Hope is the thing with feathers

Lessons from the bardo from a life expertly lived

Oct 07, 2024

She hadn’t eaten in two days, turning away at even the most enticing of offerings, but she can sometimes be a bit fussy with food so we weren’t terribly concerned until the third day, when her lethargy got worse and we noticed the whites of her eyes had turned yellow — a sure sign of something serious, likely liver issues. It was now Monday morning, and I called around to dozens of vets in the area and only one could see us that afternoon, so we went.

A blood test reported off the chart liver enzymes, and an ultrasound revealed an extremely enlarged gallbladder — something was terribly wrong, and she needed high level attention, and now. The vet called around to all the animal hospitals in the area in search of a place that could take her immediately, and the only one who could see her that afternoon was in Ithaca, a two and half hour drive away. So we went.

As soon as we arrived she was triaged and jumped to the front of the line of pets waiting with their people, swiftly taken to the back while we anxiously sat in the waiting room flooded with late summer afternoon sun. My heart sank into the weight of the situation when, twenty minutes later, the vet tech emerged and walked towards us, holding in his hand everything but our dog: her leash, her harness, her collar with her name on it. She was going to be here for a while, and the outlook was rocky and uncertain. Maybe pancreatitis, maybe a block in a bile duct, we aren’t sure. They brought her into a room so we could see her before we left, her face wrought with concern from being at the vet, her body too weak to stand, she laid on the floor, fearful, wide eyed, unwell, wanting to be near us, and we got on the floor with her and held her tightly through tears and said goodbye, filled with the wretched ache of grief and fear that wrings your core when you realize that this goodbye might actually be goodbye, for good.

Thunder rolled as we left and picked up our first meal of the day at six o’clock, huffed it in the car as the rain started down in silver sheets, and then set off on the silent two and a half hour drive home, through the gray and growing darkness, away from the steel crate in the hospital that housed our minds and hearts.

Three days in to her stay it was clear surgery was necessary to clear a blockage in her gallbladder’s bile duct, and it was clear that this came with substantial risks. “I don’t want you to feel pressured to pursue this, and I want you to know that many people in your position would choose to put her down”. We told him we’re doing the surgery, and that afternoon her soft belly was cut all the way open, a temporary stent was inserted in the blocked bile duct, and we waited with worry for the phone call: she made it through, and was in recovery. But this began the phase that is often more risky than the surgery itself, and after a couple days of holding stable, on Saturday morning our update call included the news that she had developed a fever, and still was not eating on her own — a concerning sign. We got in the car, and drove out to see her.

A puddle of white fur with specked black spots pooled on the floor of the small room, tangled in the feeding tube and IV drip that steadily fed her fentanyl. Lucy was not here, nowhere to be found. The doctor sat on the floor with us for what must have been an hour, and said she estimates a thirty percent chance of her survival, and that if she still wasn’t eating by Monday, we would need to seriously consider euthanasia. The tiny hill of hope that we had climbed since her successful surgery had just collapsed, and I wept the entire drive home not just for the prospect of losing her, but for the thought that of all her wild and beautiful eleven years alive, that her last week might be one of excruciating physical pain, kept in a box in a hospital filled with strangers, and plugged into a machine. This can’t be how it ends.

Come on, EAT, Lucy, eat. Sunday morning’s update call: her fever had dropped a touch, but still no interest in food. You have to eat by tomorrow, Lucy, EAT! The deadline loomed, blurring everything that day into a shade of angst and heartache that became almost unbearable. But then, something happened.

We’re always surrounded by wildlife here, as the country cabin my great grandfather built nearly a hundred years ago in which we are currently staying, sits just at the foothills of the Adirondack Park— but a curious number of sightings began to mount as this critical day went on. My husband came across a buck in the woods, a large crayfish stared at me unconcerned through the clear pool of water in the stream, a snake barely lazed out of my way with a belly full of some large snack it had just swallowed that ballooned its middle like a cartoon, monarchs danced around the field, and then — then came the birds. Blue Jays and brightly colored Woodpeckers zipped around the trees in numbers we hadn’t seen before. The elusive and shy Kingfisher that sometimes visits but is always gone before we can get the binoculars out was back — this time lingering, strangely staying nearby for hours and hours. Later that afternoon as I pulled into the driveway, I was startled by the sight of a prehistoric giant rising straight up from the hidden stream below and into the sky like a blackhawk helicopter, a Great Blue Heron with a wingspan wider than my six foot four husband is tall, taking flight. In my culture, a spotting of these birds is always an omen of good luck — but considering that we hadn’t seen a single one in our three months of living here until today, until this day, my intrigue grew.

Early Monday morning, before I could drop into dread, I was awoken by a ruckus outside my slightly open windows. Dozens of birds surrounded the house, singing together in an astonishing riot of noise that my Merlin app discerned as primarily a blend of Eastern Pheobes, Red Bellied Woodpeckers, and Northern Flickers, among others. This was more than unusual, and I stood by the window in awe for a while, watching, listening, and then moved to the other side of the house to sit at my desk and wait for Monday’s update call from the hospital. But the singing suddenly got starkly louder, as I curiously approached the bedroom it got louder still, and as I turned into the room to peek out the window, there they were: two Eastern Phoebes inside the glass of the ajar window, sitting on the wooden frame, pressed up against the screen, singing straight into the house — before sliding into the air at the sight of me.

Now, my personal kind of spirituality has never been one to include the notion this is the universe telling me something, or even this is a sign. This is not how I tend to interpret the world, but something unspeakably bizarre was happening, and I stared back at it in utter puzzlement. I was bewildered. What is going on? And then my phone rang. I answered, staring out the window at the songbirds. The doctor said she had eaten overnight. Her fever had broken. Her numbers were improving. And she could come home tomorrow. After nine days in the hospital, we carefully loaded her into the car, fluffed multiple beds around the house, gave her obnoxious amounts of kisses, and let her relax into the comfort of home. But we’d soon find out that we were a long way from being out of the woods. The stent was temporary and was going to come out sometime in the next couple of weeks, and the risk remains that whatever unknown thing caused this may return — in which case, euthanasia would be the kindest, and maybe only option.

We watched her closely over the next week as her condition waxed and waned, our agony waxing and waning alongside her— in some moments she was back to herself, happy and humored, but overnight she would fall into spells of severe illness and evident pain, often so bad that we couldn’t say out loud the thing we knew we were both thinking — this is it. Concerning symptoms returned. We spoke with the doctor nearly every other day. There was one night where I got out of bed and laid on the floor with her for hours, racked with grief as she rolled and groaned in anguish, certain that I was watching her die.

She has been existing in the fragile space between life and death for four weeks now, and her time in the bardo has been brutal and heartbreaking — but it’s also been blissful and mesmerizing. Very slowly and nonlinearly, the balance of unwell to well has subtly shifted, and these days, most of the time, she feels really good. And never have I been more hypnotized by another being’s joy than in these moments.

The lingering truth that this could be her last week, her last walk, her last comfortable day, her last anything, her last everything, has sharpened my awareness and presence into a polished beam of light that lands on her occasional displays of utter delight and absorbs every atom. My small mortal heart watches this creature with no concept of her own ephemerality roll in the crunching maple leaves or lie contentedly in the warm sun or purr in deep satisfaction from scratches or luxuriate in the raw ingredients of experience and I remember that these are the features of existence that mean something, that mean everything, almost by virtue of meaning nothing. In these moments, in all moments, she just is — and it moves me to tears, not because she might die soon, but because of the simple wisdom with which she, and all animals, live.

We still don’t know if she’ll make it or not. But having her back home, in the fields, in the woods, in the wild places where she is so clearly a part of something, a part of everything, in the same way we all are but that we always, always forget, is medicine for us all.

As for the birds, I still don’t know. I never saw a display like that again. Mostly, they’ve all gone quiet. But — in her most vulnerable moments and scariest days, they have conspicuously returned: circling, singing, staying close, seeming to tell us something, and I am sure to stop everything and listen. A quick search informs me that the symbolic meaning of the Eastern Phoebe is hope. As I sit here on the couch near a crackling fire, Lucy asleep against my legs, the cold steely rain finally yields to one of those slow October sunsets that seem to go on for hours, spilling gold across the orange treetops, turning the world into an oil painting. For some unknown reason, for another day, she gets the immense good fortune of getting to smell the rich bouquet of an autumnal earth, feel the grass against her skin and the sun on her face, receive and give love, and breathe. And for some unknown reason, so do I.

xo, Taylor

Hope is the thing with feathers

Lessons from the bardo from a life expertly lived

Discussion about this post