A thousand little white birds of peace 🕊️

Happy Saturday friends!

On Friday I read this from Rebecca Barry (you can find her on Substack by clicking here):

In the car on the way to dialysis I asked my mother what she wanted her death to look like. “That’s a good question,” she said. “I haven’t thought much about it.” I told her about a death doula I met once on a trip to swim with dolphins in the wild. She had wonderful white hair and green eyes that the sea made greener and one night at dinner she asked everyone at the table how they would want to die if they could plan it.

I thought this was the most marvelous question! I also thought everyone would have the same answer—to die quietly in their sleep.

But no! That was not true!

One woman wanted to die alone in a forest by a tree that loved her, no humans around for miles. Another wanted a violent, fast death—POW! Lights out!—possibly by gunshot. Someone else wanted to be with her horses. Another wanted to be surrounded by her children, the best drug she could get flooding her veins.

“What did you want?” Mom said.

I couldn’t remember what I wanted then, so I told her what I wanted now—a death that was glorious and soaring, like autumn or Beethoven’s 9th. Painless and exciting and so achingly beautiful that I remember— remember!—that this this whole thing is a gift and an adventure and ultimately a return to more love than we can even imagine.

“I’d like that too,” Mom said. “Something like that.”

“Do you want all of us around you singing?” I said. That was what we did for my grandmother.

“Maybe not that much singing,” Mom said.

Then she told me what she did want. To be at home in her bed with everyone in the house, but not in the room with her. She wanted all of us in other rooms, doing what we wanted, being alive and together.

That is exactly how she died. We had stopped singing or lying next to her listening to cello music or whale songs and were in various rooms doing things we liked. I was writing, my father was in the kitchen banging things around, one sister was meditating, the other out with her dog, my nieces were drawing and playing cards. The whole house hummed gently with ordinary things, and Mom took her last breath.

It was a lucky, gift of a death, and I am still grateful for this. But I didn’t remember that it was what she’d asked for until I found this conversation in my journal, two years after she’d gone.

When I did, a thousand little white birds of peace flew from my heart.

I am hoping they find their way to yours.

I could feel her last words down into my bones:

“A thousand little white birds of peace flew from my heart.”

Mom’s death was so rough, her time struggling in silence, comatose, 6 days. I wasn’t there that last hour of her life but the stories were brutal. Her sister Katy’s last days were filled with softness, gentleness, music, poetry, conversation. Only 36 hours comatose. 

Mom’s upsetting death paved the way for Katy’s gentle crossing. We all learned so much from what happened and Katy was a part of her own care (a nurse for 44 years) until those last 36 hours. When the pain wasn’t being controlled and the doctor’s offered her dilaudid instead, she switched, which enabled her to stay lucid longer, who knew?

(My brother has a friend whose husband in hospice was in a morphine coma and when my brother told her about dilaudid she asked if her husband could switch. In short order his pain was under control AND he was speaking again. She had her husband back!

I think it’s so important to talk to your loved ones about what you want your last months, weeks, days, hours to be like—and to do it NOW while you can think clearly. 

At one point, when Mom was coming to the last couple of days, my brother and I asked Dad if we could let Mom be alone for a while. We had read that sometimes people need to be alone in order to pass. We (Dad, my brother Michael, his husband Nic, Katy, her husband Chris, Brad, ManChild, and me) were in the living room talking. I suddenly had a flash of Mom telling me decades before that her favorite thing growing up and even as an adult was falling asleep while the people she loved talked all around her. It was so soothing to her. She didn’t cross then but I think it probably made her very happy to hear us out there. 

All of us have talked, many times since then, about what we want when we die. Even ManChild talks about it. If nothing else, write it down and put it with your will. Let others know that it’s there. 

Your loved ones left here will feel “A thousand little white birds of peace flew from my heart.” And what a gift it is to feel that.

THE RANCH:

Just a few pics today of my funny crew, coming to hang out with me twice a day when I pack their hay bags with hay. At first they just hung out at the door but then Tori started hopping up into the trailer. Now they all want in the trailer but Tori body blocks them if she’s in there with me. Which is nice so I don’t have to worry about them jamming in LOL. Today I sat down on a hay bale for awhile and hung out with them, it was sweet:

Caught him mid shake, look at his ears!

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ManChild was cleaning out a stock tank this evening, lifted it to dump the water, and found a little nest of four baby mice! Oh my goodness! Now we are typically not a big fan of mice here, but baby mice with their eyes still closed? Jeez. They all scattered out of their nest and we didn’t see their mom so I found where they had gone to hide in the grass and put them all into their nest that I had moved to a bucket. Once I had them all gathered, I propped up their bucket on its side just outside of the fence and as close as I could get it to the place it had been. I hope they make it!

THE MEMES:

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Thank you for reading :-)

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