If you were walking your labradoodle on the other side of the avenue, I’d look like I’m just staring at the ground, perhaps listening to a book on Audible, perhaps “James,” by Percival Everett, which, if you haven’t read it yet, stop reading this immediately and go get a copy.

I’m actually praying over a dead squirrel. And before you say “just” a squirrel, consider that he has hidden 10,000 acorns in the last six weeks and will remember and return for 90 percent of them. Next time you’re searching for your cellphone, a little respect, please. Ask a squirrel.

I can’t tell what got him. It seems squirrels have only one successful predator: cars. But he’s perfect. No visible trauma. It looks like he’s sleeping—his eyes are closed, his little feet are relaxed, and his tail is a gray plume on the dry maple leaves.

“I am so, so, sorry, squirrel,” I whisper.

I hope it looks like I’ve just paused for a moment so Leah-dog can sniff the Bachner’s boxwoods while I actually stand there and pray that death didn’t hurt or scare him and that he is scampering through the oaks in heaven with his squirrely ancestors.

But truthfully, I’m also grossed out.

Why is it that things that are perfectly fine when alive become instantly unnerving when dead? The minute the spirit leaves the body, it becomes something else.

I had to drive to Cambridge last week to record more episodes of “This is How the Story Goes” for NPR station WHCP. It’s over an hour’s drive through fetching farmland, big sky over big fields, but a lot of big things had died on the side of the road. Things that were cute when animated and scary when vacated. A raccoon, several deer (one just a fawn), a fox, a possum and several squirrels. And I’m speeding by at 65… okaaay, 75 mph, praying a dead-animal prayer for each, including for a bag of mulch that had fallen off a truck and only looked like something dead.

Dead things grieve me unreasonably. Me of all people! I don’t even believe in death as an ending—not even as a change of address—only as a change in accessibility—for now. A change in mass, vibration, and visibility. Death blindfolds us to a greater reality. How will I get your attention, say the people who still love you from the other side of now. But love doesn’t go anywhere. At least not anywhere that it can’t come back from instantaneously upon request.

I’ve only seen two dead people, the most recent being my mother. That experience was less unnerving than numbing. Having been called by the staff of her assisted living facility and informed she was “actively dying”—a horrible term, but I’m not sure I have a better one—I had tried desperately to get there before she left for parts unknown. I had wanted to see her off, to hold her hand, to be there for her last breath as she was there for my first. To say thank you one more time for everything in between.

But I was minutes too late. Minutes. The midnight call, a lazy security guard at a locked facility, a red traffic light, and an inattentive nurse, all conspired to thwart a timely arrival.

So, when I rushed up the stairs and into my mother’s room, only her body was there. The figure on the bed wasn’t her, and she wasn’t nearby. This may be only because of the opaque nature of my own soul; maybe she was standing right there, saying, “It’s okay, Laura, my brother Ralph showed up! My big sister Lenora! Then Mom and Dad invited me to come with them, so I have to go–will check on you later.”

Maybe. But while I gazed at what had been my mother, I sensed no one in the room at all.

I sat down and tried to take it in. That she was gone. That I had missed her time of departure. That I was an orphan. That the person in the bed I’d left earlier that day was a body now and that person and body are not the same thing.

I called a funeral home, sitting on a straight back chair in the silent room. It was after midnight and the holiday season. All available employees were out on other calls. Couldn’t say when they would get there. Probably hours into the night—maybe by 2:00 am or 3:00 am. Maybe by 4:00.

I sat by her side for another hour. The whole facility was silent. Sleeping. Dreaming. Christmas garlands still draped the doors. Holiday lights twinkled on Christmas trees in the hall. Classical music played softly in the dimly lit room. Silent night, holy night. Lonely night.

Total privacy, no one coming or going, and Mom so thoroughly absent. The assisted living facility had supervised this transition a million times, and I had overnight guests at home who would be waking soon. It felt as if sitting there served no purpose. So, I left.

I left. And I feel bad about that now. Really bad. What on earth was I thinking? Of course, I should have stayed, protected her no matter how tired I was, how numb. Is this why I am so grieved by everything that dies now?

When I was a child, Mom told me that the moment she knew, deep down in her bones, that we are not our bodies and yet we live on, was the moment she saw the body of her own mother. The minute I saw her, I knew she wasn’t there. It wasn’t her; she had left, yet she was in no way gone.

Left and gone. Not the same thing.

Know this as sure as you know the name that I gave you.

 When it’s my turn, I won’t be able to leave if even one of my kids is in the room. So maybe I’ll do what Mom did and leave while they are at a stoplight, sleeping, or putting a baby to bed.

And I’ll say to them what Mom must have said to me as I rushed to her side that last night—

 Love you. Have to go.   

 Will be in touch.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

When I was little, when you were little, there were some specialized forms of torment a friend or older sibling could indulge in that were extraordinarily irritating —by design.

Like this move: pinching your cheeks, wagging your face back and forth, while exclaiming, “What a pretty little pony face!”

Was that a thing? Or did that just happen to me?

It was a real ninja move– sort of an endearment but a painful one. And what is a pony face anyway? The result of wearing a ponytail? I’m looking in the mirror…could be.

Then there was the setup. On cross-country road trips, Mr. Oliver’s sister, only 13 months younger, relentlessly whispered, “You’re stupid.”  in the backseat, her voice inaudible to their parents. This could be ignored the first few times, but by Oklahoma, this stealthy maneuver required a punch in the tormenter’s slender bicep which was met by a satisfied and very audible, “He hit me!”  (Followed by a whispered, “Gotcha,” as her brother was admonished from the front seat of the car.)

But this form of harassment could break the most disciplined among us–having every statement out of your mouth repeated. These exchanges degenerated quickly.

Talk about irritating!

Talk about irritating.

See?

Eventually, the victim would attempt to turn the tables, announcing with a triumphant smirk, “I’m an idiot,” waiting for that sentiment to be echoed, which, of course, it wasn’t. There was only one idiot in the room at that point.

The original repeater of language was Echo, an Oread, a mountain nymph in Greek mythology. Zeus had ordered the loquacious Echo to distract his wife Hera with conversation while Zeus pursued earthly pleasures. Hera figured out the subterfuge and to punish Echo for her role in the deception, Hera deprived the nymph of speech, leaving her only the ability to repeat the last words of others.

Later, when Echo fell hopelessly in love with Narcissus, she couldn’t tell him. Unable to speak, she watched him fall in love with himself. Over time, her inability to express herself caused her to fade away, to shrivel into nothingness, until all that was left of her was a disembodied voice.

A real echo is a disembodied voice with a different origin story and message.

When we were little, there was a place above the marsh where, if you called out over the grasses and cattails, the red-winged blackbirds, and the heron’s nest, you could hear a faint echo of your voice. No scientific explanation (a high bank on the other side) could make the phenomenon less than cool. Less than super cool. And eerie.

And a hundred and twenty-five years ago, when my grandmother was a girl, she too found an echo. At the northeast corner of the pasture of her father’s farm—near the wooded hill they called the Lost Eighty, she and her siblings could yell or even talk normally, and their voices would come back loud and exact.

Intrigued, the kids set out to find the source of the echo. For years, they searched the Lost Eighty for the one particular tree or knoll that repeated their words, but they never found the source of the magic.

Why? Because it’s everywhere. In one form or another, whatever you send out returns to you. Your life itself is an echo, an energy rebound. This means that in a world where you clearly have no control, you still have a choice.

You can choose what you think and the feelings those thoughts generate. You can choose the words you write, speak aloud, and the energy you share.

The primal brain, the reptilian brain at the base of the ancient brain stem, is ego-centric. It interprets everything as inner-directed. This is why when you spontaneously stop to help the man who has dropped his keys, you feel good—as if someone has helped you. It is why you will never feel good repeating gossip or bad news. You will internalize only unkindness. You will feel only despair.

So, in a world you can’t control, choose what you say and choose what you do. In the words of Rachel Stafford:

Today, I will choose love. Tomorrow, I will choose love. And the day after that, I will choose love. If I mistakenly choose distraction, perfection, or negativity over love, I will not wallow in regret. I will choose love until it becomes who I am.

Becomes who I am.

Who I am.

You can’t save the world, but you can help the lost tourist from Delaware, the elderly man who is confused at Target’s self-checkout, the stressed-out mother with the crying toddler who clearly needs to go ahead of you in line.

You can give a 100 percent tip to your waitress. And you can say thank you even for the losses you can’t understand, because panic is a five-letter word but so is trust.

So is trust.

So is trust.

You can wallow and ruminate. You can note that it’s getting dark earlier. Or you can remember the sun will continue to rise.

When it feels as if all that was good has been buried, know hope is a seed.

Be the light.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

When our mother turned 60, my sister living in Virginia, secretly drove up for the celebration and hid in my coat closet. Mom thought she was just coming over for a birthday dinner with her Maryland daughters. When she opened the closet to put her jacket away, my hidden sister leaped out, yelling “Surprise!”

Not our finest moment. Mom practically had a heart attack.

I mean, really. She had to sit down.

Surprise affects our brain chemistry with noradrenaline, a hormone released when we are startled, and the fact that surprise intensifies emotion by 400 percent may be why I remember not only this, but another long-ago winter night I would not recall otherwise.

Surprise may also be learning’s secret sauce. Each new piece of information is a surprise that enlarges my world, and what pleases me even more is that once I possess a new interesting fact, I can share it.

(Did you know that research shows the scent of women’s tears lowers aggression in men? Tears drop levels of testosterone. But the response is only generated by tears of emotion, not watering eyes from cutting onions.) If only men could be exposed to the tears of every mother, wife, sister, and daughter before the order for ground troops. How many tears need to be shed for world peace?

The surprise of new information opens up the brain like the dome of an observatory. Did you know that when dinosaurs reigned, they were looking at a different sky? It takes the Earth approximately 230 million years to orbit the center of the Milky Way, so in their heyday dinosaurs roamed the other side of the galaxy. The arrangement of stars overhead was not what you see now. In fact, in the sky they saw, Saturn had no rings, but it kind of didn’t matter.

An asteroid called K2 was heading their way.

Surprise…

One of my first surprises was not as dramatic as the obliteration of most species on Earth, but it was life-altering. In first grade at Lake Shore Elementary on Mountain Road, where there was no lake, hence, no shore, and not a mountain in sight, I met a six-year-old classmate named Becky. One day I asked Becky where she lived, and being a six-year-old, she drew the map to her house in the air. We were standing in front of the brick, one-story school in sight of the flagpole. “You go out the school driveway and do this,” she said, making an upside-down L-shape turn to the left with her finger.

I was not only surprised, I was stunned.

That couldn’t possibly be correct. Because to get to my house, you drove out of the school driveway and turned right. I simply had no paradigm in which anyone lived in a different direction or neighborhood other than my own.

As insignificant as that exchange with Becky seems now it was my first revelation that the world was bigger than my experience of it. That not everyone lived on my road or inside my head. That not everyone sees the same sky.

Surprise.

Not long after that, I saw surprise in action at home. It had been snowing all day, and we’d been stuck in the house—dusk fell early, by 4:30 or so. It must have been just before Christmas or Mom’s birthday in February. It was certainly the season of gift giving. She had built a fire and closed the cream-colored curtains against the stone-gray twilight. Dad had gone out in the bitter cold several times—perhaps to bring in firewood or to brush snow off the car.

Having grown up on a farm, gone to college on scholarship, and put all their money into building Barnstead, the contents of my mother’s jewelry box were sparse, and luxuries were few. Mom owned necklaces made of cowrie shells my father brought home from the war in the Pacific, her college sorority necklace, and a locket that held their photographs, but little else, and nothing of value.

I was constructing a house made of pop cycle sticks and Elmer’s Glue at the maple dining room table when my father casually asked my mother, “Think the snow has stopped?

“Turn on the flood light. Take a look,” he suggested.

I put down the glue and ran to the picture window, too. The floodlight beamed down on the yard from what had been the hayloft. If you looked up into the light as the flakes swirled down, it was as if you were inside the storm.

Mom flipped on the switch, pulled the curtain aside, and gasped. A smiling snowman stood caught in the glistening spiral of this blanketed landscape. Instead of sticks, his arms had been sculpted in front of him, and a diamond ring sparkled in his cupped snowy palms.

Surprise.

Saturn will not always wear the icy diamonds that encircle her now. Most planetary rings last a mere 40 million years. My mother’s ring is gone, as is Barnstead, as is childhood, as are the parents who made me.

What has stayed with me is the delight and surprise of learning something new.

The world will always be bigger than my experience of it. But each time I discover another piece of her magic, I will come looking for you.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

 

 

 

A friend of mine was wondering aloud the other day whether her kids would ever appreciate all she was doing for them, and I assured her they would. “Absolutely, without a doubt!” I proclaimed, adding, “When you’re dead.” I based this on my own experience but it’s not a prediction about my own legacy. It’s that I’ve come to appreciate a relative now whom I did not love while she was alive.

My paternal grandmother was perfectly nice to me, yet I didn’t like her. I may have been channeling my mother’s disapproval of the way my grandmother wielded money for influence. (There is a reason my father christened his new cabin cruiser, “Windfall…”). So, perhaps I was my mother’s unwitting proxy, something I wouldn’t wish on any grandmother. Even one who called me “Sugar Girl” in a high, quavering voice and inexplicably smacked her lips. A lot.

My grandmother was not big on just sitting around. Case in point—in her late 70’s she and her older sister got summer jobs as chambermaids at a resort in Watch Hill, Rhode Island just for something to do. But by the time she was 85, my widowed grandmother was a resident of an assisted living facility in Florida (isn’t everyone?), and I could tell she was bored at Mease Manor. I wanted to help her find a new project, so in a moment of inspiration, I asked her to write down her life story. What was it like to grow up on a farm in the foothills of the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks at the turn of the last century?

Sugar Girl had struck gold.

My grandmother wrote out her entire family history painstakingly, flawlessly, in long hand, in black ink, then wrote out two more volumes so that each of my sisters and I could have our own leather-bound,140-page book detailing her life. She recounted the death of a beloved little brother when she was 9, and he was 7, praise for the Native American doctor who would only come and go from his house through the window, and her grief at the runaway horse accident that killed her father at the age of 44.

She structured each book on a linear timeline, but on the back of each page, she wrote a stand-alone anecdote in red ink. I had to admit that was pretty creative, and I stumbled on an anecdote this morning that made me newly appreciate her. (Long dead! I point out to my friend as evidence that recognition of service is often late in arriving.)

My grandmother had 10 brothers and sisters, all of whom made pets from the farm animals. There were over a hundred chickens to choose from at any one time, along with twenty barn cats, lambs, horses, and pigs. It grieved my great-grandfather every time the kids adopted a pet because he knew the animal was doomed to either die or be sold. He also didn’t want dead animals buried in the yard near the house, so he told the kids that all burials had to be along the fence on Cloud Hill.

There, they staged elaborate services, decorating a considerable number of graves with flowers and broken dishes and singing to the deceased every song and hymn they knew: “Get on Board Little Children,” “Barbara Allen,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder.” All pretty standard fare for kids until I read this.

My grandmother had a little gray kitten she loved and carried everywhere. “I gave him a grand time,” she said, until one day a cow stepped on him and he was dispatched to Cloud Hill. She writes that the kids gave that cat a proper burial under a June midwestern sky, when the blackberries were ripe and the corn green in the fields. But she wanted to mark his little grave with something special so she could always find him again, so the hill wouldn’t claim him.

Down by the creek, she found a beautiful rock to use as a marker, but it was too heavy, and she was too little to carry it far.

Wanting to keep this memorial private, she hefted this stone alone and lugged it several yards before she was forced to drop it, but a few days later, she returned to drag it a bit further up the hill. Trip after trip, she recovered the stone from where she’d hidden it in the tall grass, determined to carry out her mission. And here’s where she found me and touched me across time.

It took her all summer to get that rock to the kitten’s grave. She dragged that stone a few feet at a time for three months. I really, really like the girl who did that. I wish I had known her. I am making her acquaintance now.

And I remember that feeling. If you love something as a kid, you don’t love it a little. You love from horizon to heaven. A love as big as the sky.

Because you loved that way then, are there moments you can access a love that size now? Childhood is the place you stored the years you believed in magic, leaped without looking, and took on kids bigger than you to defend someone smaller.

Childhood is where you first knew your omnipotence. If I work hard enough, I can do anything I want to do, be anything I want to be.

I can get this stone to my kitten even if it takes me all summer. Even if it takes me to the end of time.

At 85, writing from her Florida apartment, my grandmother wondered if there was any chance that rock was still at the top of Cloud Hill.

She’s been gone many years; perhaps the stone is gone, too.

But as long as someone else knows the story, it’s there.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.