Walking home from a conservation meeting a few nights ago, my headlamp shone upon two pairs of orange glowing lights. Thinking I had come upon a pair of wolves in Justin Morrill’s front yard, I gasped, then remembered they had been extirpated years ago from Vermont. The larger pair of eyes did not budge but looked me straight in the face until I slowly passed by. A smaller pair of eyes moved up, then down, then ran off. I wished them well and moved along.
A blizzard from the West is heading this way. Out on the porch, I see colored lights strung around a couple scraggly young field pines tied together. They seem festive in a down-and-out Charlie Brown sort of way, which suits my mood. From this same porch, yesterday morning, I saw a young bull moose swimming or hopping down the icy boulder-filled river, and today a dead deer carcass, red ribs reaching up, like a bowl set out for crows, lay on the bloody ice a bit downstream.
My friend, M. died this week, or passed on to the other, as I think of it. She was 98 and claimed to be well ready. Her death wasn’t tragic, for she had a long rich life filled with music and literature and people who loved her, but the act of dying and how long it takes seemed tragic. From the time she knew she wanted to go until she took her last gasp of air, it all became more uncomfortable. I felt like she had things to say, yet couldn’t speak, things she wanted to do, yet couldn’t move. Koshka, her striped, white-pawed cat lay on her lap until the end.
The last time I sat with her it was quiet — except for sounds of her breathing. I sketched the two of them, my friend, and her cat. Even gentle music seemed an intrusion into her act of dying. Koshka was firmly grounded into the blankets, yet in the drawing, my friend seems to be wisping away into the air as if her atoms were evaporating. She looks young, like a girl, sleeping. In 2020, When my husband was at home in the sunroom with Muki, our cat sleeping on his legs, he said to me, “I don’t necessarily want a bunch of people standing around watching me die. Tell them thank you, but please go home.”
M. and I had many discussions about religions and afterlife and the existence of a God. She entertained the possibility of everything, for that was how she thought. I, on the other hand, channeled my beliefs through the narrower scientific laws, scoffing at the idea of spirit or soul. With our atoms, mine, and yours, being around 13.8 billion years old, who needs an afterlife? We’ve already been here as long as the universe has, and maybe well before — universe following universe. No wonder we get tired. I asked M. to please send me a sign if there is something after. Aside from this week’s encounters with glowing wild eyes, a swimming moose, and a dead deer, I am still waiting. Knowing M, it will be something gorgeous, like Bach streaming from the clouds.