Constant Companions

On a walk around Lake of the Isles at a time Holly Ramsey knew that she was dying, she told her husband, "I'll haunt you, if I can." Dan Dailey knew what she meant: I'll stick around, if I can. I won't leave you.

And she didn't, Dan said.

At times that he has been troubled, Holly has appeared in dreams, comforting him, giving him guidance. Long-time friends have felt her presence in Dan's Kenwood home in ways that convince him that he and Holly have breached the veil between what we know as life and what we think of as death.

Last summer, Holly returned in a dream the night after Dan found out that Hamline University was folding the Five Owls, the children's literature review that was Holly's passion during her lifetime and that the university began publishing shortly before her death.

"I knew in the marrow of my bones that this was her plan that she wanted me to have the magazine back," said Dan, 49, who ghost-writes speeches for corporate executives and does strategic planning for companies. "I've always loved books. But that's not my passion. I'm really doing this thing for Holly."

The love of his life

"For me, this is a story about true love," said Dan, sitting in the Kenwood house that he and Holly bought when artistic types could still afford to live there. It is filled with art and books and reminders of their life together.

Holly Ramsey was 28 and a graphic designer in 1977 when she learned she had a particularly vicious strain of multiple sclerosis. It hit hard and fast. In a dozen sideways conversations, people talked to Dan about how chronic illnesses split couples up, as if pardoning him in advance.

But she was the love of his life.

"I've never seen anyone more committed to each other than Holly and Dan were to each other," said Genevieve Ryan, a close friend since 1972. ''Some couples come apart with illness. I think they just got closer and closer."

As Holly lost use of her hands and legs and her vision began to fail, she quit her job. Powerful steroids made sleep difficult. One night she shook Dan awake with a dream she'd had: She'd start a magazine about children's literature; and call it the Five Owls.

Technically it was chemotherapy that shocked Holly's body into remission. In the kitchen one day while Dan's back was turned, she rose from her wheelchair and walked to him. But Dan believes she walked through sheer will, the same way she pursued adopting their son, Henry. The same way she and Dan founded Five Owls.

Before them always was Holly's vision of a magazine that a librarian or teacher would relish getting in the mail and reading "over a cup of coffee or two" in one sitting. It had to be concise, direct, conversational and intelligent.

Of the 2,000 books it received each year, Five Owls reviewed 60 of the very best. Dan sold ads and worked with the printers. Holly was the publisher and graphic designer.

"Sometimes, I'd forget about Holly's MS," said Ryan. "She made every minute count." More than that, she had this radiant intensity that drew people to her.

"She made you feel both important and more creative than you knew you were," said Fred Appell, a friend of nearly 30 years.

Holly grows sicker

In l991, Holly learned she had ovarian cancer. "You'd have thought the MS was enough," she said in one terse pass at self-pity. The cancer, too, proved vicious. And treatment was cruel.

"Holly was the bravest person that I've ever known," said Dan. "We were very mindful, both of us, that a lot of people were watching us. We were the first people in our circle who had to go through this. We felt it was important to do it right."

They never belonged to a church, so they had no ready doctrine about death, no structure to provide solace or meaning. If Holly was the pragmatist, Dan was the philosopher. He took on investigation of the hereafter as a calling.

"When Holly was dying, her job was to go on living and to keep fighting the fight,'' said Dan. "And my job was to figure out for both of us what we believed.

"I had read in a book about African spirituality that there is dynamic relationship between the living and the dead. The dead rely on us to remember them; they rely on our memory for their contined coherence as an individual personality or soul. And I've learned, especially in the last six months, that we rely on them for a lot of stuff."

Surgery in February 1993 showed that Holly's cancer was raging. For more than a month, she refused to talk about death.

"As the time stretched out longer and longer, it bummed the hell out of me that she continued to avoid the subject," said Dan. "I knew that she had to deal with the beyond, not just the here and now."

So he gave her a ring. In the center was a nautilus, the symbol for eternity. Surrounding it was a circle of waves, symbolizing for him the water rune that is a harbinger of death. Holly knew what it meant. And at first, she was put off. But she wore the ring, wrapping herself in Dan's comforting beliefs.

"We started talking about-- not the end of life, but about eternity," he said.

Last days the sweetest

Through the spring and into the summer, Dan devoted himself virtually full-time to Holly's care. They lived on savings and credit cards. Dan remembered something his mother had repeated from a friend who cared for her dying husband: "The very last days," she said, "are the sweetest."

"Those last few years were just pure hell at times. I had debts up to my ear lobes," he said. "It was awful. And yet, I wouldn't give it up for anything, especially those last days. We'd always been close, but not like that."

Holly had her own agenda. She was determined to get Henry into a new school, to live through the summer and to make sure Five Owls was in good hands.

Hamline University agreed to take over its publication. Holly and Dan contributed the 6,000 children's books that overflowed their home. Hamline matched the value of the gift, building a room with Oriental rugs and hand-made furniture that Holly chose.

Hundreds of friends came to the Five Owls Reading Room dedication a month and a half before she died. Holly was so thin then, really too sick to be there at all. But she spoke with leonine vigor. It was a celebration of life that for an afternoon obliterated the sadness to come.

As Dan's mother predicted, The last days proved the sweetest. Holly died Sept. 6, 1993.

"Dan spent the last three days of her life with her, making sure that the spirit that bound them together was honored," said Appell.

"It was a time for the two of them to withdraw from the world. Dan came back, and Holly didn't."

More than a dream

After Holly's death, Dan was terribly alone.

He cut off his wedding band, but he took a pair of designer glasses Holly bought and had them remade into bifocals for himself. They didn't fit exactly -her face was thin, so the glasses squeezed his temples. But they were a way of staying close, of seeing the world through her eyes.

Four months after her death, Dan was by himself in their home when his back went out. He couldn't move without excruciating pain. His despair was complete.

"That night Holly came to me in this dream," Dan recalled. "I don't remember anything about it except that she was leaning over me and comforting me. It was like she was there, as she would have been in real life."

In his spiritual quest, Dan not only had settled upon an ancient belief that is embedded in many religions, but the dreams he experienced are a common and healthy response to loss, said Judith Savage, a St. Paul Jungian analyst who specializes in grief.

"This ongoing relationship is central to the grieving process," Savage said. "It gives you time to adjust to the loss. Psychologically, you don't feel so abandoned: You still have a relationship with them. You can go to sleep, have a dream about them and it feels like a visitation. Often it can help give you permission to live a life after death: `I'm OK now. Live. Be happy.'"

As far back as 380 A.D., Christian theologian Chrysostom suggested that there may be a spiritual reality to the dead conversing with loved ones through dreams, said Elaine Ramshaw, associate professor of pastoral care at Luther Seminary in St. Paul.

"I think our tendency is to assume that seeing the person that died is sheer imagination. I think there's no real reason to assume that. There's much more that we don't know than we do."

Saving Five Owls

Since that first dream, Dan said Holly has visited him several times.

"This whole house just reeks of her," he said. "She's in this place through and through."

One day, he was in the shower that he built to accommodate Holly's wheelchair when a vision of her appeared. There was Holly's head thrown back, with the water flowing over it. "I realized that's how this haunting thing works: She's not haunting the house; she's haunting me."

Seven months ago, Dan learned that Hamline was ceasing publication of Five Owls.

"It really upset me, until I went to bed," Dan said. "Holly was in my dreams."

Within a day, he decided to bring the little magazine back to Holly's airy office, remortgaging their house to do it.

After losing 1,000 subscribers from its peak circulation of 3,500, Five Owls' numbers are rising. Pieces have fallen into place in ways that convince Dan that Holly's invisible hand is at work. The right people have appeared to help when Dan needed them most: a children's book editor, a promotions manager, a staff of nationally regarded reviewers.

Every morning he rises, pulls on Holly's snug glasses and tries to see the world as she would have.

Although Dan has begun moving on in his life--he had a date last weekend--being with Holly changed him so much that it's hard now to tell where she leaves off and he begins.

"This whole thing with the magazine is about integrating my past and not abandoning it. I'm not living in the past, I'm building on it."

Downstairs in his bedroom the room where Holly died, Dan has a wax model of a sculpture he created of her. It's 8 inches high and a dead ringer for her. He'll cast it in bronze and place it in her garden.

"I have come to believe that the divide between life and death is not as great as we think," Dan said. "And if we're open to them, the dead can be very active agents in our world."