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| image: Sharon, Flicker |
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.
