After someone you loved dies, there begins a series of coincidences of tiny events which you can't help but notice, and can't help but sorta-kinda-like, maybe, attribute to a supernatural influence.

As if the dead person were communicating with you.

Mine -- my series of tiny events -- began as soon as I was left alone in my house after Michael's funeral. I started writing them into a notebook. They included even the intervention of TV, hilariously: Futurama showed an episode about Professor Farnsworth's gargoyle Pazuzu (an episode I'd never seen) the very day I received a box in the mail which contained my brother's stone gargoyle. My brother's former email address had to do with gargoyles, too.

Other events continue, such as the penny I found in my purse last night. I had just put away my brother's coin collection, after looking at it again. He had a love for wheat pennies, like lots of people who start collecting in childhood. I was thinking maybe I'd add to the collection. And then, I started straightening up my place, picking up my papers and mail, taking my purse and emptying it. Some loose change is there at the bottom, and glancing at it, a very brilliant penny face-up says the date 1958. I look at it again, because it looks like it's brand new, and flip it over -- but yeah, it's a wheat stalk from 1958, the year I was born.

Like Michael thought I should keep collecting coins, too, or something. And decided to tell me.

I guess these pennies from heaven crap stories are what keeps Dear Abby going. Nevertheless, I found the event something to think about. The fact that we live, breathe and think is sufficiently mysterious. Not too much more amazing would it be if we continued to exist after our bodies died.

In memory of Michael, here's a picture of Napier's Bones, which was the precursor of the slide rule. I am trying to make a simple one for myself, with just sticks rather than rods.