Here, Again

Here, Again

I am at the shore of Lake Crystal, looking out over the expanse toward the island on a wintry November day.

I can’t get there–the lake is beginning to get slushy, so a boat (if I had one) is not an option. But it’s not frozen, either–walking is also out of the question. Somehow, though, I know I need to get there. I know the water will hold me. I step gingerly out over the edge, and the water holds–like a glassy version of the flat escalators meant to carry weary travelers from one part of the airport to the other, I am slowly

carried toward the island. Sometimes, I walk. Most of the way, though, I just watch as the island’s shores

get closer and closer.

I climb the bank, reach the island’s center. There are remnants of a fire, and I am warmed by its embers. Beside it, my sleeping bag, sitting atop a soft material–like a cloud, but solid. I climb in, wrap the warmth of the sleeping bag around me, securing the hood around my head. 

And–look!--the trees here (but not on the shore) are covered with hoar frost, thick and heavy on the branches. Lying down, I look up at the intricate map of intersecting branches. It’s impossible to know where one tree ends and another begins. The sky is a bright blue streaked with pink, the air thick with the pre-dusk light that burns suddenly luminous, then fades. 

That’s when I hear someone coming toward me. When I turn to look, it is my mother. She’s wearing boots and a sensible coat. She’s the age she was the last time I saw her healthy–around 45–stout and short but also strong, walking slowly toward me.

I stand up, drop the sleeping bag. “What are you doing here?” I ask, but she puts her finger to her lips, points ahead of us. Then she takes my hand. 

“Do you see them?” she asks, and I do–more deer than I ever remember seeing in one place, grazing. Every so often one of them turns to look long and hard at us, but they are not afraid. 

We aren’t, either. “Do you want to dance?” I ask her, in a whisper.

“We don’t have to dance every time we see each other,” she whispers back. “Let’s just watch for awhile.”

And so we do, my hand in hers, her fingers gently squeezing mine. Nothing and everything happens: the deer move slowly from place to place. They stand still and look around at the incredible beauty of the hoar frost. They lower their heads to eat. Once in awhile, they nuzzle each other. 

Once, long ago, when I was three or four, I walked out the side door to a sky blazing exactly like this one, to a world saturated in light. My relatives were there, talking together in the driveway, when my mom took my hand. “Look, a rainbow!” she said, pointing above us. Then, just as I was taking in its beauty, I saw out of the corner of my eye a golden-brown streak of light, and when I looked, it was a family of deer, running across our yard along the tree line separating our lot from the neighbor’s. 

It’s like that again, this airy silence, this witnessing of beauty. Except I am 51. I have outlived her. She comes to me around the age she was when we lost her, not the almost-90-year-old she would be if she were alive. In guided meditations or dreams, she’s always this age.

She slowly lets go of my hand. “Goodbye,” she whispers. Then she holds up the blanket Lisa made for me for Christmas a few years before. She wraps it around my shoulders. 

“How do you know about this?” I ask her. “How do you have it?”

“I’m always with her, you know,” meaning my daughter, who is at an appointment trying to get to the bottom of some chronic pain in her stomach. She’s been messaging me updates all day. “I helped her make the blanket.” 

My eyes fill with tears. I named my eldest daughter for my mother (adding a middle name) when she was adopted. In my heart of hearts, I’ve always known they were bound together even though they never met in this world. 

“What about H?” I ask. My beloved son, whose spiritual presence is deep and strong, is in residential treatment, struggling. Sometimes his body cannot contain all he knows. Sometimes he resists it.

“Him, too,” she says. I name my other children, one by one–those living in my home and those long gone, adopted and foster and heart-children–and she affirms she’s with them all. 

And then she walks toward the island’s shore, going the opposite direction, toward the ethanol plant, the fairgrounds. When she reaches its edge, she turns to me and waves. Her body turns to light–not a flash exactly, but a steady transition until she is a part of the light from the slowly setting sun.

And then, I realize the deer have gathered around me, forming a figure 8 with me in the center. It’s like the golden figure 8 that appeared in another dream, in which I was reunited by my cousin, who is paralyzed from the waist down. She was sitting on a beautiful wooden chair in the middle of a swimming pool. She gave me a necklace with this symbol, which also appeared on the back of the chair. How we intersect, connect, spread out, find one another again and again.

The deer huddled around me then, slowly moving in toward my body. I touched some of them gently on their heads, their backs. I had a sudden memory of a time I’d gone hiking in Ohio and encountered a deer who came toward me shyly, rubbing against me like a dog. When I went home and told my sister she said, “That deer must be sick. Deer don’t do that. They’re supposed to stay away from humans.” 

“Are you sick?” I asked the deer, and the two closest to me shook their heads, definitive. 

They stayed a few more minutes, then began to disburse, heading slowly toward the shore that faces 5th St. When they got to the water, I shouted out, “Don’t step over the edge! You’ll drown!” The last time I’d been here in a vision, one solitary deer had run toward the shore, and I had panicked–it was summer, and there was no way she wasn’t going to drown. But she pranced across the lake, and in the distance I could see other deer standing on its northern shore.

This time, the deer moved more slowly, but they, too, stood on the lake. The young ones among them began to prance around, to play, dipping their heads in the water and splashing one another while following their elders. I watched until all the deer had made it to the shore. 

I lifted my arm. “Goodbye!” I shouted across the distance. “Goodbye!”

This is a story about a time when, while walking along the banks of the Cuyahoga River during college, just after coming out, I came across a spider web drenched in a sudden beam of light. As I looked carefully at its perfect design, I noticed, through its center, a family of deer in the distance, and thought, "If I ever have children, this is the kind of moment I want to share with them, so they will understand the beauty in the world." And then there were tears, because I hadn't imagined or believed I could have children. Then tears because I knew I wouldn't. Thought I wouldn't. I had no idea how the world would change.

This is a story about grief. It is a story about the times we cannot help our children. It is a story about how we pass on awe (or not). In this story is my grandson, who, when he saw this year’s first snowfall, pulled his arms open wide and said, “Isn’t this day beautiful?” It’s about the night I took my sleepless son to lie down outside under the full moon and he said, “The moon is always in my heart.” It’s about my daughter’s first visit, when we walked across the ice to the island–my first visit–then joked over hot chocolates that we could walk on water, just like Jesus. 

This is a story about grief. Children who were taken from our home, crying out, the last sight of them in the backseat of the social worker’s car. It's about the photo of the baby one of them sends us, years later. This is a story about grief: waking to an empty room when children leave in the middle of the night. This is a story about grief: the mundane moments of anger and disconnection and frustration and trying, over and over, to walk across a glassy strip of ice toward the terrifying beauty and mystery of trauma. It’s about staying there, seeing what there is to see. 

It’s also about memory: how my mother’s hand is always in mine even though she was lost so many years ago. How primal the grief of her loss. How every grief connects to that one: the teacher and beloved godmother I lost on the same day less than two weeks ago. How anytime somebody dies I imagine my mother in the distance, holding out her arms, welcoming home, so that when their bodies touch and turn to light I am broken open. 

It’s about Advent, which begins earlier for the Orthodox than for everybody else. This year, Nov. 15 came just as the world here was settling into an early winter after the most glorious of autumns. It’s about that push-pull between the Orthodox fast that focuses on silence and presence and repentance and preparing until the wild celebrations of Dec. 26-Jan. 7, and the run-of-the mill Protestant rush of turkey-stuffing-pie-tree-cookies-gifts, punctuated here and there with candles and songs, than seems to end abruptly after Christmas day. How I have embraced them both and lived them out at the same time.

It’s about knowing when it’s time to dance, and time to stand still. It’s about listening, about saying what we need, as in, “I can’t talk today. I’m too overcome with grief. Help me to find my way again,” and so my spiritual director trusts this is true and walks me into the soul-place where I can see clearly and here I am, writing it down and putting it out into the world for others to read. It's about how much I miss writing. It's about how I am writing all the time.

This is a story about home. Because in the end, just as darkness fell, I stepped onto the water, knowing it would hold me. I walked toward the distant lights of the shore. Snow was falling, large, fluffy flakes, and everything was quiet, and in the meditation, as in real life, I knew the streets so well I could have made it to my family with my eyes closed.