Waking

I woke this morning full of doubts about this blog. Who wants to read about widowhood? About death? Do you really want to be the one who writes the bad news? Do you really want to write at all? Just go back to sleep, soothed the voice that kills dreams.

I've slept enough already. I know how short life is and how suddenly it can end. I want to figure out the hand I've been dealt and what it means to me. When I'm taken out, I want to go knowing that I decided to face my life and the deaths within my life. I want to know that I tried, anyway. That I didn't let myself down by staying in bed and turning on the television as soon as I opened my eyes in the morning just to drown out my own thoughts. I've been doing that since Al died to keep away--what? Loneliness? Is loneliness that bad? I think it's something more that I've been holding at arm's length. The something contained in the word "loneliness," that I can only glean from the sounds that make it up. That long O, eternally startled and mournful--Oh! Where'd everybody go? But also the two Ls in the word that remind me of children singing and of being sung to--those childhood lullabies that lulled and swaddled.

What I've been avoiding is the awful feeling, harsh and grating, that doesn't stop. The naked longing and vulnerability of having no control and no power. I held those feelings at arm's length all during the eighteen months that Al and I fought his lung cancer. Together we held off exhaustion, despair, terror, and doubt.  But now I'm alone with all of those feelings, and I can't hold them off anymore.

Lonliness doesn't even begin to explain it. It's less word than sound. It's like the cry a hawk makes, piercing the very air that holds it up. An alien, animal sound is what I would have said before Al died, but afterwards I identified with that cry. It bridged the gap between human and beast, between me and every mortal thing.

Anyway that's what it semed like when I came home from the hospital that last time. A hawk was nearby, very near, which isn't unusual up in the Taconic Hills, but this one wouldn't stop screeching. It screeched and screeched every time I went outside to walk our dog, Star. I had to cover my ears with my hands, the screeching was so loud. I couldn't understand why Star seemed so unperturbed. She didn't seem to hear it. She had been his. I expected her to be frantic, look everywhere for him and run from place to place with a lost look on her face, like she used to do when she had dozed off while he went into another room. But no, as we walked, she kept her nose to the ground, sniffing every other blade of grass and stone as if it were an ordinary day. With Al gone, she became my buddy, such a calm transfer of loyalty.

I also couldn't understand why, as we walked on our country road, my neighbors weren't running out of their houses to see what on earth all the racket was up in the sky. But no one seemed to notice. No one on the road seemed home at all. It was deserted. Just Star, the hawk, and I. Strange, although it looked like my road, it felt different, like an old faded painting. A still life minus one dimension, flat and dull, where I now dwelled, having become flat and dull myself without Al.

But that red tailed hawk was anything but dull. His cries pierced through the fog of my surroundings and pierced through me too. It cried for two days and nights like that. Sometimes I even heard it when I was inside, through the drone of fans and music and television voices, and every time we went outside in the dusty green of that hot August, its voice followed Star and me through the trees and down the road.

I still couldn't cry back then. To say the truth, I was feeling calm--relieved--no longer in a constant state of emergency, no longer on hyper-alert status, no longer trying to save each next minute of Al's life. I was numb, which I suppose accounted for the dullness of everything around me.

That hawk hung around for two days, and then, as suddenly as it had come, it left. I've seen many hawks around my house since that time. Some have even cried out as they flew by. But none have keep a constant crying vigil, night and day, day and night, as that hawk did when Al died.