When You See a Fork in the Road, Take It.

Thanks to Loulou for inviting me to join the flock. As life would have it, events this week make our current topic all too relevant to me:

Thank goodness blogs don't require regular feeding/watering/exercise, or this little site of mine would be flickering dimly away to nothing. On Monday I was - or thought I was - all ready to scribble out a week's worth of witty posts, but then I got the sad news of a cousin's passing, and took a little perspective break for the rest of the week. You could say I've sort of had to pull over to the side of the information superhighway here, stop for a while, and look at just where the heck I'm headed, literally and philosophically. (But don't give me a GPS to tell me where to go - I want to map out my own route, and pretend I know where I'm going ahead of time!)

Sometimes I feel like I'm navigating one of those notorious roundabouts they have in New England, where a moment's indecision or uncertainty results in a missed turn and damns me to drive around again to get it right. If I'm lucky, I only need to go around a second time to get headed where I want - or need - to go. I get annoyed at myself for screwing up, but as long as I have enough gas and plenty of time to reach my destination, driving in circles and taking the scenic route is really no big deal in the grand scheme of things.

As time goes on, though, it seems more important to get things right, to not take any wrong turns enroute to doing and being what I have to do and be. My cousin's cancers manifested themselves suddenly, and he became so ill, so quickly, it was shocking. Until a few months ago there wasn't any reason to think he didn't have time to take his time getting wherever it was he was going. Isn't that what we all believe?

Leaving work yesterday, I heard someone singing that gawdawful Garth Brooks song, "If Tomorrow Never Comes," and in spite of my dislike for that kind of schmalz, I thought maybe the cosmos decided to put the song on my playlist to remind me that any one of us, at any time, could run out of tomorrows. I am beginning to feel a sense of urgency, not to cross things off my ever-growing To Do list, but to make sure that I have prioritized it, to make sure I do the important things. Yet while I struggle to keep friendships and relationships in good working order, I have to get my taxes done, pack for a conference, write a paper, and yes, even schedule a long-overdue physical for my own self, even though the thought that something more malignant than my hatred for Fox News could be manifesting itself makes me hyperventilate....

Not that I feel bad, mind you. Except for having "If Tomorrow Never Comes" stuck in my head now, I think I'm probably doing just fine. And if this post has put that tune in your heads now, I do sincerely apologize, and offer this antidote:


Now go blow your nose and tell someone you love them.

Hawk Moon

[With this post and Amanda Rose's, below, Hen's Teeth tries a new approach. We'll be posting under a general topic that will be renewed every other week or so, each of us adding our own layer (chicken humor, there) to the whole in images, words, music, video, cartoon or whatever else the topic evokes. No topic is too serious to forbid a joke; none, too funny to be free of its pensive side. Join us in Comments by adding layers of your own. Nothing is ever real in this world if it isn't complex.]

image: Sharon, Flicker

Amanda Rose's post about her Grandmama, and the new significance to her of bird flocks, reminds me of one of my own rare devolutions into the eerie/sweet world of losses, totems, and the boundary-free zone that surrounds them.

Rachel, my mother who died July 4th (arguably), 2001, took Witch Pills...or so she swore. Something would happen to one of my kids or to someone in our extended family, and Rachel would "just know." I now understand, of course, that a life rich in experience and relationships means that, whether we're aware of it or not, we register tiny bits of information into the mind that lives just below our awareness, and our brain eventually pings us with a warning that something's up. Rachel pinged, big-time.

To further round the picture, she had a life-long moon affinity. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night for unusual moon phenomena, such as a blood-red lunar eclipse over a snowy landscape. And, in her retirement, she developed a bird thing. She carried bluebird houses around in her trunk and gave them away. She phoned me with the latest doings of the backyard bluebirds, like the siblings returning to help the parents with a new brood...that sort of thing.

It was her hawk stories that I found most amazing, though. Our NC back yard was ringed with huge, old oaks that used to scare me to death in thunderstorms; they towered over our ordinary Piedmont suburban neighborhood and no way the house could stand under the weight of just one of them if it fell. Lightening loved them. Hawks loved them, too. My mother phoned one year to say that a pair of hawks had built a nest in one of the oaks. Then she phoned to say that they had hatched a brood and were feeding them on local rabbits, voles, etc. And, then, she phoned beside herself with excitement: The hawk parents had lined their fledglings up across the fence as if to show them off to her, and were using the fence as a base to teach the little ones to fly. She had a front row seat to the whole thing and she'd never seen anything like it in her life. They were red-tailed hawks, according to her research.

The hawks put on the same show for her every year. And, every year, she called me to say that they were Her Hawks: "My Hawks are back! You should see the little ones this year!" Over the years, a chronic illness began to keep Rachel home more and more, but the back yard hawks never disappointed. Her world grew both smaller and larger at the same time.

Fast-foward. At the end of May, 2001, my sweet Cousin Marsha lost a battle with pancreatic cancer and I drove home from the beach for the funeral. Rachel seemed exhausted, but, then, of course she would: Marsha was only nine months younger than I and we'd been so close as small children. My mother could not help but put herself in my aunt's shoes...that was my explanation for her fatigue. About two weeks later, I got a call from my father: Mom had so much pain in her hip that she couldn't walk. Should he call the ambulance? Yes! The next call brought a diagnosis of advanced cancer, no known primary. And I headed out the door for home again.

By the end of June, I'd begged Rachel off the tests. We still had no primary for the cancer and she was often nearly comatose. I was more or less living at the hospital, the way Southerners do, and my husband had left work to join me. I'd called my son from his nearby college town and my daughter from Virginia. Rachel was in and out of consciousness and starting to hallucinate at times, or so we thought.

My mother had begun to talk about her hawks. She'd been telling us that The Hawk had been coming to see her, to sit on the windowsill to be with her in her corner room on the top floor of the cancer ward. We'd shared that news with our adult children when they arrived, suggesting that they not discourage her notions, explaining that hallucinations can come at this stage.

We were sitting around the bed quietly on a hot afternoon...sun slanting into the room from its tall single window, strong even through closed blinds. Rachel roused, looked around vaguely at us, and said it was about time for the hawk to come and see her. She said he was at the window and we should open the blinds. With his old fighter pilot's control, DH reached out and turned the winding rod for the blinds so slowly that time seemed to stop. And we all sat transfixed, staring at a Red-tailed hawk perched motionless on the sill... staring back into the room at us.

We only knew he was real by a slight ruffling of his feathers in the breeze and the rare blink of his eye. None of us moved. It must have been ten minutes. And no one spoke. Once, we dared to glance at each other, but I couldn't tell you what our looks tried to convey. Rachel looked wide awake for the first time in days.

Finally, my son Marc, the younger, could bear it no more and reached tentatively toward the window. The hawk turned and swooped away. We all stood to watch him fly in apparent slow motion to the nearest big oak on the lawn below. And Rachel went back to sleep.

A couple of days later, on the same evening that I finally convinced her oncologist to suspend his push for irrelevant and painful "treatment" and allow me to move her to the Hospice ward downstairs, Rachel died. There had been thunderstorms and lightening for the two days after the hawk, but, as we drove away from the hospital that night, the storm broke and the most beautiful full moon I'd ever seen was suddenly revealed.

Amanda Rose, I've lost my spirituality in recent years, and it hadn't been strong for a good twenty years before that, but I think of my mother every time I see a hawk. Or a full moon. And, now, I'll think of Grandmama every time I see a shifting, swirling flock in the air.

Listening to the Melody of Living

It was two years ago today that I received the phone call from my sister's husband, Bob. I don't recall his precise words, but I know that when I understood what he was telling me that my world stopped and all I could hear was silence. It seems so contrary, how can silence have a sound? But it does, it's as if all the air has been sucked out of a room and the silence echoes loudly and then you realize that people are trying to ask you what's wrong. You hear an unfamiliar voice and vaguely recognize it as your own and it's saying, "My mother died this morning."

On this second anniversary of the death of my mother, Evelyn, I went back and re-read a piece that I wrote three weeks after her death in 2008. I was struck by the following paragraph.

I confess that I've never known this kind of emotional loss and I don't feel like me. I go to work and I go through the motions of what I should do; I smile, I talk, I try to be "fine." When people ask how I am, I always say, "I'm doing okay. I'm fine." But I'm not. Everything seems so overwhelming. I come home and watch hours of mindless television. I rarely turn on my home computer; I tell myself that I'll catch up on things tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. All that I know to do is to keep moving forward one day at a time until I find my rhythm again. I realize that this loss is personal but it is also universal. I am not the first person to lose a mother and people do survive the loss; I just have to get back in sync with living again.

I still miss my mother. I miss her 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning call and her cheery inquiry, "Were you asleep?" I miss her stories about her older sister, my Aunt Nellie Ruth, who is always terribly concerned with two topics: Jesus and other people's sex lives. I miss her rearranging all the items in my pantry so that after she departed from a visit I couldn't find anything without calling her on the phone. Most of all I miss having her always in my corner, telling me that she loved me and that whatever was troubling me was going to be okay. However, in spite of the ache that I still have for her presence, somehow I've gotten back in sync with living again.

My sister, Rhonda, and her husband Bob live only a few blocks from me. I love their home; it's so warm and inviting. They are both very funny people and spending time with them always leaves me relaxed and happy. I feel so blessed to have them nearby. My brother, James, his wife, Lou and my adult nephew, JD live in Charlotte. We keep in contact via telephone and visit on holidays. My dad visits us and I call him every Thursday night for a marathon conversation about world affairs. Mama's youngest brother, my Uncle David calls me regularly just to chat, just as he used to do with my mother. I've renewed connections with some of my cousins with whom I had lost touch over the years. I think that we've all grown to appreciate the meaning of family more.

Then there's Little D, Bob and Rhonda's grandson. His father is Bob's son and Rhonda's stepson. Little D entered this world the December after my mother died; she never met him, but I know that she would have adored him.

This past Saturday evening, I was the babysitter. Little D and I had a marvelous time. We danced, sang songs (his favorite is Itsy Bitsy Spider), and identified all animals as "cow." I corrected him but he just grinned at me and pointed to the horse, dog, rooster, and duck and firmly announced, "cow." Fortunately, he does also call the cow a cow. For some reason, the cat is a cat and not a cow.

My favorite part of the evening was when he had worn himself out and decided to climb on my lap and rest his head on my shoulder. I read him a few nursery rhymes and then sang him a lullaby as he fell asleep.

I've learned that time does have healing powers. There is still an ache in my heart and I have my moments when I miss mama so bad that I want to scream, but the ache is manageable and I no longer feel adrift. I find that I am more patient with others and with myself. I try to pay attention to the small joys of living. There is a rhythm to life; we just to have to take the time to listen to the melody.