I was always either stuck in the past, or obsessing about the future, while the present heaped its gifts on me, screaming for attention.
Dani Shapiro, Devotion
I'm sitting here watching the snow fly curled up and content under my afghan with my kids and my cats. I'm keenly aware of the here and now: the world turning white outside my window as I sit sipping my steaming cafe Au lait - a welcome veil of peace both inside and out. I'm not thinking about what I have to do today because there really is nothing at all pressing. We finally took the tree down yesterday. The branches were losing their healthy, jewel-toned verde cast...trading it in for an unappealing shade of yellow resembling a sickly, aged bruise. I kept putting this off for several reasons...first and foremost because it's emotional for me. I have to be in the right state of mind to carefully pack away the many years worth of ornaments my Mom specially picked out for the kids. Each hand painted ornament has its own dated box, and as I match them up for another year of storage, so many memories are dredged up. So many ornaments...so many Christmases, and yet never enough. It's impossible not to think of the memories that never were...that will never be. The tears came when I took the last couple ornaments off the tree: my shamrock and my Mom's. They were right next to each other. Had I done that deliberately? I really couldn't recall. And as if that weren't enough for one day, I decided that yesterday was the day to sort through my Mom's Christmas boxes. They've been stored untouched for the last couple years in my basement. A number of years ago she divied up the relics from our childhood - some handmade, many with stories, almost all treasured for some reason - and replaced them with an array of elegant golden globes. I unwrapped each and every one of the glass orbs. They didn't really have a hold on me because although my Mom's tree was glorious in all it's glitter and gold, I wasn't attached to it. I'm not going to lie and say that I didn't have some tearful conversations with my Mom as I undertook this task alone in my quiet house. Oh...yea, I certainly did, but it was cleansing and cathartic to rewrap them. One for me, one for my brother. There were practically two of every beautiful design as if she anticipated that one day they would be shared evenly and enjoyed equally. That was my Mom.
I think I was finally ready to take on this task because I have felt my Mom with me throughout the weekend. Especially Friday evening when I went to visit one of my Mom's oldest, dearest friends in the hospital. In the same hospital my Mom spent too much time in during her year long battle. On the same floor my Mom was admitted to several times. With some of the same nurses still tending to patients. My friend shares the same name as my Mom and now she shares the same disease. Her prognosis is more promising and her attitude is just as positive. We spent more time laughing about her lovable little thug of a grandson than crying although there were tears. It was surreal to walk the maze of halls, past scary clinic after clinic getting from here to there by mere memory. There was no need for signs or directions or information booths...this was unwelcome familiar territory. My Mom's friends, my friends too, M. and R. were by my side every step of the way of this almost out of body experience because they are good like that. The numbness abated when I saw K., who looked amazing just for the record, lying in her hospital gown in her hospital bed. I just couldn't contain my tears, but she understood...she knew that they were as much about me as they were about her. They were for my Mom who is always with us when we are all together.
After I walked K's daughter out for the night, I found myself alone in the bathroom. I had a meltdown. I wish that this weren't happening to them. I wish it never happened to me. And yet, there are more differences than similarities between what happened to my Mom and what is in store for her. The thing I know that will be the same...the fact that life will never be the same again. Not better or worse necessarily...just different. When you are faced with life's fragility, it weighs heavily on your heart in times of joy and seasons of sorrow. It's an acute awareness you have no choice but to live with day in and day out as you try to keep the image of the other shoe dropping from keeping you from walking forward into the rest of your life no matter how long it is.
A little while later we said goodnight to our tired friend K., and we three friends headed out for a little continued conversation over glasses of wine. I told the girls about the coyotes in my yard just before I left. How I was sitting at the kitchen table and I felt something looking at me. How I turned to see, not one, but three coyotes in the yard and how one was staring straight at me. It was eerie and it was exhilarating. R. suggested that, perhaps, the coyote is my animal spirit guide and that it may not have been a coincidence that on this night, in particular, three of them were sighted? Sent? Since I set out together with my two friends to go where I wasn't sure I could or should go, were they there to offer strength and protection?
As M. dropped me at my car parked in front of her house, a single red fox came bounding across the yard in front of us, looked our way and then disappeared just a moonlit silhouette in the snow. Again, eerie and exhilarating, and even more so now that today I've just come to know of her history with the red fox. Hmmm? Can it be that the red fox is her animal spirit guide making sure we made it home safely on the snowy, sister filled night?
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