I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  “Do you go to church, do you pray?” she asked.

  What I told her: “I pray with a circle of women,” referring to my Womanspirit group. But my eyes skittered to the toast I buttered, away from her gaze. I didn’t share her faith, certainly not the structure of her religion, and I did not attend an organized church, as I had done as a child.

  What I didn’t tell her: that my personal theology requires that I pray directly to and for the Earth. For me there is no greater authority. “Align me, O Earth, with your purposes,” that was the litany of each day for me. I didn’t tell Iclene that, all of my adult life, I’d found divinity in remote woodlands and shorelines. In the cycling of day and night, the moon, the seasons, and the responding constellations of wild birds, this is where I reentered the silence and located my prayer.

  When I returned to Dad with his toast, he had fallen asleep. I set the plate of food on a bedside table and slipped out the door. In the parking lot, a rim of light in the east caught me by surprise. “Wheep,” called a great crested flycatcher from high in the pines. Once home, I stretched out on my bed, taking in all that I had seen. I dropped into peace. No more fear. Only peace. Struggle had left me, at least for the moment. And then I began the rest of my day.

  For each of his four children, Dad had a lifelong agenda, had zeroed in on at least one issue he hoped we’d resolve before he died. About my youngest sister, he worried: would she ever be financially secure? My brother: why didn’t he stay in touch better, invite him to visit more frequently? My sister Bobbie: maybe she was the exception, pretty close to perfect. But regarding me, his oldest child, “The only thing I care about,” he would say periodically, until he could no longer string the words together, “is that you’re still a Christian.” My father used to gather himself up and get purposeful regarding my relationship to God. “I’ve been thinking about something,” he would say, “about grace.” He sent me books and articles, asked me to go to church with him whenever I visited. But my spiritual support came from a meditation practice, and through circles of women, and from time in natural places—and was little informed by patriarchal religious doctrines. The spiritual offering of the Landing was tricky for both us.

  Three evangelical Christians from a local church had ministered every Sunday afternoon for the three years Dad had lived there so far. Attending their services was the easiest way to get him to a place of worship.

  A tall, fearsome woman led the invocation dressed in tight suede boots, black hose, a calf-length black skirt with a kick pleat, and a golden jacket that matched her hair. Then she moved to the piano bench for the hymn sing, the residents’ favorite part of the service. A second woman, short and round, wore wire-rimmed glasses over pretty blue eyes; she walked inside the perimeter of wheelchairs, conducting vigorously with her left arm, while her colleague pummeled the keys. The third, a man, searched room to room for folks who might want to come to church but didn’t know it was time.

  The first hymn was about being ready for heaven, or getting prepared if we weren’t, by accepting that Jesus was tortured and died on the cross for our salvation. I paged through the large-print hymnal, looking for softer, more accepting canticles like the Presbyterian hymns I had grown up on. Most of these songs were Baptist, just as stern as the evangelicals themselves. There was little mention of love or kindness in the lyrics, and nothing of the Earth, nor the gift of our embodiment.

  I squirmed in my chair, slid my eyes away from the preacher, and fussed with a button on Dad’s sleeve.

  “Dad, can you think of a hymn you’d like me to request?” I whispered. That’s how it worked here. You hollered out your preferences and the pianist accommodated as many as she could. But my father’s body had descended into a C curl in his wheelchair, and he didn’t respond.

  A new woman had moved into the room next door. The previous resident, a wispy, white-haired, Germanic woman, would melt into tears at any act of kindness, or even warm eye contact, during her last months wandering these halls. Now we had Miss Juanita as a neighbor. She set up a sewing machine by her door and we often heard it whir. I noticed in the church circle that a pair of tubes fed oxygen into her nostrils and that her face was pasty white. Still, Miss Juanita thumped her hymnal against her knee in time with the beat of the piano. Her eyes were closed, and I could tell she was invested in content as much as I would be if Brenda were playing “For the Beauty of the Earth,” or better yet, a song by Becky Reardon, any one of her songs. As it was, I practiced reading the alto line and tried to disregard the words. Dad revived and chimed in with his pretty baritone.

  We sat through a brief, fiery sermon. I tried for just the right balance of eye contact to establish my polite attention but cut off any energetic connection that might lead me to confess my sins or feel the urge to become born again. Then it was time for personal prayer. The three evangelicals moved around the circle of residents, and when it was our turn, I suddenly longed for them to pray for my son David, who had been diagnosed with a chronic illness. Dad wanted that too. We wanted a God who could heal him. The lay preacher reached out for my hand and Dad’s, and I grasped my father’s left palm. All around the room, I could hear the murmur of the prayer-team members sitting with the other old folks, one by one addressing their failing bodies, their wayward children, their lonely or fearful hearts.

  “Let us invoke the power of God to heal Bob’s grandson, David, to drive all disease from his body,” prayed the leader. Her eyes were closed and she tightened her grip on our hands before she continued. I truly felt she believed her version of God could cure my son, and in that moment, I did too.

  “There is a Bible verse for David, Isaiah 53:4–5,” she continued. “‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.’”

  Again, I was repelled. Why did David’s healing depend on the torture of Jesus two thousand years ago? Nevertheless, the urgent need to believe filling that room overlapped precisely with my yearning for my own beloved son to be well. Tears flooded my cheeks. I connected with my heart. I gave over my worry to the evangelists’ God with gratitude, without judgment, against all odds. I was no longer an observer, a companion to my father, but fully present in this room filled with grace and the surely dying.

  The door was open to Kathryn Crown’s room. I had passed by hundreds of times on my way to Dad’s but never had knocked or entered. But this night I thought maybe Kathryn Crown needed help. The white-haired woman’s hands were cupped over her blue housedress against her chest. She sat erect in her chair, gathered up as if every part of her strained to support her heart and her lungs, as if all the rest of her body, each part with its own rightful needs, was willing itself into stillness—brain, no needs; liver, no needs; intestines, nothing. It seemed as if every organ in her body was ceding its oxygenated power to the heart and lungs, in the interest of blood bringing breath. Her head rolled right to left, then back. She moaned. I worried that she might be dying.

  “Mrs. Crown, Mrs. Crown, I’ll go get help!” Without waiting for an answer, I ran to fetch the on-duty nurse.

  Later, when I left Dad’s room for the night, I looked in again on Mrs. Crown. She was alone, but she had oxygen now, two long clear proboscises connected under her nostrils to a tube leading to a sturdy green tank. I sat beside her, touched her hand.

  She found a scrap of her voice and patted my hand. “You feel sympathy for me, don’t you, dear? Who are you?”

  “My dad is Bob Isleib. He lives at the end of your hall.”

  More liquid than air occupied her lungs. Her breathing was the sound of an espresso machine. The tank forced air through the mucus. I shuddered at the fight between air and water, how those elements contended.

  We sat quietly. Her fingers were cool in mine. The retired music professor across the hall yelped li
ke a lonesome puppy, all broken down and barking in the night.

  White pelicans winter in the shallow marshes and bays of the northern Gulf of Mexico. Photo by David Moynahan.

  Mrs. Crown was kind. “The professor isn’t lucid tonight.” She had barely enough breath for words. If I were her, it would intensify my own fears, to listen to the man’s cries.

  I offered to bring her ice or some water. She nodded. I didn’t know which, so I filled one glass with just ice, another with water and ice. One for myself, too. She wanted me to sip along with her, to share a moment of normalcy. But her breath was a louder presence than our conversation. She could barely hold the glass to her mouth. I found a stack of straws by the sink and slipped one from its paper sleeve. I kept thinking all those little things might help.

  When the nurse returned, I left. I heard Mrs. Crown say she hoped I’d come back.

  Sitting with a person I’d never met near the end of her life seemed to me like trying to piece together the life of a rare mollusk from its empty shell, on the sand. Mrs. Kathryn Crown, who were you and what mattered and still matters? I thought of how much—and how little—I had learned about this woman on this late Thursday night. She once lived on Live Oak Plantation Road. She belonged to a quilting circle. All her friends had gone to bed early tonight, so she was alone when her symptoms worsened. On a little wooden table next to her chair sat a skein of wool—baby pastels—the kind that changes color every few inches, marbling like an infant-inspired sunrise. I fingered the metallic rose crochet hook on her night-stand and asked her what she was making.

  “Little blankets for the premature babies in the hospital,” she said. “They need so much help keeping warm.”

  As I drove to my home through the dark night, I thought about Kathryn Crown, how steady and kind she was, living out her purpose until all her breath was gone. Mrs. Crown knew I needed practice with the dying.

  Finally a little break for me and for Jeff. It was a quiet orange sunset, and we sat on the deck of a rental house at Indian Pass, a stretch of days ahead of us. The tide was so far gone, so far out, I wondered if it would ever return. But small broad combers were beginning to angle back into the pass, urging against the sandy shore. The moon-pressed Gulf would have its way, I knew.

  “Are those white pelicans on the point?” asked Jeff. We’d never seen them loafing there with their smaller brown cousins, and it was late in the season besides. But there they were: magnificent huge knobs of snowy white, across the water on the refuge. Binoculars brought them close: seven white pelicans standing at the water’s edge, adjusting their feathers.

  I’d seen them arrive in long, determined squadrons from the west in the late winter, often over the St. Marks Refuge; and I’d seen them rise on warm spring air, describing the spiraling currents. But never here, and never at nightfall.

  Birds never spend the night on the western point of St. Vincent Island: it is avidly patrolled by predatory raccoons and wild hogs. So it didn’t surprise me an hour later when the seven gathered up into the air, fell into a lopsided V, and flew directly over our heads. They flapped so close and low we could hear their great wings creaking.

  The routes and nesting grounds of the white pelican have been extensively mapped, but we know nothing of the intimacy of their journey, how it is decided who will fly with whom, and how far to travel in a day—and why these seven stopped at Indian Pass for just this hour. I felt so grateful for the confluence of time and space that allowed us to watch them and sit with and beneath them in awe. In a matter of days, these seven would arrive at their summer grounds, in Utah or northern Canada, and commit to the urgencies of nest building and egg laying. They will not remember us wishing them well on their leave-taking of the Gulf of Mexico. But perhaps our prayers for their safe passage might in some way sustain them.

  “If we do not see nature as somehow carrying the divinity,” wrote Jungian scholar James Hollis, “we will continue to abuse it.”

  The white pelicans’ flyover assured me that where I stood was on their map and reminded me that we shared a common sacred Earth: our true home and our church.

  “This is grace,” I said to Jeff. “This is a grace we can trust.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Violence

  I sat beside my father while he rested, stroking his left palm and fingers. It wasn’t a big hand. With age, the transparent skin had softened and shed its calluses. Dark blue veins forked the length of his fingers. Those fingers had held mine as a baby and a girl, had done all the work of a man’s long lifetime, had carried a gun in World War II, had hauled coal to the cellar furnace in our home, had buried three of his wives. Now my father’s hands were simply vulnerable, sentient, and frail. Lost in reverie, I turned his hand over and gave it a little pat of thanks.

  But wait, what was this? There was a seeping cut below his third knuckle. Configured in the shape of a crescent moon, the wound corresponded in size with my own fingernail. Someone assigned to his care had pressed her nail into Dad’s papery flesh until she drew blood, punishing him for resisting, forcing him to comply. With what, I could only guess.

  We had encountered similar situations in the New Jersey facilities, before I was fully in charge of my father’s care.

  On a visit north, Dad had told me that “a mean bitch” had pushed him down roughly, in the face, at night.

  “What did you do, Dad?” I asked. “Did you report her?”

  “I told her to quit it, that she had crossed the line,” Dad said.

  When I was a very young child, my dad took me by the hand and led me out into the night, my baby sister Bobbie perched astride his shoulders. We three stepped into our backyard, leaving the safety of our house behind us. The moon shone on our swing set, but it wasn’t familiar or inviting in the dark. “Look, girls, do you see the stars?” We lifted our faces to the sky. My father had brought us outside just before bedtime, because I had told him I was afraid of wild foxes coming to get us in the night. He was demonstrating that I was secure in the world and that he would always keep us safe.

  My dad and me, 1953. Photo by Janet Isleib.

  Now it was my father who needed my protection, something I could not seem to guarantee. I could not promise that he could trust the night.

  “Where did you get this cut, Dad?” I asked, turning his hand in my own.

  He winced with pain. He answered indirectly.

  “Sue, I need you to write a letter to the Johnsons for me,” said my dad. I pulled a pad of paper from my father’s desk and scribed a sentence of introduction.

  “Dear Bob and Sally: Dad has been thinking about you a great deal and wants to write you a letter.”

  I looked up at Dad, ready for his dictation.

  “Bob and Sally, I think it’s time for me to kill myself,” he said. His words came all in a rush. He looked out the window, not at me. “I can’t see why I’m always being beaten on. They are much bigger than I am. I’m strictly a has-been. I just hope I keep consciousness until . . .” His voice trailed away. I wrote down every word he said, but I knew I wouldn’t be sending it to his friends.

  Dad sat quietly, still staring out the window. “Doesn’t your husband have a rifle, Sue? I need some way to defend myself around here.”

  I sat in the chair, holding my impotent pen. The same anger and sense of injustice that had gripped his body now ruled mine.

  I jogged to the main office and flung open the manager’s door, interrupting a meeting between Ashley and her assistant. Breathing hard, I insisted they look at the picture I’d snapped of Dad’s wound with my phone. Ashley’s response was sympathetic, but she shook her head. “We can’t rush to judgment, Sue, we need to hear the caregiver’s perspective. Because Bob cannot fully report his experience, due to his dementia, we can’t be certain of what might have happened when no one else was present.”

  “Ashley, there is no denying this situation.” My body trembled as if I were my violated father. “How are you going to make this stop right
now? Tell me how.”

  She leafed through the caregivers’ schedules. I knew she was wondering herself who had been on Dad’s hall last night. Her assistant proposed that Dad might need drugs to make him more compliant with the staff. “Risperdal works well for many of our folks, at night, to keep them calm.”

  I was outraged. “Look, you two,” I said. “One, you are not going to drug him. And two, you may only allow caregivers into his room that can absolutely be trusted not to hurt him.” I told them I’d be requesting who I wanted by name, and who would not be, never be, acceptable. I knew I was bluffing.

  This wasn’t the first time my dad experienced the consequences of living with women stretched beyond their ability to cope.

  “Oh, she was tough,” Dad had told me, many years before, about his mother. “Charles she called my father, and Donald, my brother, and me—Robert. Not Robbie or Don or Charlie—or dear.

  “‘So, so, so,’ she’d chant under her breath if her round of chores was falling into place and she could see the end of the day.

  “’Stupid idiot!’ she’d yell, and she’d slap my face, if I dropped the glass milk bottle or coaxed our dog Pal to come clicking his toenails over the waxed linoleum floor or simply found ourselves in a wrong place, in her path, somehow, anywhere.”

  Uncle Don didn’t remember their mother had been so harsh, and she’d always been kind to me. But in Depression-era family pictures, almost always, my grandma’s mouth was stitched straight across her face, as if there were threads binding her lips and they wouldn’t stretch wide enough to let her laugh or joke, not ever, and if there was an extreme to be had in that house, it was her, in a burst of fury that tore open the seam where her smile might have been. Dad’s recollections could have been true.