Blessing in the loss

Her mother hovers near death, so light now she floats six inches above the bed while nestled small and frail so deeply in the sheets.

I am blessed, asked to sit in this room, asked to bring strong arms from which grief can be released. Blessed, trying to anticipate small needs, driving small errands, a presence to offer balance, solid with no weight.

Blessed, in this watching, to see here great beauty.

Two weeks since she fell and shattered bones in hip and neck, a week since she lost consciousness. Four adult children attend with children of their own, a great grandchild due in a month visits via the womb.

"Perhaps mom hangs on to meet her great granddaughter," someone says.

"I think it would be better if mom meets her before she is born," says daughter-soon-to-be-grandmother with a smile but not joking, the quickness of her response and the love in this room offers another chance to laugh.

With laughter and warmth they share stories of childhoods where Gaga played her important role, memories brought out and burnished like holiday silver.

So many meals for so many as her own children searched for channels into adulthood, moved back home sometimes with their own kids until fully fledged and swimming on their own. There are many stories.

Running through it all is the common theme: "She made each of us feel like her favorite."

A grandson reads a book, his grandmother had read it to him, he cannot continue for tears that flow from love and loss. His father sits at mother's bedside, head resting on one arm, his eyes to the floor while she looks to other vistas.

He caresses his mother's brow for a long, long time. There is is no measurement for this waiting. He cries, one of his sisters puts her hand on the back of his neck.

The mourning is as natural and accepted the laughter, as the need to go out and get fresh air, to go home for a shower. We attend in shifts. Tears, laughter, errands, waiting, nurses come in every two hours with an opiate to ease her pain.

Until the end each dose eased her breathing for a while, but then seemed to have little effect at all.

A grandson in the Air Force flew home from Arizona, he and his brother stand at her bedside, eyes bright to her. They just stand, holding her hand, no tears, no drama, peace emanates from them. In another world they wore robes and traveled by horse or mule, they are timeless.

Rebel son of rebel dad, long hair creeping from under cap, but pride earned and voice direct to her even as she cannot hear, the love she poured into him pours back to her, from pitcher to cup to pitcher.

The words "I love you" bring from her a smile. They are the words spoken in this room most often.

An Army Sergeant brings his family home from Texas to be here for the services, and uses his leave to be part of this, to help as he can. Soldiers, aviators abound in this family, tough men who do not flinch from their own weeping.

They attend, ageless youth. Baby blankets she made for them, satin edging worn away by their tiny fingers, return to the foot of her bed, warming her now and them now again.

"What will I do, her love was so important to me," asks a granddaughter, a professional pilot, overwhelmed in this moment by her helplessness.

"I just don't want to let go of her hand," responds her mother, who for years absorbed the pain of her mother's uncertain shuffle to flowers in the garden, worn by years of a long transition.

Daughters together here and now, their tears flow to her in one stream through it all.

Then, a smile, another story, one stands to go to her bed, to hold her cool hands, to feel her feet to be sure they are warm enough as circulation slows.

Over the last days and nights her breath slows, becomes uneven, long pauses cause everyone to stop, to listen, then she gasps as the body's need of oxygen overwhelms her soul's desire to flee, the breathing is ragged in her throat, softened only by sponged drops of water.

"There is a door," she said when she still had a few words left to share, "but I don't know how to go through it."

"Daddy waits and will show you the way, your papa waits and will guide you," her children reply to her stillness. "All those who have passed through will be there."

Finally, early in the morning her breathing slows even more and grows even more shallow, then just stops. This struggle is over, surrounded by loved ones through it all, not one moment of this departure did she spend alone in this room.

Such a blessing to be here.

Father’s Day letters

On Father’s Day I decided to send a couple of letters to each of my daughters. They will be dated on the twins 15th birthday, 2008.

They are to be opened in 2018, and 2028. I don’t know yet how to hold and send, but there is time to figure that out.

I want the girls to remember, then, the details of today that will otherwise fade. Through their father’s eyes, his joy and worry winding like rivulets down through time, contained within the banks of their lives.

A recall of their wonder and laughter at the smooth-skinned tiny rubber boa snake that was wrapped around a stick, thinking it was hidden because it had stuck its head in a crack. My hope that there was a life lesson there. When I showed them that he thought he was safe in a cave, with most of him outside, they laughed out loud.

When the girls open those letters decades from now, I want to give them a fresher memory about who they were. Hopefully this will give them a better understanding of who they have become.

Will they remember the effort to carry a mattress from one room to the other when their best friend came for a sleep-over? That effort may be important in a future when they think they are too tired to get off the couch.

If we are all at any moment the summation of who we have been, today is a too thin slice of time. We stack these slices, our fears and our joys, days and nights banding like alternating colors, and after a while the pile becomes so high that we can’t go back and see with clarity this day, a day that was unremarkable except for the fact that it was the present then, with fewer bumps and scars and tools and certificates pasted to the outside.

At some point in their future I want the past to come alive. I want to count the number of holes we put in the wall playing darts when we missed the whole board. I want them to remember that some dart holes in the wall were absolutely fine at one point in their lives, that fear of consequence was not the only principal of living.

I imagine them opening the envelopes like they were letters from a friend. But instead of some far away place, the letters were posted from a far away hour, not distant in miles or memory but enveloping them now, whenever that is, tying us together in the timelessness of love.

First snow

The storm that blew through yesterday laid upon the mountains finally their first blanket of snow. From the hilltop here, you can see rock falls and outcroppings jutting still black through the fresh white dusting on the dormant volcano. From here you can not tell if the snow on the mountain is two inches or two feet thick.

The sun in Fall is so bright for lacking warmth. It brilliantly etches trees, mountains, squinting from light flat and harsh. How can the sun be so cold? In spring or late summer it is softer, yet so full and warm. It must be the way light polarizes as it bends and bounces through the whisper thin skin of air to fall upon the mountains.

The twins sit at the table in the trailer on this Saturday morning. I worry that when the house is finished in a month and they have their own room that I will be deprived of this closeness of hearing them think aloud to each other only five feet away from the couch where I write, of having them warble like wrens about anything and everything and nothing at all.

Right after eggs K.C. was strumming a rubber band and asked if a musical instrument could be made of rubber bands. I had a new pair of sneakers still in the box, we got the box and stretched the rubber band over the opening. I explained frequency. Within a few minutes, she was playing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” as if on a guitar. I told her it was now an instrument, and we could even mark the notes, “A through G” on the side of the box.

A thirty foot travel trailer is not always crowded, even when filled.

My second small pot of coffee is done, and I look at news of Oregon and the world: Cheney/Bush attempt to derail real action on global warming; Portland doused in the rainiest day of 2007 (the storm that whitened my mountains); Cal versus Oregon; drug free zones; truck crashes.

We are so much a part of it and so far apart from it, a day at a time in the trailer on the hill at the foot of the mountains with their first frosting of snow.