Love After Death

Greetings, Asylum Seekers.

I heard you had another visit from my Malifecium counterpart. Let me explain in more depth as to my absence.

I served as initial counsel to a new soul a few days ago. Her name is Hannah Donovan, a tragic figure to be sure, but tragedy is common to just about any essence that occupies a cell here in the Asylum.

What is so strange about this one is that her past is a complete wash to us. We know very little about her. She possessed the taint of her suicide, but none others existed. Nor did she read completely pure. Neither side was able to establish her morality-counter because there was no record of the girl in our Asylum tome-banks.

She shouldn’t exist.

Of course, the Malifecium stood firm to the argument that since the only information we had to go off of was her recent choking down of pills and vodka, which took the poor girl’s life, then her soul belonged to The Pit.

However, after a deep questioning -- during which Donovan was barely coherent, I was able to ascertain the reason for her suicide: The death of her husband, Jamie – three years prior.

She and Jamie Donovan met as rebellious teens, runaways from families that had been affected by the economic downturn in the U.S. city of Detroit, Michigan. From destitute backgrounds, Jamie had provided Hannah, the oldest of seven siblings, an emotional stability she wasn’t able to garner from her alcoholic father or overtaxed, overworked mother.

Hannah and Jamie were true artists and that yearning to create, to be free of constraints, spurred them west, to that vibrant city in California called Los Angeles (curiously named the City of Angels). There the two married on a moonlit beach and embraced a culture of like-minded bohemians who worked and played under the beautiful sunshine of the Pacific coast.

They turned their creativity into tattoo artistry and, after a number of years of steady business, eventually opened their own North Hollywood parlor. Judging from the ink this girl has down her spine -- a coiling boa constrictor, they must have put out some decent work.

But it is hard to sustain a business in that city, and their business was threatened by foreclosure. They were left with little option, until Jamie got involved with a repeat group of clients who worked for a corporation that dabbled in dark web practices and had a tremendous amount of cash to throw around. I haven’t gotten the full detail of what happened, as of yet. The girl is, astoundingly, a closed book to me. Even the blue flame, powerful as it is, can’t pierce the recesses of her mind.

What I do know, is that Hannah Donovan returned to the tattoo parlor from an evening out to find her husband laying in a pool of his own blood, his neck slashed from ear to ear.

Over the next year and a half, Donovan lost herself in a self-loathing spiral of booze and illicit drugs. You can imagine the rest of that decline...

When the paramedics found her, she had ingested 20 sleep aids with a fifth of Vodka (actually a spirit I quite enjoy from the mortal plane, but I digress...).

SUICIDE.

A one-way ticket to the Asylum...

So, standing before myself, and the opposing Malifecium prosecutor, Donovan faced the music (a mortal phrase). I was successful in procuring a temporary rehabilitation stay for Hannah Donovan in an Asylum cell until the glitch she is to our system could be figured out and she can be processed. What was my argument in opposition to suicide?

She killed herself for love.

Or, loss of said love. Whatever the case, love comes directly from the Source. Because of this, The Pit doesn’t have absolute jurisdiction over Donovan’s soul.

The real headache now, and it falls on my shoulders, is to determine what is it about this girl that has completely shorted a system that has been sufficiently, if not smoothly, operating since the beginning of man.

When I say Hannah Donovan is special, I don’t mince words.

So, I have been spending my days in the Asylum’s northwest wing (think the TV section of a electronics store, but seemingly never ending) gazing inside Donovan’s cell. It is recreated to look like the tattoo parlor she and her love built together, and he was found murdered in, as she chews down handfuls of Ambien, and chases them with low-grade Vodka (what a waste). She kills herself, over and over and over again.

The Malifecium greedily wring their hands at the thought that this soul will refuse salvation. That slipping into the darkness because of a deeply gutted heart is her only choice at this point.

I can’t let that happen. Every alarm in my celestial body is telling me to reach this tortured soul somehow. Find a way to break through that steel wall of despair and disillusion and give her some reason to believe that no situation warrants such a sunken heart.

Love never leaves us. Not if the Authority has anything to say about it.

I, at times, wonder what it would be like to give your heart, so completely, to another and it be reciprocated with equal fervor.

I had my taste, but it was insignificant to this Donovan and how much her heart bleeds for the husband she lost.

I’ll give you another truth about angels: We can feel sadness. I feel a deep sadness for this one.

I’ve even shed a tear.

Misery and despair aside, it would behoove me to continue my observation of our new soul. Something tells me, she is meant for big things.

I’ll keep you posted, Seekers.

Till then...

- MAGGIE