about you. When I found out that you had no control over what you were going through, I discovered that I couldn't hate you for taking over my life. Truthfully, I learned a lot from you and you weren't even there.

Then the worst time of my life happened: Dan's death. Again, I was not here for it. When I found out what happened to him, I felt I had lost the world. If it had not been for Tiffany telling me about you then, I would have went off the deep end in grief. I had grown to love that man with all my heart and I could not stand to be without him. Reading your words in my journal helped me to understand the grief YOU went through with his loss. Yet, you had not spent 18 years with him as I had. You reacted as I would have and you learned that life had to go on, that death was a part of living. Your words sustained me in later years because I was able to read the anguish that you had in your heart. We both loved Dan so much and his death tore us to pieces.
 

Michael, I have no idea why I was chosen to be the one you would live through, but I am truly glad. You were the best thing that happened to me through a troubled youth and a weak adulthood. You were a pillar of strength to me. I worked hard to emulate you and prove to others that the two sides of me could be one and the same. YOU, sir, are a tough act to follow, let me tell you. But I did learn that I could not let people use me and toss me aside when they were through with me. I used your inner strength to firm up my life and I took control of my own destiny.
 

About 20 years ago, on a spur of the moment, I went to see a fortuneteller to see what she could tell me about my life. She told me some of the most amazing things. She took one look at my lifeline and mentioned that it broke up six times in its length. The last stretch, the one following me to the end of my life, was the longest. Then there was a tiny gap. She said that six times during my life, I had been officially dead, yet I lived on.
 

The gaps were close together in the first quarter of my life, but became spread out a bit thereafter. She said that there were two men in my life, and that one of them was not my husband, yet was closer to me than my husband ever would be. I could only assume that that man was you. I couldn't tell her the truth behind what she was saying, but I acknowledged the point. She went on to tell me about the length of my life as well as the rough date when I would pass away. So far, she's been so correct that it's scary. She also said that the second man would come back at the end of my life. That could only be you.
 

Now that my time has come, I am at peace with it and I look forward to joining the others who have gone before me. Thank you again, Michael, for everything you have done for me. Good-bye and I will see you when it is your time to join me in the afterlife.
 

My love always,
 
Jennifer

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

That was the last entry in the journal. I found that I was crying from reading her words.

I wish I had known her. We were so close; in many ways I felt I was a part of her.

She had left me with so much to think about and I was sure I would be doing so for the rest of my life.

I was so tired. Since I was sitting down in Jennifer's favorite chair, I felt that it was a good time to sleep for a bit. I leaned back and closed my eyes. I was quickly asleep.

Amy

Grandmother Jennifer passed away while taking a nap this afternoon. She had been reading her journal, her staple for so many years. I read her words to Michael about being told that she would not live out the week. That was true. I knew that she was dying, even though she never said a word to me. I could see it written on her face as she went about her normal daily routines. There was a tenseness covering her in shadow that seemed to drive her, forcing her to work hard to get things done before she left us.
 

It is left to me now, the task of calling everyone and letting them know Grandma has left us. I also have to contact the mortuary so that we can carry out her last request. Now that she is gone, life will have to continue for the rest of us. God Bless you, Michael for everything you did for our family. Without you, none of us would have ever been around and Grandma Jennifer's life would have been cut short. God, take care of Michael. He is a good man and deserves better than this. Let his life be without strife for the remainder of it.

 
To Be Continued...
 
Note: TG magic borrowed-body rated-R
Posted by: Admin on Wednesday, September 17, 2003 - 08:43 PM