News From Hawkhill Acres

Those of you who are still wearing the tinfoil hats I recommended in an earlier post may want to keep them on if you’re planning to go night-skiing in the Bangor City Forest. The rest of you after-dark schussers might want to borrow your kid’s bike helmet.  As reported in the Bangor Daily News article  “Owls Attack: Warnings Posted In City Forest”, Great Horned Owls aren’t going to put up with folks invading their territory.

My question is, “What are people doing, skiing with headlamps on in the dark?” Skiing in the daytime is one thing. But after dark? And, apparently, they’re also walking, jogging, running and biking after dark also. Sheesh! When do the nocturnal animals get a break?

I’ve run into a couple of territorial owls since I moved to Maine twenty years ago. One was a Great Gray Owl that swooped down on me in broad daylight when I was walking through a pine grove near a swamp on our rural property. I never heard it coming until it was right in front of my face and if I hadn’t ducked, its talons would have scratched my eyes. I was some unsettled, I’ll tell you, and left the grove at a run.

A short time later, on the edge of that same swamp, the geek and I ran into a mother bear with cubs. They were blatting at her and she was blatting at them and Geekdaddy and I were blatting at each other to get the hell out of there. It was some exciting for a few minutes.

Another time, on that same piece of property, I walked around a large tree and came face to face with a young moose and her mother. Like most young critters, Baby Moose was very curious and approached me, which didn’t go over very well with Ma Moose, who snorted and pawed the ground. We spent a very tense five minutes with me trying to edge away so that I wouldn’t be between the baby moose and its mom, and the young moose trying to circle me so it could sniff me.I finally got away by backing slowly out of the area, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a female moose was observed by my neighbor knocking down my mailbox a couple of days later.

Many of us who live in Maine learn the hard way that civilization is pretty thin once you get beyond the city limits. Or, in the case of Bangor, even inside the city limits. When I first stumbled upon the city forest, I thought it was such a neat idea, having a forest inside a city. Now, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea at all. Cities and forests are two very different things and maybe they should be in two different places.  Or, maybe they should be closed at night, so that the wildlife can go wild for a few hours without people shining lights at them and skiing through their front yards.

Yesterday was the third anniversary of my youngest son Mike’s death.  His sister is 11, a few months older than he was when he died. I read about another family who lost a child and what David Cameron, the father,  said after his son’s funeral. He said Ivan’s death had left a hole in the family so big “words can’t describe it.”

That hole is what made my chest hurt for months after my son died. Why I didn’t have a heart attack is a mystery to me, because I’ve never felt anything so painful, not even childbirth. My kids felt the same pain, but I think it was worse for my daughter than it was for my oldest son.

Daughter and Mike were inseparable. She came to us when Mike was 3 and after his doctors had assured us that he would lead a normal life, with a few developmental delays. We didn’t want to take on another child if I’d be spending weeks in the hospital like I had with Mike’s many illnesses for his first 3 years. We should have trusted our own instincts, but I guess we wanted to believe that Mike was finally out of the woods and that his immune system had “kicked in” as the doctors put it.

It hadn’t and there were more hospitalizations, but not as many, and he and Daughter bonded immediately. He fed her, held her, read to her and shared his toys and everything he had with her. He was never jealous. To the contrary, he pushed her forward to make sure that she got her share of  our attention.

We have so many photos of them snuggled together in a rocker, curled up on the couch watching TV, playing with their little dolls and blocks, and sleeping in a heap like puppies or kittens. Even when they were older and they began to develop separate interests, they still leaned on each other, stood with their arms around each other and hugged each other goodnight every night.

I read somewhere that it surprises parents, when their child dies, how much of their grief is yearning for the physical presence of their child.  It surprised me, although it shouldn’t have. Mike needed so much “hands-on” care from me:  nebulizer treatments four times a day and sometimes every two hours for days, help with bathing because of the tubes in his ears and severe asthma that meant that a drop of  water in his lungs developed into pneumonia almost immediately, help with many things that most kids his age could do independently but he couldn’t because of developmental delays. I didn’t realize until after he was gone how many times during the day I smoothed his hair back, held him in my lap for nebulizer treatments or kissed the back of his neck as he snuggled because he was sick and needed comforting.

How much more must his sister have suffered, because she had lost her biggest source of comfort. I had her and her brother and my husband. She had me, but I have to admit that I wasn’t really “there” for a long time after Mike died. I went through the motions. I hugged her and held her and cried with her, but the biggest part of me had gone with Mike.

So many people told me, starting with the chaplain in Mike’s room right after he died, that I’d heal. I got so tired of hearing that, because I knew that it wasn’t true. You heal from broken bones, cuts and diseases, but not from the death of your child. Go on, yes. Of course, I’d go on; I have other children. If  I hadn’t, I would have driven into a pole on the way home, which is what I felt like doing. But heal? Not bloody likely.

I haven’t changed my mind about that. None of us has healed. Our hearts all still have a hole in them. One of my kids said that the problem is that it’s a Mike-shaped hole, so nothing else fits into it. That’s a very wise way of putting it. The only thing that’s happened is that finally, just in the last few months, we’ve started to patch the hole.

Yesterday, instead of keeping to ourselves like we have on March 4th for the last two years, we had friends over. Three kids to throw snowballs for the dog with Daughter, to chase each other around the kitchen and fall into a laughing heap when we tell them not to run in the house.  Kids laughing at a funny movie and finally, another little girl to whisper and giggle in Daughter’s bed and sneak the dog up between them so they can both hug her.

Our hearts will never heal, but they’ll grow stronger where they’re patched. Daughter will never stop missing her brother, but memories of what she’s lost are being overlaid with what she’s gaining every day. I’ll never stop missing my son, but watching my other two children reaching toward happiness and growing toward the light is my heart patch.

We realized after Mike died that he was the glue that held our family together in many ways. Mike was a peacemaker, a bridge between Daughter and Son, who are 8 years apart from each other in age. He was our social guy, the kid who drew the rest of us introverts into contact with other people and new experiences. When he was sick, we all rallied ’round and helped each other and him. When he was well, he was usually lying on the floor playing with his cars, while he leaned against me or his sister.

For months after Mike died, I couldn’t settle to anything. I felt like I needed to be moving, to drive, to go away from home. I didn’t know why for a long while, then it hit me. I was looking for Mike. He wasn’t home, so he must be somewhere out there.  Naturally, we can’t settle to anything when our child is missing. He’s still gone, but I don’t look for him anymore. I know where he is. He’s in our hearts, right under the patch.

(If you’d like to know what I was thinking two February’s ago, read this post from 2.22.07))

Are you always a day late and a dollar short? Do you often find yourself wondering what happened to a couple of weekdays or a weekend that you must have lived through but can’t recall? I’m not talking about “Lost Weekend” kind of lost weekends here; not the ones that drowned under a sea of Seagrams. I’m talking about the times that someone says, “Wow! Thursday already!” and you’ve spent all morning doing Tuesday.

This kind of thing has been happening to me a lot lately. Looking out from the weekend, I see two doctor’s appointments on Monday, a trip to the library on Friday and lots of empty, home-based hours in-between. Plenty of time to work on my websites, get my proofreading done, think up some scintillating blog posts and help my kids learn.

Heck, there might even be a little time in there for a spot of housework. That would be a good thing. We’re either going to have to vacuum the dustbunnies or catalogue them and offer them on ebay as collectibles. And there’s only so long you can write “TEST SITE! DO NOT REMOVE THIS DUST!” on furniture before visitors catch on, although apparently everyone in the house believes it, because no one ever dusts.

So, I’m kicking back on Sunday with a good book and a glass of Cabernet and then all of a sudden, it’s Thursday, the mortgage is two days overdue, there are piles of dirty clothes all over the basement, we’ve missed a dental appointment that I forgot to put on the calendar and my daughter is a size bigger and can’t fit into any of her clothes that I bought her just… Well, actually, I guess it was fall, when we last did a mall-crawl, although it’s such a traumatic experience for me that the afterimage is imprinted on my credit cards for months.

TMJ has struck again. (That would be Temporal Manipular Join Syndrome, where my sense of Time doesn’t mesh with actual Time.) It doesn’t help that I’m one of those down-to-earth types who lives in the “Now”, like all the self-help gurus tell us we should. Right. That makes sense if you’re never going to plan anything or recall pleasant memories or imagine your future. Living in the “Now” isn’t really helpful for learning from one’s mistakes either or anticipating the consequences of present actions.

True, paying attention to what we’re doing “right now” is a really good idea, especially if what we’re doing now involves chainsaws, cooking candy, bathing cats or voting for President. But human minds never really focus totally on what they’re doing to the exclusion of everything else, no matter how long their users meditate on a candle flame or listen to white noise. You can bet your bottom dharma that some of the meditator’s attention is in the past and/or the future, thinking about what they’ve done or what they’re going to do.

Nope, this Time thing is a real poser. Einstein almost had it figured out, but then it went all bendy on him. And Hawking is still working on it and may be close to tying it all together. At least, I believe he’s answered the question of whether energy escapes from a Black Hole, and that will certainly help. I haven’t yet found a practical application for it in my own life, although I’m working on applying it to lost socks, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Who am I to belittle anything Hawking comes up with, no matter how impractical it seems. The man is probably the smartest man on the planet and, by the way, tell me HE lives in the “Now”, hmm? I don’t think so.

Well, the clock says it’s lunchtime, although I’m sure that I looked at it twenty minutes ago and it was right after breakfast. The kids have probably segued from The History Channel to Cartoon Network and, no doubt the dog’s water bowl has dust in it and the cat’s litter box is crusted over. I’d better go make some lunch and then try to accomplish at least a couple more things on my list. I’m not doing too badly; I have almost everything checked off, except for three or four things that I’m sure I’ll have done by tonight. And then I can move on to the next list in the pile from January. Or maybe I’ll tackle something easier and work on a Unified Field Theory instead. Now, where did I put my String?