By Mike VanBuren
From the Late December 2013 edition of The North Woods Call
Back in August of 1999, I was part of a small writer’s group studying creative nonfiction during a conference at Goucher College in Baltimore.
It was the second time I had been to the gathering and that year my study group was led by acclaimed nature writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams. Eight years earlier, Williams had published a fine nonfiction work called Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.
The book interweaves memoir and natural history, explores Williams’ complicated relationship to Mormonism and recounts her mother’s diagnosis with ovarian cancer—along with the concurrent flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a place special to the author since childhood.
A profoundly moving piece of work, the book’s widely anthologized epilogue, “The Clan of One-Breasted Women,” explores whether a high incidence of cancer in her family might be due to living downwind during the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s.
As a record of loss, healing grace and the search for a human place in nature’s design, Refuge has become somewhat of a classic essay on mortality and grieving.
Sadly, I am grieving myself today, having come to know the heart-wrenching pain of losing my mother 14 days before Christmas. She’s now on a migratory path of her own, thanks to complications of age, dementia and biological infection that took her down sooner than we expected, and stole her ability to walk, talk, eat and—ultimately—live.
About a week before she drew her last breath at the Rose Arbor Hospice Care Residence in Kalamazoo, she was an in-patient at a local hospital and only slightly better able to communicate than she was at the end. A woman of lifelong quiet faith, she said through nods and facial expressions that she was ready to transition into the presence of God and claim the promises of eternal life.
I believe she was.
It seems she knew she was dying long before I and other family members caught on. We thought she was merely ill and that prayers, encouragement and modern medicine could somehow resurrect her in a form similar to the person we previously knew and loved. But God had other plans for her.
Looking back, the telltale signs of impending death were there even before she left home for the final time more than three weeks earlier. She had lost interest in food and would soon reject water and other fluids. She slept almost continually and efforts to communicate with us became fewer and farther between.
She saw things that we couldn’t see and had no way to adequately describe them—images and celestial beings of various sizes in the high corners of the rooms; mysterious threads on the table, floors and walls; and sometimes people from her distant past beckoning her to come forth. At times she attempted to rise and follow those calls—only to be stopped in her tracks by a concerned care giver asking where she was going, or by malfunctioning legs that would routinely collapse and fall.
Like any good mother, she never stopped listening to me, even when she couldn’t verbally respond to questions or statements. Instead, she briefly opened her eyes, raised her eyebrows, made a face, or simply smiled.
The day before she died, I saw a hawk perched on a pole outside her room. I wondered whether it was some kind of a sign. Early the next afternoon, a similar raptor—perhaps the same one—flew repeatedly into the window and tarried for a while in the bushes outside.
A mere hour-and-a-half later—as a layer of newly fallen lake-effect snow cloaked the ground in pure white—my mother awoke, opened her eyes and tried in vain to say something to those of us gathered at her bedside.
I think it was simply, “I love you.”
Then it was over. Like someone had flipped a power switch. No struggle or after effects. Just complete stillness.
Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, I was searching for my own refuge—a haven from the disrupting loss of her gentle spirit, from the frustration that we couldn’t save her and from the haunting fear that somehow we hadn’t been effective medical advocates when she needed us most.
The family did the best it could, but to no avail. Now all we can do, I suppose, is cling to her memory and to each other, and trust in the promise that we will one day be reunited.
Looking back nearly 15 years to Goucher College, I remember the simple and poetic inscription Terry Tempest Williams wrote in my personal copy of Refuge:
“For you, Mike.
In the name of shared days in search of stories.
Refuge.
In the land.
In each other.
Blessings.”
My mother’s life was a constant blessing to me and many others. Her love never failed and her faith in God never wavered.
In the days following her death, I have come across many things that I wanted to tell her. But we’re no longer connected in that way.
Yet I think she sees me from her exalted position on high and continues to bless me with her prayers.
I cherish that thought and will think of her each time I see freshly fallen snow, or a soaring hawk against a bright blue sky.
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