The Owl

The other day on the way to work a dead bird was on the side of the road. It looked like a baby owl but as I had never seen that before I wasn’t entirely sure. It was at the corner of a well-traveled road where, at least in the morning, many cars run the red light – not exactly a good place to slow down for a better look. The next day I was stopped at the light and saw for myself that it was indeed a baby owl. My stomach flipped as those kinds of things remind me too much of Mark’s death and people driving to work – unbeknownst to them that day that someone ended their life a few feet from the road they were traveling.

At the same time as this was unfolding on my morning drive, my brother was helping our uncle who he has cared for in innumerable ways over the last few years. His health has been declining and he needed to go into assisted living. My brother was at his apartment trying to figure out what to move to his new place while my uncle was at church. There was a commotion in the parking lot and it turned out that on his return my uncle fell backwards going into the building and his head hit the pavement. He was taken by ambulance to the local hospital and then transported to another hospital in Chicago that could better manage the severity of his head injury after having a seizure at the first one.

There was talk of DNR orders and next of kin and my brother handling all of it in the middle of the night from one hospital to the next. Days later my uncle was taken off life support and died shortly after. While we all knew this was coming the wave of sadness I felt hearing the news surprised me. If ever there was a person who deserved far more in life than he ever got it was my dad’s youngest brother. Whenever he saw me he always said, “How are you, honey?”, kissed my cheek, and bear-hugged me. My sisters, sister-in-laws, and kids would say the same thing. When Mark died he called me and said, “I sure loved the two of you together,” and it was the most simple and beautiful expression of loss that anyone said to me.

A few days later a friend texted me that her dad died. When my own dad died we were young mothers living a few doors down from each other in Maryland. She never met my dad and yet listened to my heartbreak over and over, from his cancer reoccurance, to my long stays in Illinois to help out, to his death three weeks before Will was born. I have always felt indebted to her for that, then our husbands died within two weeks of each other and the bond that formed so many years earlier became even stronger.

Last week a dear friend notified our close-knit group that her husband had died and, me, who has lived this, was at a loss for words. Death comes in threes they always say, and this third one was especially painful. I don’t want any of my friends to outlive their husbands and yet that has happened again and again. And this husband? He was kind and good, a joy to interact with every single time we’d all be together and the pain of his loss cuts deep.

When Mark died what I needed most was someone to listen to my pain and disbelief but everyone around me wanted to fix the unfixable. I understand that, I understand the anger at the unfairness, I understand that you have to get comfortable sitting in the dark before you can look for the light. My friend and I used to shake our fists and broken hearts at the universe and demand an end date to the mourning when our lives disintegrated before our very eyes. How naive that seems now, to think that missing someone you loved has a best buy date.

A few days after I had first seen the dead owl it was gone. Thank god, I thought, someone took care of it and put him back upon the earth to which he will return. I wondered if the mother owl screamed when it happened, if she felt better that her baby was off the road where it’s spotted dead feathers wouldn’t ruffle with every passing car, if she stared into the blackness of a cold, winter night and wondered what comes next when death comes sweeping in for one of your own.