Letters From Beyond the Grave on Memorial Day

Tags

David Whyte, death, inspiration, Memorial Day, poems, poetry, renewal, Rilke, spirituality

While neither of these poems have anything in particular to do with remembering those who have given their lives to defend our freedoms, they are reminders that death is not an ending but another beginning. So my heartfelt prayer for them is that they fell into the arms of that great Mothering and are being nurtured and renewed there.

Farewell Letter to My Son

She wrote me a letter
after her death
and I remember
a kind of happy light
falling on the envelope
as I sat by the rose tree
on her old bench
at the back door,
so surprised by its arrival
wondering what she would say,
looking up before I could open it
and laughing to myself
in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time
for me to leave you.
I am afraid that the words
you are used to hearing
are no longer mine to give,
they are gone and mingled
back in the world
where it is no longer
in my power
to be their first
original author
not their last loving bearer.
You can hear
motherly
words of affection now
only from your own mouth
and only
when you speak them
to those
who stand
motherless
before you.

As for me I must forsake
adulthood
and be bound gladly
to a new childhood.
You must understand
this apprenticeship
demands of me
an elemental innocence
from everything
I ever held in my hands.
I know your generous soul
is well able to let me go
you will in the end
be happy to know
my God was true
and I find myself
after loving you all so long,
in the wide,
infinite mercy
of being mothered myself.

P.S. All your intuitions are true.

By David Whyte

To Leave One’s Own Name Behind

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity. – Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent
whirls all ages along in it, through both realms
forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar

By Rainer Maria Rilke
from Duino Elegies, The first Elegy
translation by Stephen Mitchell

I found both of these poems and the photo by Edward Steichen on Beauty We Love, a wonderful source of inspiration I turn to often.

Wrapped Around Schrodinger’s Cat

Tags

ambiguity, death, life, Limbo, paradox, personal, Philosophy, quantum physics, Schrodinger's Cat

Watercolor by Endre Penouac

That’s where I’ve been these last ten days or so, wrapped around Schrödinger’s cat in that state of unknowing. My son went missing and I did not know if he was dead or alive. Both possibilities seemed so potent. I wanted to know and not know at the same time. I wanted to peek beneath that lid and keep it securely closed forever.

I’ve always been fascinated by the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, that something can be and not be at the same time. That it exists within a perpetual state of ambiguity until the lid is lifted and someone peeks inside. The act of observation is what breaks the spell and catapults a thing, a cat in this instance, into a single state of being– either alive or dead.

Apparently, according to quantum physics, at the level of the infinitely minute, where atoms and quarks and such are the substance of reality, things exist in a fluid state of infinite potentiality. Yet at this macro level where we experience reality, all appears fixed and certain. Only during heightened times, such as when loved ones go missing, does the dilemma of Schrödinger’s cat become not only real, but preferable.

The hope that my son might still be alive seemed too fragile and fleeting to hold on to. Instead I wanted to wrap myself within a state of unknowing, where there was neither life nor death, being or non-being, but just this rich, potent potential with no edges.

I wanted to remain in that limbo forever because I knew that once the lid was lifted, the dilemma did not really end. If he was dead the long, anguished darkness would descend. If he was alive, the joy would be brief and mixed, because the eventuality of his death was so certain and could come at any instant. Life is fragile and fleeting. Death is the one great certainty.

The lid to my dilemma eventually did lift. The whole time of my unknowing was his as well, it appears. He had been in a hospital in a coma. They called me when he awoke and I went to him. But he was clearly not fully awake. He was in purgatory he told me, neither alive nor dead, and he could not tell if I was real and really there or just a figment of his imagination. He truly believed that he had died and was existing in some hellish limbo. I cannot tell you, but you may well imagine, the anguish I felt hugging a son who thought he was dead.

By the next day the lid was raised for him as well, and he knew that he was indeed alive and that I was really there. His recovery was swift and he was discharged from the hospital.

So all is well, for now, at least.

But I cannot shake this sense of uncertainty about the nature of reality. I would rather live in that quantum field of endless potentiality, rather than being stuck in this macro world of duality where the cataclysmic forces of right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, clash so ferociously, and appear so fixed.

I wonder if it truly is that lifting of a lid that “fixes” a thing? That ties it to one end or the other of an apparent duality, and makes a thing dead or alive?

Or rather, is it our firm belief in a dualistic reality that forces our rational mind into “seeing” either one thing or its opposite, and not the state between?

Is this another paradox to puzzle through? Another box to open?

Let all six sides fly apart.

Let all  hard edges dissolve.

Let me wrap my mind around the soft warm body within where nothing is fixed or final.

Mary Oliver, Washed in Light

Tags

death, inspiration, Mary Oliver, Nature Poetry, poet, poetry

Georgia O’Keeffe

One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, died last week. I do not have the words to tell you how much her words meant to me, and so many lovely eulogies have been written already, I won’t try.

But the best eulogies were written in her own hand, or so it seems to me.

She did not shy from death. She studied it, stalked it, even taunted it at times. But mostly she used it as a spur to live more deeply in the moment, to become “a bride married to amazement,” a “bridegroom, taking the world” into her arms.

And finally she let it swoop down to wrap its white wings around her and carry her away to that river of light where she is “washed and washed.”

She lived her “one wild and precious life” with exquisite purpose, and I am certain beyond words her journey will not end.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Poppies

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful,
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings—
five feet apart—
and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow—

and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows—
so I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us—
as soft as feathers—
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking,and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

 

 

13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After

Tags

Caretakers, Caretaking, death, Hospice, Mother's death, Mothers, poetry, prose poem, Relationships

My mother died seven years ago this month, which is also the month I was born. I wrote a short story, which reads like a prose poem, a few years ago about the experience, caring for her during those last months. I thought I would reblog it here in memory of her. We had a difficult relationship at times, but it was buoyed by the deep love and commitment we had for each other. She is dearly missed.

Here’s how the story begins. You can read the rest of it at the link below.

I
She streaks past me naked in the dark hall. Light from the bathroom flashes upon her face, her thin shoulders, her sharp knees. Her head turns toward me, her dark eyes angry stabs. As if daring me to see her, stop her, help her. Or demanding I don’t.

I struggle up from the cot where I’ve been sleeping. Through the open doorway, she’s a slice of bright light, slumped on the toilet, the white tiles gleaming behind her.

She kicks the door shut in my face.

Source: 13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After

Dreaming of Death—Oops, Bears

Tags

Bears, death, dream interpretations, dream symbols, Dreams, Humor, rebirth, renewal

I’m going to die. Soon.

That’s what I thought, waking one morning, remembering three distinct dreams, each in which I was suddenly “taken.”

In the first, I was whisked away by a whirlwind that dropped out of the sky. In the next two, bears got me.

The dreams were so vivid and similar, I was sure they meant something significant. Knowing the best interpreter of any dream is the dreamer, I asked myself:

“What do YOU think it means?”

“It means I’m going to die!” was my answer.

This realization was so disturbing, tears sprung to my eyes. It’s too soon, surely! I have a lot of living yet to do. I’m not ready.

It wasn’t my first dream of death, or bears. Only a week ago I had a similar vivid dream of being chased by a bear in our garden. Fortunately, in that dream I managed to escape. It was my husband who got gobbled.

This dream fed my certainty that bears must symbolize death in dreams. I rushed to my computer. A quick google search confirmed my fate.

Bears do symbolize death!

Among other things, I learned as I searched further. Like rebirth and renewal.

Ever the optimist, I latched onto that explanation. Perhaps I wasn’t dreaming of my real death. Perhaps it was only symbolic. The death of my “little self,” and the rebirth of a brand new shiny me. What a relief!

This new interpretation seemed even more likely when I recalled that in the last two bear dreams I was walking with a “little sister” who was dragged away, kicking and screaming, before I was taken. But when the bear came back to grab me, surprisingly, its paw was soft as it led me away.

I realized then in my dream that I had been “chosen.” The bear was taking me on a journey and I was no longer afraid. In fact, the bear was so amiable that when I worried about leaving unprepared, he let me go home to grab a coat.

I was certain this must be the correct interpretation of my dreams since bears also act as spirit guides and signify fresh beginnings.

Still, the “death” scare lingered.

So I decided to share the dreams with my husband. Just in case. That way, if I did suddenly expire, he’d have a good story to share:

“Well, you know, she dreamed about her death only days ago!”

I didn’t tell him about the dream where he got gobbled. No need to alarm him.

Besides, that would make a good story for me. You know. “Just in case.”

[NOTE TO READERS – If this blog goes dark, you too have a good story!]

13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After

Tags

Caretakers, death, dying, fiction, Flash Fiction, Mother's death, short story, writing, writing process

This is the title of a short story I wrote that was published in the Fall Issue of Cobalt Review. I’ve copied it below. It’s very short.

It came together when I was working on a blog post about Wallace Stevens, one of my favorite poets. His “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” was on my mind while I was reading Paul Harding’s Tinkers.

Harding’s novel about a man on his deathbed looking back at his own and his father’s life reads almost like a prose poem at times, written in short, lyrical vignettes. I was reminded of my own mother’s death, which I remember as a succession of brief, intensely vivid scenes.

I first wrote of this experience in my blog post “The Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry.” I wondered how the story would unfold if modeled after Steven’s poem. This is the result of that experiment. While based on personal experience, it is fictionalized. I’d be very interested in hearing what you think.

13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After

By Deborah J. Brasket

I
She streaks past me naked in the dark hall. Light from the bathroom flashes upon her face, her thin shoulders, her sharp knees. Her head turns toward me, her dark eyes angry stabs. As if daring me to see her, stop her, help her. Or demanding I don’t.

I struggle up from the cot where I’ve been sleeping. Through the open doorway, she’s a slice of bright light, slumped on the toilet, the white tiles gleaming behind her.

She kicks the door shut in my face.

II
Late June she’s diagnosed. October first gone. Mid-August her strength rallies.

“I don’t think I’m dying after all,” she tells me. “They got it all wrong. As usual.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” she says.
“Like what?”
“Like that.”

III
The plums lie where they fall in the tall grass. I pass them on my way to the dumpster, where I toss plastic bags filled with fouled Depends, empty syringes, and morphine bottles.

On the way back to her apartment I gather up a few plums, passing over the ones pecked by birds, or burst open from the fall, or too soft to hold together, carefully selecting those with bright tight skins.

“Where did you get those? Did you pick them?”
“No, they were on the ground.”
“Garbage. Throw them out.”

“Garbage,” she insists. Her foot hits the lever, opening the trash can as I try to push past her.

When she’s not looking I fish them out and wash them in cold water. I place them in a bowl in the refrigerator next to the bottles of Ensure and pediatric water that she won’t touch.

When she’s asleep I take one out and press the cold, purple flesh against my lips, biting through the taut, tart skin to the soft, sweet meat beneath. Sucking up the juices.

IV
“Come here. I want you to sit on my lap.”
“No, Mama. I’m too heavy. I’ll hurt you.”
“Come, I want to hold you, like I used to.” She pats her lap.

Her hands are all bone now, her nails long and yellow. Her pajama bottoms are so loose there’s almost no leg to sit on. I balance on the edge of the recliner and she pulls my head down to her chest.

“There now,” she says, “there now.”

I feel like I’m lying on glass. Like any second I’ll break through. Like the long sharp shards of her body holding me up are giving way, and I’m being torn to pieces in her arms.

V
“She says you stole her car.” The social worker from hospice sits on the couch with a pad and pen in her hand. She’s new. They’re always new. We’ve had this conversation before.

“It’s in the shop. The clutch went out, remember Mama?”
“You can’t have it. Bring it back.”
“You don’t need it. Besides you can’t drive.”
“Anna can drive me, can’t you Anna?”

Across from the social worker sits Anna, slumped on the hearth, biting her thumbnail. I sit facing my mother. We are like four points on the compass, holding up our respective ends.

“That’s not Anna’s job, to drive you.”
“I know what you’re doing,” she tells me between clenched teeth.
“What am I doing?”
“You know what you’re doing!”

Her fury flashes across the room in brilliant streaks, passing over Anna’s bent head, the social worker’s busy pen. It hits me full in the face. I do not flinch.

VI
In spring the wild turkeys wander down from the hillsides and graze in the meadow behind our home. Sometimes they come into our yard and stand before the glass doors. Raising their wings and flapping furiously, they butt their hard beaks against the glass. Attacking what they take as another.

VII
She’s moving in slow motion, inching across the room in her walker. Her sharp shoulders are hunched, her wide mouth drooped, her once silver hair yellow and dull. Dark eyes burn in sunken sockets.

Slowly her face turns toward me, her fierce, bitter-bright eyes fixed on mine.

“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she says.

VIII
I kneel at her knees weeping. Her hands lightly pat my head.

When I look up her eyes are closed and she looks so peaceful. Her body sinks deep into the soft cushions steeped in her own scent. The wings of the chair, the arms and the legs, rise up around her, the sharp edges of her face and body sunk in softness.

If I could I would let her, cocooned like that, sink deep beneath the shade of the plum trees outside her window. Sink into the earth just like that.

The tight bitter skin broken through. All the sweet juices let loose.

IX
The ground squirrels are popping up everywhere, their long tunnels weaving through the roots of the old oaks, loosening the soil that anchors them to the slopes. We fear they will eventually cause the trees to tumble and the hillside holding up our home collapse.

So we feed them poison, sprinkling it around the trees and along the squirrel-dug furrows, as if sowing seed. It’s the same stuff found in the Warfarin my husband takes to keep his blood thin and clot-free.

Sometimes I imagine them out there beneath the oak trees in the moonlight, the squirrels running in slow motion through dark tunnels while the blood running through their veins grows thinner and thinner. The light in their brains grows brighter and brighter until they finally explode, like stars, in a burst of white light.

X
She sits on the edge of the bed hunched over, letting me do what I will. The lamplight spills over our bent heads, catching the sheen on the tight skin of her calves.

I hold her bare foot in my hand and rub lotion into the dry skin, messaging the soft soles and the rough edges of her toes. I spread the thick lotion up her thin ankles and over the sheen of her legs where it soon disappears. I pour on more and more.

Her skin is so thirsty. There’s no end to the thirst.

XI
I listen to her breathing in the dark from my cot in the next room. I hold my breath each time hers stops, waiting, listening. Sometimes minutes seem to pass before the rattle starts up again. Each time it’s longer and longer. Soon the minutes will turn to hours, the hours to days, then weeks, years.

How long can you hold your breath before your heart bursts?

XII
I touch her hair, her cheek, before they wheel her into the room where she’s cremated. I wait while she turns to ashes.

XIII
It’s too dark to see when I hear the deer scream. There’s only the sound of thundering hooves and that long terrifying cry passing from one end of the meadow to the other, before crashing down a ravine.

It ends abruptly, as if a knife had sliced its throat.

I see the deer often in my dreams, screaming past me in the dark, slowly turning her head toward me. Fixing her fierce, bitter-bright eyes on mine.

I do not turn away. I let her drink and drink.

First published in Cobalt Review, Issue 9, Fall 2013, in a slightly modified version.

(Forgive me if this has shown up twice in your reader)

Related articles

• “13 Ways of Looking at Dying, Just Before, and the Moment After” (deborahbrasket.wordpress.com)

Epitaph for a Tombstone – Exploring Infinity

Tags

Consciousness, death, Immortality, Near-death experience, poetry, Science, spirituality, Tombstone Epitaph

I came across this recently, something I wrote years and years ago.

So much has changed since then, but not this. This sense that something in me was meant to live forever, that a handful of years is just not enough to realize all that I am.

Epitaph for a Tombstone

I am compressed within my skin
Like a time-bomb

There is more to me than time
Allows to be

When the end comes I’ll explode
Like an atom

It is my end to explore
Infinity

I was obsessed with the idea that I would never be able to see, do, be all that I wanted within the time allotted me. That this little life “rounded by a dream” as Shakespeare wrote, was but an interlude, and that I had existed before and will exist well after it ends.

Perhaps that’s why Wordsworth’s lines in “Intimations of Immortality” mean so much to me, that we come into this world “trailing clouds of glory”. The verses found throughout the Bible about being there “when the morning stars first sang together” have a similar deja vu effect on me.

I was on a blog recently where the question of an after-life was being discussed, along with the musings of Thomas Jefferson and Saul Bellow on the subject.

The suggestion was that there is no science to support such speculation, and these musings by learned men were merely a comforting concession to ease the pain of lost loved ones or the anxiety about one’s own impending death. I took a different viewpoint, and wrote this:

I’m very skeptical of what “Science” knows about anything at this point, but especially of what it knows about the mind and consciousness and the thing that sages through the ages have referred to as “soul” or “spirit.” That individual consciousness would just disappear when life leaves the body seems almost more fantastical than if it should continue in some form.

Look at what happens when we turn out the lights at night–consciousness continues to spin out a type of “reality” at least to the one “awake” in the dream, seemingly conscious and aware of himself and others and a world around him. This waking dream we all seem to be part of seems no more real at times than the one I left when the alarm when off.

And when we look at the “new science” and quantum physics, it appears we know less about how this world is fabricated than we had thought, but what it does seem to indicate is that consciousness plays a much larger role in reality than mere physical particles (if the two can be separated!).

I guess all this rambling goes to say I think when it comes to facing our eventual deaths, scientists can tell us nothing of importance, but the great shock of contemplating a blank slate in place of continuing consciousness may be such an affront to reason that it kick-starts a higher sense of perception or intuition, where the continuation of a person’s spirit or soul, or even that of a dog, does not seem so unreasonable after all. Hence Jefferson’s and Bellow’s musings on death.

Just yesterday I read about a new study debunking the claims of those who have had near-death experiences of an after-life (you know, images of a long tunnel with a bright light at the end surrounded by departed loved ones.)

Apparently researchers have discovered that as the brain dies there is a flurry of abnormal activity—lots of bells and whistle going off , neurons going crazy, atoms exploding, that sort of thing (a bit like my poem depicts, don’t you think?).

These frantic falterings cause those near-death experiences, so they speculate. But a cause and effect relationship can go both ways (as we all well know when considering which came first, the chicken or the egg). It could easily be that in those final moments before the brain goes dead it records the experience of our consciousness of crossing over to a new mental landscape beyond this world. That crazy brain activity could be the last gasp, or mental grasping, of the mortal as it perceives a glimpse of immortality.

There’s no way to know for sure, of course. But when the best minds of this world and many cultures across time all seem to have a similar sense of something of ourselves continuing after this life ends, I think we’d be wise not to dismiss this altogether, despite the lack of science to support it.

Science after all is just evolving thought, new ways of perceiving reality, discovering new patterns of evidence that explain the phenomena around us.

And, if true to itself, Science is open-ended as well as open-minded, poised to grasp things that may never have occurred to it yet. Science too, in the end, may be but one way by which we “explore infinity.”

[My apology to readers who received this twice. Some readers had trouble viewing the first post so I reposted it. Please respond to or “re-like” this one.]

The Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry

Tags

death, dying, human consciousness, Nature, wildlife, Zen

The deer fleeing for its life turns to look at me with my mother’s eyes.  Dark fierce eyes, bitter-bright, locking onto mine.  Not letting go.  She’s not looking for help or pity or comfort.  Or escape.  She knows there’s no escape.  That dark gaze locked onto mine wants but one thing.  A witness to its passing, its inevitable and terrifying end.

I never actually saw the deer that night.  It was too dark.  I only heard its pounding hooves passing behind our home, its terrified scream splitting the night.  But I “see” it nonetheless.  For days, weeks, afterwards, even now, I see it. Screaming past me with my mother’s eyes. I’d watched her passing too. Her inevitable and terrifying end.

It came quickly.  Late June she was diagnosed with cancer.  By October she was gone.

I was her caretaker during those last brief months.  I watched her flesh waste away, her energy, her light step, her quick smile. Her interest in watching golf and tennis on TV, in reading mysteries, in knitting, in food, in friends, in family.  In me.  In her own life.  It all drained away in a few short months, in the time it takes to flee screaming from one side of the meadow to the other before crashing down that ravine.

And during all that time of her passing, her wide, terrified gaze locked on mine.  Or so it seems now.

In fact, her passing was surprisingly mild.  She refused treatment and entered hospice care.  She was 80 years old.  Her time had come.  She was ready.  Or so she said, and maybe even believed, at the beginning.  The medication kept her free of the worst pain for most of that time.  Until it didn’t.  Until there was no escaping the pain.

She watched herself deteriorate, and I watched with her.  It was like a thing we watched silently together, this draining away of her life.  It was a painful thing, but for the most part she was stoic, reserved, resigned.

And then one day as she was struggling across the room with her walker, moving in slow motion like the deer in my dream, she turned toward me and fixed her eyes on mine.

By then her loose skin hung from her bones, her sharp shoulders hunched, her wide mouth drooped, her once silver-white hair turned yellow and dull, and her dark eyes shone from sunken sockets. She turned toward me in her slow struggle across the room, fixing her intense bitter-bright eyes on mine and said, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

The worst thing. Dying. And I knew she was not looking for a response from me, nor sympathy, nor saving, nor comforting words.  My place was simply to bear witness to this “worst thing”, to the terror of her inevitable passing.  Death at her heels on that slow passage across the room.

She slipped into a coma soon afterwards.  And then she was gone.

No escape.  The unalterable, unutterable fact underwriting our existence.  We avert our eyes every which way as long as we can. Until we can’t.  Until the time comes to bear witness, to refuse to look away, to let the fact of another’s inevitable passing, or our own, stare us down, and lock our gaze.  No escape.  And all we can do is be there, fully present, in that moment, bearing witness.

There’s a story about a Zen monk fleeing for his life, a tiger at his heels, chasing him over the edge of a cliff where he grabs hold of a branch.  He dangles there just out of reach of the tiger’s jaws snapping at his head, while below him he sees another tiger half-climbing the cliff to snap at his feet.  No escape.  Just then he notices a fat juicy strawberry dangling from a nearby vine. He lets go with one hand to swing toward the strawberry where he plucks it loose and pops it into his mouth.  “Oh, so delicious!” he sighs, savoring its sweetness.

Here’s another story.  True story.  Caught on video by a group of tourists on safari in Africa. You can watch it here on youtube. Here’s how it goes:

A herd of water buffalo approach a river where a pride of lions are resting.  The lions chase the buffalos, separating a calf from the herd, and dragging it away.  Only the struggling calf slips into the river.  The lions climb down the bank and begin pulling the calf ashore when a crocodile grabs hold of its leg and tries to drag it under.  The lions and crocodile play tug-of-war with the calf, until the lions win and pull it ashore. No escape.

Then something unimaginable happens. The fleeing buffalos suddenly stop running, reverse course, and head back, charging at the lions and chasing them away. The little calf, who moments before had been caught between the lion’s jaw and the crocodile’s teeth (no escape), gets to her feet, shakes her rump, and walks away with the herd, apparently unharmed.

What does it all mean?

These two stories roll around and around in my mind, the same way the screaming deer’s flight and my mother’s slow struggle across the room are rolled together in my memory.

What do they have in common, the monk and the baby buffalo?  One savoring life while death snaps at his heels, another’s life being saved from the grip of death.  The saving and savoring of life.  It’s a theme I turn to again and again in my writing.

Perhaps our escape from life’s inevitable and terrifying end, like the monk’s, is by embracing life’s sweetness, savoring all it has to offer, living life in the oh-so-delicious present moment.

Perhaps our escape is like the calf being plucked from the jaws of death by something too miraculous to even imagine.

Perhaps at the very end, when there finally is no escape from death, like that deer, like my mother, and that awful inevitable conclusion chasing us down grabs hold, something unimaginable happens.  Some unseen hand plucks us like a ripe strawberry from the jaws of death and swallows us whole, savoring all the sweetness of our brief lives, and reaffirming with a sigh, “Oh, so delicious!”

[This post is a sequel to my last, which you can read here. The photos were taken from an Amtrak train window on a trip to San Diego where I wrote most of this post]

Related articles

• Mountain Lion Kills Deer in Springs Family’s Front Yard (kktv.com)
• Deer Forest (charleymckelvy.wordpress.com)

A Deer’s Scream – Beauty and Brutality at Home and in the Hills of Vietnam

Tags

beauty and brutality, death, Deer, deer scream, memoir, Nature, Vietnam, wildlife

The most horrifying sound I’ve ever heard came one night soon after we moved here.  A scream of pure terror that seemed to last forever.

It was too dark to see.  All we could hear was the sound of thundering hooves and a long endless scream passing from one end of the meadow behind our home to the other, then crashing down a ravine. There the sound suddenly stopped, as if a knife had sliced its throat.

Something running for its life had ended abruptly.

We had never heard of a deer screaming, but could not imagine what else it could have been to run so fast and so loud, so I searched online.

There various hunters confirmed that deer do indeed scream—not always, not often, but when they do, the sound is so terrifyingly awful it has haunted them ever since.  One property owner who had always welcomed hunters would not allow them on his land after hearing that scream.

So much of what I write here is about nature’s beauty, how it inspires, uplifts, and nourishes us.  But there’s another inescapable side to nature, darker and more brutal–nature “red of tooth and claw,” as Tennyson wrote.

I’ve seen that kind too in my own backyard–in the screaming deer running for its life, the mountain lion crouched in the tall grass devouring something unidentifiable, the rattlesnake that rose hissing and bared its fangs when I was weeding, the two coyotes taking turns digging at the gopher hole then swallowing it whole in two gulps.

Then there was the rattlesnake we slaughtered when it made its home in our backyard where our little dog plays.  The whole thing was a bloody nightmare, my husband going after it with a long pruning spear.  The snake lunging and hissing and retreating. Finally catching it up, cutting it in two, the headless body writhing, whipping its tail.

There’s also the traps we set to keep the rats out of our garage, the gophers out of our garden.  We kill to preserve life–the life of our dog, our flowers, our lawn–to protect our home. I can’t ever imagine killing a deer or rabbit or quail for food.  Yet our freezer is full of meat others bred and killed.

When we were sailing we joyously lived off the bounty of the sea, hunting, capturing, killing, and eating tuna and swordfish, scallops and lobsters.

How many silent screams went unheard in those halcyon days filled with great beauty and joy and thanksgiving.

As a boy my husband spent his days happily roaming through the hills of old Orcutt with his dog Scratch and his shotgun hunting rabbits and quail.

He hunted in the hills of Vietnam as a young marine too.

Never had he known such beauty as he did then tramping through those wild tropical jungles and lush valleys, he once told me.

He built shelters of sandbags high on a hill overlooking a distant valley quilted in rice paddies with the dark steep mountains laced in waterfalls rising behind them.

He trudged through streams with his 30-lb backpack and machine gun strapped to his back, spellbound by the tropical flowers draping the banks, the brilliant birds darting overhead.

It was surreal—such beauty and brutality all rolled into one. Like the fields behind our home where beautiful creatures die every day to feed other beautiful creatures.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.

Perhaps just to bear witness to the beauty and brutality rolled into one all around us everywhere.  We can’t separate it out.  We have to swallow it whole.  There’s no other way.

For a long time after my husband returned from Vietnam he carried in his wallet a faded photo, a heap of dead bodies. When he showed his uncle, he shied away from him, horrified that he would take and keep such a thing.

But he had to he told me.  He couldn’t turn away.

He had to bear witness to the brutality of war.  Taking that photo was his refusal to turn away.  To swallow it whole.

[NOTE:  Part Two of this post can be found here:  A Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry.]