Resurrection

Death, death, death

"There's a lot of death in my life right now," I tell Dama. We're sitting in her living room after a sweat lodge. Earlier I’d just asked the community for prayers, but my asking came out wrong.

"My father is dying, at this point, short of a miracle we are not expecting a cure,” I’d said. Don't hope. I cannot hope.
"So I ask instead for guidance in this the most difficult journey." I was surprised at the emotion in my voice.
"My ancestors know how to die, how to surrender to a parent's death, and I ask for guidance in surrendering as well." I'd meant to ask for prayers and guidance for him, not me.
"Ahom," I ended, not knowing how to correct it. Papa does need prayers, he who will endure pain untold so as not to inconvenience anyone around him - he needs help asking for help, accepting help, surrendering to being taken care of.

But when it comes to dying I have no concern about his capacity to pass on. When you watch and see the joy in his eyes, the deep trenches death has furrowed in his soul over the course of a suicidal life, he will die when he is ready.

But I am not so comfortable with my own like-minded surrender.

And I am still finding the line between giving everything and giving nothing. It is a young person's line. When I dance and someone leads me and dips me I trust in them completely. If I fall then I fall, and this surprises people. I let myself go like a man who has never fallen, who's trust has never been betrayed, and yes it has not been taken and crushed again and again, ground into powder between grey dusty rocks. I have not yet been broken.

When I surrender I throw myself to mercy, body relaxed to the whim of the storm, and let someone else hold me. As my father has held me, whole body cradled in a single large arm, as my mother has held me, body wracked in sobs, buried against her breasts - you do not find unconditional love elsewhere. Perhaps I will find it in the one-day-expected children of my own, but not here.

"There is a lot of Death in my life right now," I tell Dama on Easter, on April Fool's day, the day before the date Papa set to die by hemlock. A date he rescinded. A date I trusted, leaning into it like an arm set to dip me all the way into the ground.

I tell Dama about the chickens. Eithne crying at the porch. I'd sent her to let the chickens out and she returned, crying.
"What's wrong? -” a pause, a realization, then - “Oh, - what's the damage?"
"Five, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
She told me afterwards that when she saw five dead on the chicken house floor, her first instinct was to hide them. Run to the store and buy five identical chickens, train one to fly up to my arm on command - I couldn't know. She had to protect me.

Only when the two remaining moved as if a predator were still in the coop did she  summon me. We'd weasel-proofed the coop before, and finding the weasel’s hole under the door, I could plug it, and trap the weasel inside.

Then one live trap with two chicken heads inside, Hans and Flynn, and the weasel was stuck. The remaining two Rhode Island Reds were evacuated away from the coop, and we hung the headless dead to bleed out as we waited. An hour later when I went and checked, the weasel has sprung the trap.

You have not met a demon until you have stared a weasel in the face. Its cute little button nose, and fuzzy face, black bright eyes, and fluffy tail. I lean in to look at it up close and it screams, a sound that sets every hair on my skin on end. Eithne comes in. "It just screamed at me," I tell her. She leans in, not believing me, and it screams at her and she screams back in terror, then laughs, then backs up a step. I steel myself and carry the trap outside into the sun.

Our neighbor Theresa just happened to stop by, and we gather around it, Papa and Eithne, and Theresa and I, all watching the trapped animal - all anticipating death but flowing in and out of conversation like everything was normal. Like death is a part of life. The sun and spring and loved ones feel soft and warm. I’m still not feeling anything. Perhaps I’m in shock.

We drown the weasel, Papa watching as I lower the trap by a string into the pond. It swam around and around in the cage, pressing its nose through the bars, circling, trapped, desperate. Papa and I both saw the moment when it surrendered, body going limp and sinking to the bottom of the cage. Its body gave one last twitch long after we thought it was dead, and I left it in the water for a good minute after that. When I brought it up, it looked more asleep then dead, as if it would just pop up at any moment. Later, I took it and strung it up by its tail by the coop. A warning like pirates in a cove.

Eithne helped me process the chickens. She thought she'd be too squeamish, but we got into a good routine of her plucking and me gutting, and when I pulled out a fully formed egg from the belly of a hen, she marveled with me.

"There really has been a lot of death in your life lately," Dama says when I'm done telling my story. My second mother, whose house I was as comfortable in as my own, offers help then, anything I need.
"Tell me when he's going to drink the hemlock, and I'll hold space for you here, she says. I'm so close, you can call on me for anything, and I, who have passed to the gates of death and returned, know something if this journey."
"Thank you," I say.

As hard as any of the rest of this is, one of the hardest things is conveying to any one individual that you are being touched by death. There are so many wrong responses:

Conversations stopped dead

Awkward attempts to change the subject

Or more often, "I am SO sorry," they'll say, and meet my eyes and never let go.

Most painful are those who open the door "How is your dad doing?" - and then don't give space for the answer.

There have been a few who have done it well. My boss at my teaching job returned with a story of a similar situation in her own life, and empathized how hard it is. Others open with offers of help, which - while never taken - are good to hear. "If you need anything, ask."

I try and learn from the good responses. When people tell me their bad news I try and meet it with a story of my own that doesn't overshadow theirs. An offer of help, and space to listen to anything they have to say.

"There has been a lot of death in my life, I tell Dama on Easter, "But I have yet to find the resurrection."
"Yeah, well, the death has to come first."

It's in this kind of quiet companionship that I take the most comfort. I grow frustrated when I come away from friendships I have nurtured, to find that I am tired, worn out by holding them when I would like to surrender to their care.

I linger late at Dama’s house, as I always do, then walk back in the dark with ghost-wrought eyes. When I arrive at the house I go to the chicken coop, finding myself surprisingly emotional. I duck inside and squat beside the roosts, Vaith and Sweetness clucking first alarm and then acceptance as I settle in.

"I'm not strong enough for this. I am not equal to this. I cannot do this alone."

I’m surprised by my voice. Surprised by my words, but I know them to be true.

"Yet so many of those in my life cost more energy than they give. Those for whom I would ask for strength take more strength to ask."

I take a deep breath.

"Only you," I tell my two remaining chickens, "Give more strength than you take, and you are mostly gone. Are you two enough?"

"We're enough," clucks Vaith.

"I'll have to trust that."