I see you, late morning perhaps, wandering in, sitting next to this quintessential Ordinary Guy. He looks sideways at you. Pushes your favorite mug of hot something to the edge of the table he made himself. So long ago it hurts. A permanent scars kind of hurt.
And all he says is with his eyes-
When my children have their birthdays everyone tells them their story–how the delivery went, first memories of the child, what we ate in celebration.
Your mom told me about your birthday. She was in the hospital for a some time before you were delivered because you were a multiple birth. She was so excited about you. You all were delivered (most likely c-section) around 33 weeks old.
You were each tiny and perfect from the beginning.
She was overjoyed by your birth. They told her she would need help since all of you would spend three weeks in the NICU before leaving with three identical apnea monitors. They said they asked your grandmother to help out but she said no.
So they call us. I was young and stupid. The other foster mothers were older women. One had fostered and adopted many children, the other had only your sister and her own grown daughters. They made up lullabies for her.
When we left the hospital together people mistook me for the mother and them for my supporting family. We explained this was not the case.
I did not get to know your mom until they told me they were taking you away. She fought for her parental rights, but the system was well rigged against her.
Sometimes she would call me. She told the most interesting stories. It is these stories I wish I had written down, recorded, preserved for you, best would have been recorded, in her own beautiful voice.
So you could hear them now. So close to her birthday.
Trying to escape the lie that there was another day that could’ve been–something with more walking, running, skipping perhaps, less pain, which you and I measure in numbers, whole or in pieces, because how could you measure it otherwise? The way you might
Measure a life in years, decades, fractions of things. We are all just fractions of things.
Kaleidoscope humans
Seen whole
Only from great heights.
All day it has been set–the lovely flowers, the pristine linens, silver service, aroma of a meal wafting from bone china, but I do not know how to do this–how to sit to this table, how to make a banquet out of sorrow.
—Psalm 23, of course.
I struggle with sadness (with good reason). The world is a dark place. Sometimes I will construct bits of words to hold off the sadness, things that are true but cannot fly or sing or curl up in one’s hands. We make words alive all the time–alive to life or alive to death, but not everyone can use words to make the dead rise or the sun, to speak worlds into being.
I know only One who can do that. Word of God, speak us all to life.
Despite my refusal to believe in the ghosts of the dead, stalking the yard, watching from the hill, beneath the trees where we have buried them, it remains the souls of the technically still living who haunt the before-and-after story of the man buried for another
never asking what exactly it is a carpenter does with
the disarray of
rails, posts, and sockets from the busted-in gates of hell
Trees remind me of home, as do the adorable wearable blankets one might buy for a baby born in a winter country. I struggle with the pronoun I, construct tree houses and wearable blankets out of words strung around the neck of a woman turning into the composite her grandmothers long gone on to the next thing…home…give me a cup full of it, your face, voice in my head, Man who shows up just in the nick of time in sorrow as piercing as joy.
Perhaps you know this place. Perhaps it is just up the hill, just around the corner, just out of reach on the spectrum of visible light
Dog-whistle-there
For-those-who-have ears to hear
She mistrusts me now, with good reason. I took her smallest one and when I brought her back it was only to say goodbye. She moves the surviving ones to the back corner of the closet where they are surrounded by the fragrance of girls’ Sunday dresses, sashes the vines and tangles of a forest we can only see through the window. She shuns the crass plastic takeaway boxes for the Formica bowls we bought in South Korea before you were born, before you were the little ones stashed in the closet for safety. I wish more things were just metaphorical thought experiments and fewer things were laced with grief and its outsider ways.
I understand when she lets me feed her and when she growls be careful, lady, I am done with white man’s justice.
“Don’t worry, Girl,” I tell her. “No white men here anymore.”
I am tired of this thought experiment, this place inside the box where brilliant but uneven men might shape narratives about alive-but-already dead cats. We are all either alive-but-already-dead or entirely eternal in the throes, in the arms, beneath the motherly, sheltering wings
Of the Divine
So good, so very good
…at
setting captives free
Six weeks ago we lost a beloved cat who was originally named Billie Holiday until she survived a traumatic near-death experience. We renamed her Miracle.
When Miracle died suddenly I rushed to stuff meaning and hope into the place she had left with us. We adopted a gregarious shelter cat and began to foster a litter of kittens.
For a brief time things looked manageable. We grieved, but we also marveled. Then, one by one the kittens succumbed to something awful. After the first few died we surmised it was panleukopenia. It was an agonizing week of trying everything and then losing them. We lost, then lost again.
I kept thinking this must have been what the plague felt like (worse, of course).
Against cooler heads we adopted a second cat for my college-aged son. She is amazing and is going to be a great city girl.
We knew–no kittens, the panleukopenia is too strong, lingering like a vengeful ghost all around us in the house.
Then we got an email–momma cat, four week old kittens, needed a foster home. I told the coordinator our story. She said she would keep looking, hope for someone less contagious.
No one emailed back.
When we got to the shelter there was a hesitation, some consulting over Momma Cat’s listlessness. They sent her home with us, humans of last resort. It has been a rough season for cats, for shelters, for life or death decisions.
We took this little feline family home and sensed something was wrong. Mama seemed wan and apathetic.
I called the vet the next morning, emailed the shelter. Nothing materialized in terms of veterinary answers so I enlisted the help of a trusted medical professional whose patients are mostly human.
We dosed mama with “subq” liquids and antibiotics left over from the last bacterial thing. We knew this was a race against time. She needed to eat soon.
Last night at 12:30 she started eating. Miraculous.
She went from skinny, listless, glassy-eyed to an engaged and selfless mama cat.
Selfless because she has a moon-shaped laceration on her belly, right across the nursing plain.
I am not sure all the little ones will make it. I am not sure what we will do with our grief if we lose even one.
One thing is sure for me though, this little feline mother is a Wonder Cat to me.
Carrying Light 