Tag: Grief

Wanting

On By trashonthemonocacyIn Family, Reflections3 Comments

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What do I remember?

 

The gritty slope of concrete,

Pressing into my tailbone,

Cold,

As I watched the silty water

Of the creek

Run, metal-scented,

From man-made tunnels.

 

I imagined myself

Elsewhere, but

There

I was.

 

My house,

My father’s house,

Down the street, was where I

Least/

Most

Wanted to be.

Not that there was a

Choice

For a teenage girl

To go anywhere

But where she was.

 

Now I watch a river

Two, three times the size,

Brown and thick

With manure,

Mud of

Men and animals,

And I cannot see where

It goes.

I want to be

There,

Just there,

And nowhere else.

I want

My mind to stay

Too.

 

But it goes to that

House,

Father’s House,

Dad’s House,

Where he

Isn’t anymore.

 

And then I want so much

More.

 

I smell the water

And can’t forget

The wanting.

 

I’m Not Alone

On By trashonthemonocacyIn Family, Memoir, Monocacy River, Reflections, Wildlife3 Comments

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  1. 5 white-tailed deer, in 3 different locations
  2. 1 pileated woodpecker
  3. 1 groundhog
  4. 1 rabbit
  5. 5 squirrels (maybe more)
  6. 2 opossums
  7. 2 Canada geese
  8. 11 Mallard ducks (10 of them ducklings)
  9. 1 barred owl
  10. Too many songbirds to keep track of (mentally)

My walks lately are emotional affairs, vacillating between sublime wonder and heart-pressing sorrow in a matter of a few steps. I can’t help but feel pleasure in the unassuming beauty of the river, but the memories of earlier seasons, so easily evoked in a quiet mind, lay over it the blue tint of loss and grief. Especially as the days warm, I feel myself fighting against the passage of time, even as I smile at the new life it brings.

On the sunny days of this late, cold, wet spring the shores of the river glimmer in green, and elusive vernal ponds formed near its banks appear like secret oases beneath the trees. When I come upon them, I follow the deer paths to their edge and try to find frogs and turtles. Today I instead startled a mallard with her prodigious brood of ten ducklings, who skimmed across the water with astounding speed when they saw me step out of the woods. They’re clearly unrelated to the Frederick ducks of Baker Pond, who, despite the signs saying otherwise, see humans as a potential source of bread crumbs and other such duck junk food. I tried to take a picture of them, but, between the limitations of my camera phone and their determination to get away from me as quickly as possible, I got nothing but a photo of the pond.

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I left them in peace, pursuing the main trail to the river, only to fluster a white-tailed deer, who paused mid-stride when she saw me walking up the path. I paused, then, too, to allow her to cross ahead of me, but she decided that this behavior was much too threatening on my part, and retreated back into the trees. Shrugging, I stepped off of the path in the opposite direction, following a switchback down toward the river, where a pair of Canada geese, after one look at me, launched into the water with agitated bickering and began paddling in indecisive circles.

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Guessing that there was a nest nearby, I left the waterside and returned to the high trail. It was only a few minutes before I came upon another bird, whose large head and bright red crest immediately identified him as a pileated woodpecker. He was on the ground, throwing large chunks of dead wood off a log so soft with rot it hardly required pecking. It took him some time to notice me, but, even once he did, he only flew a few feet to another pile of wood, calling out a laughing song that always makes me feel as if I’m in a jungle. This time, as a pair of barred owls began hooting in the distance, the feeling was even stronger. But the peter-peter-peters of a tufted titmouse managed to keep me firmly in my mid-Atlantic reality.

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Beyond this there was a part of the path that I hadn’t traveled since walking there with my father, last December, on one of the last days when such a walk was possible for him. It is a part of the path just beside my neighborhood with the easiest access to the Monocacy from the assisted living facility where my father lived the last 2 months of his life. While we were there, bundled against a gray day, I pointed out to him where Israel Creek flowed into the river and showed him the rocks where the boys liked to play, and we wondered a little about the birds we saw and the geology of this part of Maryland. He couldn’t always say what he meant, but he was himself, and I understood. It wasn’t long before we turned around, afraid that he wasn’t warm enough or strong enough to go much farther. I still imagined that we would come back again in the spring, when it was more pleasant and there would be more to see.

This morning, I feared walking on that path again. Not so much because I was afraid of what I might feel or remember but because I was afraid of treading over yet another place where my last memory was with him, alive. I suppose some part of me believed — or wanted to believe — that he could somehow remain alive right there forever, as long as I never wrote another memory over it.

But I walked on. It is spring. And I told him we would come back in the spring.

The curious thing is that just when I reached the part of the path where I had stopped to speak with my dad, the part of the path that would seem the hardest to pass, I ended up so distracted that I didn’t think of it at all until it was already behind me. Because, of all the curious things, out of the corner of my eye, partially obscured by a pile of tree limbs and twigs, I saw two white forms shuffling about. At first I thought they might be small dogs, and then maybe young pigs, but as I got a better look I realized that they were two full-grown opossums, out in the morning sun. They’re not terribly quick things, so they thought a little before rambling off back down the hill into the woods, away from me. I was honestly tickled because I hadn’t seen a live adult possum in the wild since a family vacation years ago. And I had never seen one in daylight. And here were two! My father would have loved it.

I loved it.

 

My Father

On By trashonthemonocacyIn Family, Reflections19 Comments

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My father died last week. It still feels too recent to write anything coherently, but every now and then a panic seizes hold of me — a deep, sickening fear — that the time when he was with me is passing away too quickly, that I am losing something vital that will be impossible to retrieve if I wait too long. So I try. I sit here putting words on a screen, and I feel as if I’m wearing blinders. I see but narrowly, unable to understand what is not directly before me.

Days before my father’s hospitalization this fall, when he was still walking, albeit warily, and his dementia had not yet so confused his speech, he and I visited the Catoctin Furnace, where pig iron was discovered and then, beginning in 1776, produced by the first governor of Maryland, Thomas Johnson. We followed the trail that leads into the woods beside the reconstructed furnace, past the ruins of the old manor house, where sparrows hopped between asters and pokeweed in the autumn sun, onto a rocky, narrow path framed by heaps of ancient slag, over the treacherously open Bowstring Arch Bridge, which overlooked a pair of dogs gamboling after sticks a woman tossed into Little Hunting Creek. I stopped my father on the bridge to take a picture of him, something I rarely did. I had no idea this would be the last hike I would ever take with him. I had no idea. But it was a beautiful day. And he smiled.

It was this day I remembered when, the night before his funeral, I tried to think of something to say at his service. My brother and sisters had all finished their pieces, each beautiful in their uniqueness and approach, but my head was too filled, too noisy, too confused by images of my father’s last days. It was not until I lie in bed, not sleeping, nursing my numbness, that the woods came to me: the leaf-littered path, and the water, and my father beside me, as he had been so many times before.

And I knew what to say:

 

To Dad

 

When I step into the woods,

Onto a path through a field,

Up a trail into the mountains,

You are with me —

You always were —

A teacher,

Pointing out

the color of the stones,

The signs of animals in the underbrush,

The shape of the leaves on the trees.

It’s your language

The way you love

How you show the way.

And how nice it is,

Now,

To see how easy it will be

To feel you again,

In the wren in the thicket,

The bright zinnias in my garden,

The rolling clouds in the sky.

You thought you taught me to see

The world

But you also taught me to see

You.

So I never have to say

Goodbye,

Only,

I’ll see you later,

Again,

Soon.

–Julie

On Seeing Everything

On By trashonthemonocacyIn Monocacy River, Nature, Reflections10 Comments

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As a trash collecting hobbyist, it is difficult to look away from unpleasantness. It is difficult, in fact, to look away from anything at all, as I am always looking at everything. My only way, then, of not seeing unpleasantness is not to write about it. And I am guilty of that.

Whether because of the early loss of my mother or the natural human aversion to reminders of mortality, I am affected for days after encountering the body of an animal, particularly if it is young. For years, I said a prayer for every dead animal I passed on the road. Although my faith has gotten shaky, I usually still say my roadkill prayer; it seems to absolve me from some of the pain and grief that witnessing death usually invokes in me. The sight of vultures and crows over a carcass offers me even more comfort. They show a way to truly see a purpose in the animal’s death, if not in its life.

There are moments, though, when this is not quite enough. The time, for instance, when I saw a car strike a bear cub, and for weeks and months (and even years now?) could not stop imagining the bereaved mother bear somewhere in the woods on the other side of the road. Or, last year, when I found an older fawn lying in the woods along the Monocacy River, clearly dead but without any signs of trauma, and a few days later encountered another fawn of the same age, only a short distance away, looking slow and weak, its ribs showing and rear smeared with diarrhea. It stared at me for a long time, unconcerned with my curious old dog, before tottering back into the tall brush. Again I imagined a mother, but this time she was the one dead on the side of the road, and her children were lost without her. Lost children: our fears and histories seem to circle back on themselves, and our imagination never wanders too far from us.

Yesterday I found a young fox kit on the island path. It was lying on its side, its small mouth just open, its eyes just closed. It was dead, of course, but only just so. Its gray fur was downy and its body soft as I lifted it, checking for signs of life and death. The head lolled, its neck broken, and a tincture of moist blood stained its right ear. There was nothing I could do but move it from the path to the forest floor, where it could decompose in relative peace, shaded and surrounded by the bluebells, celandine and violets that have transformed the Monocacy into a wonderland. I covered it with a few damp leaves and noticed a trout lily blooming nearby.

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I know that death is vital to life. Predators kill and prey feed, diseases weaken, the strong survive and reproduce. I get all of that. I appreciate it. With an intellectual and scientist’s objective eye, I can say, “This is Good.” But sometimes my soul is just a little too sensitive for this world.

Reflections on “Cicada”

On By trashonthemonocacyIn Childhood, MemoirLeave a comment

Cicadas remind me of transformations. Slow, patient transformations. Even the annual cicadas live in the earth for years, feeding on tree roots as small, white nymphs before finally crawling out of the soil to trade their dull exoskeletons for wings and color. After a life of silence, they drown out even the birds’ songs with a harsh, incessant buzzing that, for me, is the defining sound of summer. They demand to be heard. Is it their years of invisibility that makes such bold insistence possible?

If so, can I learn from them? Can I accept my years of quiet acquiescence as years of growth and then be brave enough to let them go, to break out of them and find a new form? While nature forces the cicada into its impressive transformations, it seems to work against my own. It is much easier to remain as I am, safe and fed, than to risk the precious resources of time and energy to try something new.

Loss has been such a power in my life that I’m reluctant to lose anything purposefully, even if it is my own sense of limitation. When I lost my mother at the age of 5, it was too much for me to understand. Certainly I couldn’t put my grief into words. I knew only that my world seemed to change color the day she was buried, from bright hues to a constant sickly green. In the car, I would count my family over and over again, only to come up with the wrong number, but for some reason I was sure that it wasn’t my mother I was missing. There was something else, something bigger, something too frightening to really look at. I wished upon the first stars of many nights for my mother to return, until a well-meaning adult told me that I needed to wish for something I really could have…like a Barbie doll. Children are so resilient, I heard them say.

But I didn’t feel resilient. Not even 20 years later, when my oldest brother died in an accident so bizarre that it’s almost impossible to discuss. We buried him next to my mother, while his own son, the same age that I was when my mother died, looked on. Why can’t anyone just grow up with both of their parents? my grandfather asked at the wake. My brother’s loss was nothing less than a reaffirmation that change is frightening, risk is an expression of stupidity, and that that great big hole was never really going to be filled.

As it happens, I was with my brother’s son, now an adult, when I found the cicada yesterday. He bent to look at it with me, still wondering at my weird preoccupation with the life of the Monocacy River. He was there at my son’s command, to skip rocks across the slow, brown water of one of the broadest spots along the river. He is, like my brother, a gentle and soft-spoken man with a desire for family and a peaceful life. In fact, he is studying to become a family counselor, noting that he wants to help people the way people helped him. Maybe that is what resiliency looks like.

Grief can force change. It can force action. It can force one to see time more clearly for the precious thing it is. I know that there is time to wait and to grow, but that time is not limitless. I need to dig myself out of my safe hole, shed my fears and truly spread my wings. I’ve been close so many times. What’s stopping me now?