Hawk Moon

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[The big blog world ticks by me this week as I focus elsewhere. Somehow, it always seems to be Wednesday afternoon and I'm not ready to say what I'd been thinking of saying here. This is a re-working of a story I published at Hen's Teeth, our group blog for Liberal Southern Women.]

Rachel, my mother who died on July 4th (she would argue), 2001, claimed to take witch pills. Something would happen to one of my kids or to someone in our extended family, and Rachel would "just know" before she'd been told. I now understand, of course, that a life rich in experience and relationships means that, whether we're aware of it or not, we gather tiny bits of information into that part of the mind that lives just below our awareness, and our brain eventually pings us with a warning that something's either up or soon will be. Rachel's pinged often and loudly.

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 moon phenomena, such as a particularly bright crescent slice on a slightly back-lit globe or a blood-red lunar eclipse over a snowy landscape. Mother moon.

And, too, in her retirement, she developed a bird obsession. She carried bluebird houses around in her trunk of her car and gave them away to strangers whose stories she collected to share with me. She phoned me with the latest doings of the backyard bluebirds: the recently fledged offspring had returned to the house as the parents fed a new brood, flitting about in ways more curious than helpful. And, perhaps, the goldfinch feeder that hung in her big kitchen window had required daily refills. She asked me to paint her mailbox in folk-art bluebirds.

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.  Our house could not have stood under the weight of just one of them if it had fallen. 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, big enough and weighty enough to suit those big old oaks.

The hawks put on the same show for her every year. And, every year, she called me to say that they were hers: "My hawks are back! You should see the little ones this year!" Red-tails were big enough and weighty enough to suit Rachel's persona, too.

Over the years, a chronic illness began to keep my mother home more and more, but the back yard hawks never disappointed. Her world grew both smaller and larger at the same time, as she focused down on the details.

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 could not put her weight on it. 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 time I arrived, we still had no "primary" or original type for the cancer; as the story so often goes, an oncologist had admitted her and then gone on vacation, so no coherent treatment had been devised. Whatever the cancer was, it was widespread and far-advanced. 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 began to talk about her hawks. She told us that one of them 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. My husband and I shared that news with our adult children when they arrived at the hospital, suggesting that they not discourage her notions, explaining that hallucinations could come at this stage. It's important to try to sound like you know what you're talking about when you explain your mother's death to your children, although it can only be a lie.

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 for a visit. She said he was at the window and we should open the blinds. With his old fighter pilot's control, my husband 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 huge Red-tailed hawk perched motionless on the sill... staring back into the room at us.

We only knew she was real by a slight ruffling of her feathers in the breeze and the rare blink of her 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 say what our expressions conveyed; our eyes looked fathom-deep. Rachel seemed 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 her fly, great wings stretching out over all the grounds of the hospital, swooping in slow motion to the giant oak on the lawn below. No one spoke. And Rachel went back to to her restless sleep.

The next day her oncologist returned from vacation and announced he was ready to act aggressively to finish testing and treat the cancer. I'm no doctor, but I'd taken those witch pills, too, and I knew a medical CMA procedure when I saw one. It took a day of fierce argument (with terrible self-doubt on my part) to finally convince her oncologist to suspend his push for irrelevant and painful "treatment" and allow me to move her to the Hospice ward downstairs. Within hours of an evening admission to Hospice, Rachel died.

There had been thunderstorms and lightening for those two confused and sorrowing days after the hawk. There were deep rumblings of thunder, the kind that are felt before they are heard, that gather and surround you, buffet your skin, then shake the ground you stand on--the very sort of storm that had terrified me in childhood. The heaviness of the air had weighed down my thoughts, then sudden ozonic vacuums and stupefying flashes of near lightening scrambled them. But, as we drove away from the hospital on the last night, that long loop-back storm finally broke, the air turned light and sweet, and the most beautiful, kind, reassuring, full moon I'd ever seen was revealed by parting clouds.

In recent years, I've lost what we call spirituality, and it hadn't been strong in me for a good twenty years before that, but, predictably, I think of my mother every time I see a hawk, every time I look at the moon. Or smell vegetable soup. See a handmade quilt or hand-painted china. A bluebird. Hand lotion. Thunder. Wednesday afternoon. The middle of any night. My own hand.