Heaven, Maybe.
I was driving down I5 between Ashland, OR and Mt Shasta, CA where I live. My mom had died six weeks earlier and I had been carrying around an enormous cardboard photo of her from the memorial service. I had it with me anytime I had to leave the house because it made me feel like she was with me at all times. It felt a bit weird. I was a little embarrassed. But my longing for her was far greater than any fear of being judged. So there I was, talking to her in the rearview mirror as she gazed at me from the backseat with her bright face and that oh so familiar playful look in her eyes. I cried, telling her for the millionth time how much I ached for her.
She had spent 6 years bravely living with metastasized breast cancer and I had spent those 6 years by her side as her devoted but exhausted caretaker. By the time she neared her death, we both knew neither of us could go on in this way. We had spent so many immeasurable intimate moments together but by the end, our bodies, both hers & mine, could not go on any longer. It was time.
Well that day, as I drove along the I5 corridor over the Siskiyou Summit mountain pass, I was listening to a song by The Wailin' Jennys that a friend had just sent to me. It was from their album “Fifteen”, a collection of covers they recorded a few years ago. As I listened to their sublime three-part harmony, Dolly’s lyrics echoed in the car between my mother and me:
“It's been a long, long time since I've known the taste of freedom
And those clinging vines that held me bound, I don't need them
I've been left, a captured eagle
You know an eagle's born to fly
Now that I have won my freedom
Like an eagle, I am eager for the sky”
At that EXACT moment, a large bald eagle flew by my car, maybe 100 feet away. I was high up in the mountains driving over that pass so it’s like I was flying thorough the sky. If I had been standing outside observing I swear I would have been able to hear the rush and power of its giant wingspan.
I gasped in awe and wonder, blinking a few times, not sure if I what I had seen was actually real. It all happened so quickly. The eagle was there and gone in a few brief seconds, flying off to wherever it was headed. Heaven, maybe. The feeling of magic was so enormous I was left dumbstruck.
I looked back at mom twinkling behind me. I knew it was her. She was singing about herself. She was also singing about me. We had both been that captured eagle for so many years. We had both won our freedom. And we were both eager for the sky.
As if that weren’t enough, every single song that played from that album onward was like her singing directly to me:
“My mama loves me, she loves me, she gets down on her knees and hugs me! Yea she loves me like a rock”
“You are not alone, Laying in the light, Put out the fire in your head, And lay with me tonight.”
“If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less, Keep me in your heart for a while”
I wept the rest of that car ride home. A mixture of utter sorrow mixed with the tenderness of hope. A hard-to-describe feeling. Poignancy hits close to the mark I suppose although it doesn’t quite capture the intensity of that very real, very human, very other worldy moment in time. It was as if every grief stricken daughter in the world had nestled into my heart and poured out their pain with me. And as though every mother in the world heard our cry and scooped us up in some magical eagle feather woven baby wrap and sang to us until we slept.
