Writing Through Cancer

It was a week already colored by loss.  I watched the news on Friday evening in shock as again, images of tornadoes in Oklahoma filled the screen.  Barely two weeks since the town of Moore was devastated by a massive tornado, it was hard to imagine that the town could be struck again by another tornado before it had even recovered from the first.  Then the news coverage shifted to the war in Syria, fighting in Lebanon, and I turned the television off.  I was already filled with enough heartache and sorrow.

Two days earlier, I received an email from an acquaintance, the wife of a dear friend, B., who had been at our sides in the years after the death of my daughters’ father, my first husband, helping to ease my daughters’ grief.  “I need your telephone number,” she wrote.  She and B. had divorced five or six years ago before she moved back to the United States from Canada.   I hadn’t heard from her for years.  I sent a reply with my telephone number and waited, filled with a sense of dread.  I’d just sent him a note last week to tell him I’d be in Toronto next week, but he’d never replied.

B. never recovered from the loss of his marriage, and although he said little about the break-up, he gradually became more withdrawn, until he was living the life of a recluse.  We continued, my daughters and I, to telephone from time to time, visit him when we were in Toronto, send birthday cards and occasional emails.  Time and again, B. reassured us that he was all right, but we were all dismayed by the change in him

His former wife telephoned that evening. “B. is dead,” she said.  “They found him in his bed.  He died in his sleep.”  Whatever the cause of death, no one knew.  The family declined to have an autopsy performed, and whether natural causes or suicide, no one could say.  I went to bed with a heavy heart and for the next few days, replayed our last conversations, the late night sentimental messages he had been sending, the memory of the first time we met him—and how he’d helped us through that first turbulent year of grief.  My feelings of loss were acute—and I chastised myself for not having reached out more often.  But it wasn’t B.’s death that finally brought me to tears, but a mother dove with losses of her own.

For the past two years, doves have chosen a potted asparagus fern, one that hangs over our porch railing, as their nest.  Their arrival announces springtime and new life.  We’ve watched as, each year, two pale eggs appeared in the fern, patiently tended by a pair of doves.  Twice, we’ve seen chicks hatch and test their wings with their protective parents in tow.  But this year we were visited a third time, a few weeks after the other family of doves vacated the nest.  Another mother dove appeared, and after a day or two of assessing the abandoned nest, claimed it for her own.  Soon, two more eggs were visible in the few fleeting moments she would leave the nest, and her vigil began in earnest.  She sat patiently, tolerating our comings and goings, her dark eyes riveted on mine when I watered the other plants near the fern.  As our eyes met, I experienced a kind of communion, as well as a sense of awe.  It seemed she somehow trusted I would not harm her.  I felt like her protector.  Several days passed, and I grew eager for another pair of chicks to hatch.

It was just about time, or so I thought, when early in the morning a day after B.’s death, I saw her pacing back and forth on the railing, coo-cooing repeatedly in agitation.  I tiptoed as close to the nest as I dared and peered into it.  Empty.  Her eggs were gone, no doubt stolen during the night by one of the predators that inhabit our canyon—coyotes, hawks, and rodents.  As I got closer to the nest, she flapped her wings frantically, squawked and flew away, leaving me to stare, in disbelief at the empty nest.  That’s the moment my tears began, and I wept over the loss of two small eggs—and so much more.

The mother dove returned a few hours later, paced the deck again, repeatedly checking the nest, as if she thought it was somehow been a joke, a passing mirage of emptiness.  Only the hollow in the fern, where her eggs once lay, remained.  I, was as hopeful as she, returning to gently probe the hollow, hoping that maybe the eggs had just slipped below the fern and into the soil.  She squawked and fluttered her wings once more, and flew away, both of us grieving in our own way.

This morning, I returned to the porch to water the parched fern,  surprised to see a young dove strutting among the day lilies below the porch.  She was unfazed by my sudden appearance, pausing briefly to look up at me before continuing her strut about the garden–apparently quite at home.  Perhaps he was assessing the garden as a potential nesting place for next year.  I wondered if it was one of the offspring of the pair who’d nested there earlier in the spring.  Whatever the reason for its casual stroll among the lilies, I smiled, my spirits lighter than they had been all week.

“Hope is a thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote.  I recalled words as I thought about the dove this morning, and about the natural cycle of life, birth and death.  Even when we suffer unexpected loss, as in B.’s death, we can rediscover hope.   B. gave to us, as a friend-in-need, hope when we needed it most—and that is the memory that will live in our hearts.  Hope is a gift we can pass on to others, but this week, it was the unlikely appearance of a little dove that gave to me.

“Hope is the thing with feathers”

By Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers 

That perches in the soul, 

And sings the tune without the words, 

And never stops at all, 

  

And sweetest in the gale is heard;         

And sore must be the storm 

That could abash the little bird 

That kept so many warm. 

  

I’ve heard it in the chillest land, 

And on the strangest sea;        

Yet, never, in extremity, 

It asked a crumb of me.

 

This week, write about hope.