Death of a Hawk

The Great Black Hawk saga.

A short essay of mine about a rare hawk was published by Entropy Magazine today. It’s also about curiosity, death, grief, compassion, wilderness, healing, kinship with nature, ecological warning, hope, and what it means to live in community with the earth. 

I worry about what I would have done if I hadn’t had nature in the months after Evelyn’s death. I often went to Yosemite to hike alone in the wilderness because I needed to figure out how I was going to survive grief. The long days on the trail gave me the time and the solitude I needed to listen for what I could not hear at home. The beauty and awe of natural world reminded me that I was not alone, and that I always had a place where I could go and renew my spirit.

You can read the essay online:

https://entropymag.org/the-birds-the-great-black-hawk/

(Yes, that's an owl in the photo because I don't have my own photo of a hawk, but the journal has a good one.)

Empty Journals

The mother of writer Terry Tempest Williams left Terry her journals but said she could not read them until after she died. When it was time, Terry opened them and discovered the pages were blank. Why would her mother take such care to nicely bind her journals yet leave the pages empty? 

Possessions

What artifacts do we keep to remind us of the people we've loved? 

Artifacts - my new essay at Hippocampus Magazine. http://bit.ly/2z6kDWc

Recovery Journal

One of my essays was published this week in the R.KV.R.Y Quarterly. You can read it here: http://rkvryquarterly.com/wooden-gates-by-mark-liebenow/

It’s an early chapter in my yet to be published grief memoir.

A snippet from the essay – 

“No matter how death comes, it’s traumatic. But Ev dying in her 40s excavated a dark depth to life that I didn’t know existed.”

Coming Home After

Journal entry 35                                                                       

(The following is taken from my journal during the first year of grief.)

The shadows of the dead weigh heavy, like thick humid air when dark storm clouds approach.

I’m not in control anymore. Forces I can’t see push me around like an ocean. Every day life flows by but I can’t connect. Every few days people bring food and I eat. They send cards or call and leave messages that I won’t return. Words have lost their meaning. Colors mute to gray. Every day I excuse myself, sit on the side of the world and watch it flow by, unable to move, unable to care what happens to me or to anyone.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

How Fleeting the Motes of Dust

Journal entry 33

How fleeting the motes of dust

that burn in the light before us,

guiding us blindly where we need to go.

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Converting the Home

Journal entry 32

Today I gave away more of Evelyn’s possessions.

I filled the backseat of the car with her professional outfits and drove them to a place that helps low-income women acquire the business clothes they need to interview for decent jobs. I took her teaching resources to a teaching friend, and her music to someone who sings.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Ashes

Journal entry 31

The cones of the Giant Sequoia won’t open until the trauma of a forest fire sweeps through, burning away the underlying bushes and small trees. The seeds fall into the blackened earth, germinate, and grow from the ashes. 




Out of the destruction of the old, new life rises.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

  

Bones of Our Dead

Journal entry 30

Evelyn’s bones sit by my left hand, cremated and ground up, held in the urn that we used for her father. I only have one urn so Stan had to move to a muslin bag and now rests in the drawer. Our cat Vashti is curled up in a pine box on the shelf. I compare my collection of bones. Stan’s are darker than Evelyn’s; our cat’s are whiter.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

New Year's Eve

Journal entry 28

New Year’s Eve. Because I’m now single and all my friends are still couples, I have not received any invitations to parties. I stock up on snacks and plan to watch a football game or movie until midnight when I will blow a paper horn and go to bed.

Dumbledore told Harry Potter, when he was clinging to thoughts of his dead parents and wanted the past to come back, “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Imagining the Unbearable

Journal entry 27

Iris Murdoch, a novelist and philosopher, wrote, “Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.” Even with the power of her great mind to comprehend the abstracts of reality that befuddle most of us, Murdoch could not figure out what bereavement felt like. Then she died and her husband, John Bayley, found out. 

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Diversion, Companion, or Guide?

Journal entry 26

Sometimes we need diversion from grief, but diversion that is meaningful beyond the superficial and frothy we often use to fill the hours when we don’t want to think about anything and we just want to escape. The Inspector Morse mystery series on PBS filled this need for me. Each week I would tune to and watch Chief Inspector Morse try to figure out why there was a dead body, who was responsible, and why they did it.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Possessions

Journal entry 24

           

My unpleasant task today is to sort through more of Evelyn’s possessions, this time it’s her bathroom supplies to see what I can use. There are shampoos, soaps, brushes, combs, tampons, a new razor that she wanted me to try (a Mach 3), hair caps, the tint we used to lightly color her hair, and a number of mysterious beauty items like blue goo for cleaning your face. 

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Stirring the Water: Compassion

Journal entry 23

The fifth month begins, which automatically makes it a moody time. Five months ago today Evelyn died.

I call Judy, anyway, trying to move out of my dead zone. We were in grad school together but haven’t talked for fifteen years because she doesn’t live close by and I’m not a phone person. When her husband, John, died three years ago from a brain tumor, I didn’t do anything for her because I was heartbroken and couldn’t think of anything helpful or positive to say. 

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

The Great Dead Calm

Journal entry 22

Four months after Ev’s death, life stops moving.

Everyone speaks words of cardboard. The same song plays over and over, wearing out whatever emotions used to exist in its notes. The world’s happy sounds are flat tones masked by white noise. I am Buster Keaton’s blank face because I feel nothing. I drift on the dead calm sea that old-time sailors feared when no wind filled their sails and they moved to the ocean’s whims. 

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Eating Out Alone

Journal entry 21

For the first time since Evelyn died, I risk going out to eat by myself, and pick the Black Angus Restaurant. We came here maybe twice a year to celebrate something, even if it was just being together in our struggles. Ev would have the prime rib while I ordered the sampler platter. I order it again tonight and savor the chicken strips, potato skins, and the fried zucchini, aware all the time that no one is sitting across from me.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Across the Boundary

Journal entry 20

           

We were talking about grief in general when Gene asked me what I thought about the afterlife.

“What do you mean?” I say, shifting in my chair at the change of topics, knowing that something is coming. “My vision of heaven?”

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Solitude or Loneliness?

Journal entry 19

Am I a widower or a bachelor?

A widower because I have a pocket stuffed with tissues, but there’s no sense of nobility or strength in being such, regardless of what people tell me. I’m simply relieved to function well enough to get through the day.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Questioning Faith

Journal entry 18

If I had unquestioning faith, I’d sluff off Ev’s death like the missionary in Peru whose wife and son died when their aircraft was mistakenly shot down as a drug plane. He forgave everyone and said that God was showing him something, so he was grateful. 

Faith doesn’t amount to much until it’s tested. 

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *

Where Is She Now?

Journal entry 17




The options for where Evelyn is now seem to be heaven or hell, according to the traditional Christian schematics, with purgatory thrown in by the Catholics as a temporary transit station if needed.  




Even though the notion that heaven physically exists in the clouds was dispelled when we started flying planes through them, the notion that there is a place called “heaven” still prevails in western civilization.  




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