A Question of Naming

I was widowed in 1993 at the age of 48. In late April, I had a fire ceremony with my friends. “I’m beginning to feel like a phoenix,” I said. Two weeks after the ceremony, this extraordinary event took place. I had to get up in the middle of the night afterwards. I wrote this letter:

May 16, l994

Dear Jim,

Six months ago last Monday, you stepped out of your body. The next day, the eye of the moon eclipsed and later, it rained. The following weekend, as we all gathered to celebrate your life in the darkening November light, you threw a rainbow down to tell us you were okay.

The day we passed the sixth month mark, I was down in New York with our new child, the book you gave to me to prove to me that out of the shatter fall unexpected gifts. The next day, the sun blinked once in remembrance and people danced, not knowing some of the dance was for you.

The week passed and Friday brought a great wind and cold, a reminder of the bitter, endless winter days. The pond glazed out of habit. As I got ready to leave for the weekend, the stovepipe rattled and banged and the house shook in the gale. I pounded on the pipe to make sure that it would not fall out of the wall, since there was still a bit of fire in the stove from the frosty morning. It was so wild outside, the pipe almost sounded inhabited.

The stovepipe rattled and banged all night and the next day. My son and a friend, visiting in my absence, remarked on the noise, but knowledge did not dawn until the body of the stove itself took up the sound and soot began to rhythmically puff out of the cracks. “There’s something in there,” said Terry, and left for home. Marcus got around to checking, and opened the door. A long, sharpish beak. A beady eye.

My stove had birthed a full-grown female Merganser duck!

Not quite comprehending how the interior of my stove, accessible only by four right angles of pipe and chimney and one three inch wide baffle, could do such a thing, Marcus later described to me how he had called Mom (wise woman of the forest) for help. He subsequently was able to reach in and lift her (not Mom, the duck) — light, feathery, decidedly sooty and exhausted, from the ashes and place her in a box for the night. In the morning, he showed her the pond. She quacked for joy and took a swim and then a serious nap on the shore.

When I arrived home later in the day and heard this story and witnessed the duck’s composed departure downriver, I marveled at this singular event that had graced my home, my stove, my life.

You know I look for messages from the cosmos all the time, especially now that you are gone, I immediately began asking, “What does this mean?!” No, I do not think you paid your former home a visit in duck form, although remembering your sense of humor, I wouldn’t put it past you. No, it’s taken me until this moment, three o’clock in the morning to figure it out.

It may have looked like a duck, but it was really a phoenix.

Out in the yard, all of the daffodils the children planted for you last autumn are up and leaping and trumpeting on the riverbank. The river melted gently this year, no torrents and chunks of ice on the edges and now its round-the-clock work is to remind me about flow. “Be a duck,” it murmurs now, outside in the remnants of night, wanting to share in the mystery or reclaim one of its symbols.

Everywhere I go these days, I meet or hear about someone struggling with or dying of cancer. There is a battle waged, but I remember well that point when the terrain becomes pregnant with stillness, peace and possibility. Love emerges, both in the warrior and in those who also have held the sword.

Those who find some key to unlock a door into new life here, find they have acquired a brimming, transformative energy that comes from the conquering of fear. Energy which cannot be held, but must be shared. And you, Jim, for whom the other door opened, still find so many beautiful ways to send that energy back.

These days, if I meet someone new to the kind of pain I have been through, there is always an element of excitement in me, strange to say.

“Wait,” I want to say,”watch and stay open, because amazing things will come your way. More love and grace than you ever would have dreamed possible. Light a candle every night and cry if you need to, but don’t forget to ask for help. Write down your dreams. Do at least one thing you have been talking all your life about doing, because you will find much is possible.

You’ve been given a life with a big bump in it. Use it to get up really high so you can see far. And then, jump off and fly.

Something wonderful will hold you.

And if by chance a big wind gets too full of itself and throws you down, say, a chimney, and you have to spend what feels like lifetimes, flopping and crawling through smoke and soot in the dark, just remember. Someone will open the door.

Welcome the light and remember who you are. It’s all a question of naming.

A version of this essay appears in When A Lifemate Dies: Stories of Love, Loss and Healing (Fairview Press — 1997)