Now You See the Sky

by Catharine H. Murray

  “Namo Tassa Baghavato, Arahato . . .” In resonating vibrations, the monks droned the Pali words that honor the blessed self-awakened Buddha, and we chanted after them in turns.

  Three-year-old Tahn refused to sit on the mat with his feet pointed politely away from the Buddha image at the front of the room. “You want a piece of me?” he kept threatening before he tried his Thai boxing moves on me. Cody, a planet out of orbit now without its sun, found staying conscious for this final ritual of death impossible and, only a couple of hours after waking up, put his head on my lap and slept hard.

  * * *

  The night after we collected Chan’s ashes, I was sighing when Cody spoke up.

  “Mom, you know that’s getting kind of annoying.”

  “What?” I asked, shaken out of my thoughts.

  “You keep sighing. You started the day before Chan died. You keep saying, Chan, Chan, Chan, and sighing.”

  I thought about this and then said, “I miss Chan every minute. Do you?”

  “Every second,” he replied.

  * * *

  The next morning, when we had all gathered back at the temple for the final ceremony of the funeral, Pong spoke to me: “Little Kay, I want to tell you that last night while my brother monks chanted at the temple, the smell of a body came to them. They looked around for a dead gecko or rat, but found nothing. Afterward, they realized it must be Chan coming to listen to the chanting. They said to him, All right now, go along now, go back to where you belong, and the smell immediately vanished. They told me the story and asked if Chan liked chanting. I said yes, of course.”

  I listened in respectful silence to his story before waiting to speak. When I did, I held my palms pressed together in front of my chest and cast my eyes down at the ground, as is required when addressing a monk, even your brother-in-law.

  “Chan used to love to go to listen to the chanting at the temple when he was little,” I said, “and would keep telling me when they weren’t yet chanting, Make them sing, Mama. Make them sing!” Curious if the smell of the smoke of the cremation fire could carry the five miles across town to Pong’s hilltop temple, I asked him if the monks smelled a burning body or a rotting body. A rotting one, he replied.

  * * *

  We scattered Chan’s ashes and bits of bone two days later. After breakfast, Mei Ya handed me a large silver bowl, intricately laced with images of fertility and the cosmos. Part of her dowry, now it held the petals of the traditional nine different kinds of flowers, colorful, fragrant, and reminiscent of heavenly beings. We walked to the river’s edge at the end of our street where a narrow, wooden long-tail boat waited. The captain held out his hand to help me step onto the open craft with his usual wordless grace. I set the bowl on the bow next to the bundle of ashes wrapped in white cloth and jar of bones. A bouquet of marigolds stood at the prow where the boatman had set them, fresh from his garden, his daily offering to the river spirits.

  We motored upriver through the morning mist and sunshine until the driver cut the engine, and we floated downriver. Despite so many relatives in the boat (fifteen in all), the ride was silent. Dtaw and I untied the plain cotton cloth that held the ashes, poured the bone shards from the jar onto them, and covered it all with the flower petals. Cody and Tahn and Jew helped Dtaw and Cam and me lift the bundle over the side to tilt the last tangible elements of their brother into the swirling brown water. The gray dust of his ashes floated and shimmered in the sun on the surface before the water swallowed them. We dropped the cloth and empty plastic jar in too.

  As the boat slid downriver, each person threw a handful of petals toward the place where we’d scattered Chan’s ashes. The colorful petals spread out over the surface of the brown river and floated and followed us as we drifted.

  When we came to the steps in front of our street, the captain pulled the boat up gently against the rocks. I turned to look back at the wide river with the winding trail of flower petals, a long curve of color surging toward the faraway sea. It reminded me of the Naga, the serpent that was believed to inhabit the waters of the Mekong and that once coiled itself under the Lord Buddha during a thunderstorm, spreading its hood over His head to keep Him dry as He sought enlightenment. Chan loved the stories of this revered spirit, Payanak. It was the name he’d chosen for our colt.

  PART 7

  Back to the Mountain

  A week later we arrived back at the cabin. I looked across the barren fields in the valley to the distant hills like earthen waves where elephants and tigers roamed free. Only a few days before I had thought it was beautiful here. But now, without Chan, it felt empty and desolate.

  The day we arrived, Dtaw, normally busy cutting back growth or planting trees or herbs or building a stand for a water jar, sat alone on the bench overlooking the valley. When I sat down next to him, he was silent for a while before saying, “It’s not the same now.”

  I put my arm around him and leaned my head on his shoulder. “I know.”

  It was as if we had had some worthy project we were engaged in: making Chan well. Everything was part of that: the rainwater we drank, the fresh vegetables we ate, the horses we loved to watch and ride, even the hawks and eagles that swooped close enough for Chan to shout out their names. Where before we dwelt in abundance and possibility, now we could see only emptiness.

  * * *

  That night when I came into the candlelit bedroom to undress for bed, Cody said, “Mom, does it hurt when you die?”

  “It could hurt a lot, but we were lucky because Chan’s death was mostly slow and gentle. I don’t think he had much pain at the very end.”

  “Then why did he cry?”

  “I imagine he was sad at leaving us. Or maybe it’s some physiological thing. I don’t know. Maybe he was crying at all the sadness in the world.”

  I thought about Chan all the time. Getting into our bed, lying on the spot where he spent his last night and drew his last breaths, I always felt him near me.

  Cody talked about him all the time after he died. Sometimes he said, “I miss Chan,” or, “I wish Chan didn’t have to die.” But more often he remembered. “Every time I smell this soap, it reminds me of the day before Chan died,” or, “It’s too bad because our friends will ride in the back of the pickup, and Chan would have loved that.”

  When Dtaw sat silent on the bench, shoulders hunched with despair, I told him our lives would be like that for a while: sad. I hoped I wasn’t telling him not to complain. When he hugged me and I started to cry, I hoped I wasn’t stopping him from crying. But I couldn’t hold back my tears.

  * * *

  Every night for weeks after Chan’s death, Dtaw and I both woke up around one thirty a.m. The light, the moon, the stars, our mood sometimes seemed to suggest another time of night, but when we flicked on the flashlight or lit the lamp, the clock always said one thirty, the time Chan died. One morning as we lay together in the darkness, we talked about the moment Chan died.

  “How do you think he woke me up?” Dtaw asked me. “With his jit?” (Pali for heart-mind.)

  “Yes, I think so, honey. He couldn’t move his hands, could he? He couldn’t even open his eyes, but he knew what was happening.” Dtaw and I marveled that, although Chan couldn’t control any part of his body, he could still wake up Dtaw from a deep sleep.

  We were sure Chan knew it was time to leave us.

  “It upsets me that Cody didn’t get to take up monk’s robes for Chan’s funeral. I don’t know why Pong decided that,” I began to complain.

  “I think it was perfect. I think we did it all just right for Chan,” Dtaw said firmly.

  He was right. It was all just right. There was no sense in doubting any of it. Chan had the best possible end to his life, strong and hopeful and still asserting his right to live right to the last seconds. He never gave up. He never stopped living until he had no choice. He complained loudly about not being able to run or stand and about his pain, but he didn’t stop fighting.

  I think now
I did the right thing. All the times that I wanted to tell him, You’re dying, honey. You can give up now. The cancer is winning. Just rest. Have some ice cream, I never thought about what his reaction would have been, only that I was afraid that mentioning death would hasten his. I never realized that he would have probably laughed in my face and asked for more bitter vegetable juice.

  He was not confused about his life. He knew he had the right to fight as hard as he wanted and never give up before he had to. He died knowing he had lived fully and fought his hardest. If I had been honest with him about my fears of his death, seeing him laugh at them would have helped me see them for what they were: only fears, not reality.

  The reality was that he was not dying. He was living. He was living fully in the present and did so every moment until his last breath.

  A few days after he died, I looked up into the blue sky over the house and saw an enormous eagle circling overhead. I watched its graceful arcs climbing upward, riding the updrafts from the valley far below. It soared higher until it became little more than a speck, higher than I’d ever watched a bird fly. Then it headed to the north and soared farther upward until it disappeared from view. I thought about how Chan loved eagles and how I’d never seen one spend such a long time above our house. I thought about all the indigenous cultures that read signs of the spirit world in nature, in animals and birds and plants. And how odd it is that my newly developed Western culture is arrogant enough to laugh at these ancient views. What do we know in our youth and logic?

  It was then that I began to look up, to look up for him every day.

  * * *

  A month after Chan’s death, the January wind cooled my face as I biked over the rough dirt road toward home. I heard the rhythmic thunk, thunk, thunk of the rice pounder and saw Tong’s muscular form stepping on and off the seesaw of the tree trunk to pump it up and down into a bowl, four feet deep and sunk into the earth. Tong walked the mile up the hill from her village every day to bring fresh garlic or greens from her garden or some sweet rice treat from her kitchen. Now, with Chan gone, she knew better than I did that we still needed her.

  As I biked over the crest of the hill, Tahn saw me and untangled himself from the old grass mat he was playing on and came running barefoot over the warm earth and dead broken grass to meet me, a big smile lighting up his face. I don’t know where I’d have been without his zest for life, undaunted even with all the sadness of Chan’s death. He told me to change my shoes and clothes so I could help with the pounding.

  Side by side, Tong and I pounded the rice, leaning together on the wooden rail for support, combining our weight to step in unison onto the end of the log, letting the heavy mallet at the other end come crashing down onto the golden grains. After a while Tong let me pump alone while she separated the rice from the chaff.

  It was hard to get the rhythm right, not letting my leg get banged on the pedal’s upswing as the mallet at the other end hit the rice at the bottom of the mortar. I let myself go easy, let myself be awkward, not pushing for perfection, knowing the right rhythm would come of its own accord. As my legs began to tire, Tong put a pile of threshed grains onto a round bamboo tray. She gave this to me to pick out the few grains that didn’t get pounded to put back in the mortar. The rice felt delightfully cool and dry under our fingers as Tahn and I hunted for the grains, golden against the tan of the threshed. One by one we picked them out and set them aside to return to the mortar.

  I was always fascinated by the way the care for a single grain of rice was so important in Thai culture. There was something about the action of taking just a few grains and carefully placing them back with thousands of others that so clearly mattered. It did matter. The rice that we eat is made up of single grains. I learned by living with people who raise rice that when you are not mindful of every grain of rice, you are dishonoring a whole constellation of beings: the farmers and buffaloes who worked to till the land, the people who planted the seedlings, the tiny organisms that fertilized the mud, the women who rose before dawn to pound the hulls off the day’s supply. When a villager sees rice, he sees the sun warming the earth and the clouds giving rain. He is careful with each grain.

  It felt good to do such simple physical tasks each day: knitting, walking, chopping, pounding. The stitches, strokes, and steps, like pulses, seemed to keep me on the earth, a security I might not have so easily found in a suburban house or city apartment, where my life would have required more of my own directive.

  There, a month after Chan’s death, I could simply do, without thinking. The fire had to be lit, the rice had to be threshed and cooked and served, the bedding had to be aired and reassembled, the floor swept. Perhaps it would have been the same back in the US, but because of the breezy skies over horses and birds and bugs, it was the place I needed to be. I knew this all along. I had wanted to bring Chan here because I knew it would be the best place for him to get well, but I also knew it would be the best place for him to die, the best place to grieve.

  For the first time since I was a very little girl, I was sure that I was in exactly the right place. I belonged there. I knew that whatever I was doing, it was a kind of incubation, recovering from a year and a half of emotional roller-coastering, vertigo, and heartbreak. I allowed myself to be quiet and nurtured, not try to do anything useful at all. I found it a restful place in my head to be after so many years of beating myself up for not striving enough, not making enough money, not challenging myself enough. I knew after Chan’s death that I’d been challenged enough to last a long time.

  I liked having the creatures around. The horses kept us on our toes, shooing them away from the house and the rain jars; the wood mice kept us from getting messy in the kitchen; the birds reminded us of the infinite—and it all reminded me that where there is life, there is always birth at one end and death at the other.

  * * *

  It was the usual time of night when I woke up, an hour and a half after midnight. The moon shone bright behind the tree. My sons and husband slept soundly. I tried to wake Dtaw up to talk. He grunted, laid his palm on my cheek, and continued to sleep.

  I lay and worried about how it all started. Those chemicals he took in so young when I had asthma during pregnancy? So much albuterol in the womb when he was so tiny? I struggled with the knowledge that I would never know. It didn’t matter, though. It was over, and we were left with so much sadness and so much love that felt like only a memory, like thirsty hands cupped, remembering icy clear water and long cool drafts.

  * * *

  One hundred and five days after Chan’s death, Dtaw and Tahn and I were riding the motorcycle under the hot bright sun through the streets of town. Tahn was delighted to be squeezed between the two of us, his blond and brown curls and his daddy’s long black and gray strands twisting together in the wind. He said, “That’d be cool, Mama, if you and me and Jew and Cody and Chan were flying in the sky.”

  “Yes, that would be, honey. Do you think Chan is already flying up there?” I asked.

  “Yeah, look!” he said with happy certainty, and he craned his head back and pointed his chubby arm straight up into the blue as if he could see his big brother.

  I do feel these days that he’s still with us, watching us, maybe guiding us along.

  He has moved us a few degrees up. I get mired in my own travails less now than I did before. I don’t squint down into the blackness of my own mind so much anymore.

  Now I try to look up. I try to see the sky.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my gratitude to the following people. As of this writing, these are the names I can remember. If yours does not appear here and you were part of this journey, please know I am deeply grateful to you as well.

  Chan’s father Dtaw for teaching me how to fight for what matters most.

  Cody, Tahn, Jew, Jum, Mei Ya, Cam, and Tong for so much love.

  Mom for teaching me to cherish. Dave and Vivian for knowing when we needed them. Thomas for sho
wing up without asking.

  My Stonecoast mentors Deb Marquart, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Ted Deppe, and Rick Bass, with extra thanks to Rick for reading so many pages before I could see where it all was going. Robin Talbot, Justin Tussing, and Matt Jones for their hard work, support, and good humor. My Stonecoast classmates, especially Jenny O’Connell, Tiffany Joslin, and Heather Wilson for all the moral support and dancing. Carter Walker for seeing beauty, and Melanie Viets for the same and for the quiet. My Stonecoast writing group—Kris Millard, Sophie Nelson, Mary Katherine Spain, Bill Stauffer, and Ryan Brod—for their close readings, honesty, and encouragement. A special thank you to Ryan for letting me cry but not letting me quit.

  My editors Ann Hood and Johnny Temple for their skill and patience and for knowing that people need stories like this. My book designer Lucian Burg for his generosity, sensitivity, and artistic vision. And Tris Coburn for believing in this early on and for advising me on all things literary agent.

  Humble thanks to our family and neighbors in Thailand for watching and holding it all with patience and kindness. Our community in Seattle for working together to support us without even being asked. The nurses and doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital for their compassion and expertise. My Loeipittayakom, University of Southern Maine, and Portland Adult Education faculty families for taking me on when I was still so sad. My cocounseling communities in Portland and Seattle for reminding me over and over that healing takes more time and tears than we would like.

  And thanks to all my incredible friends. Cynthia for seeing the story from the start. Sherry and Hannah for bringing sunshine when we needed it. Payne for saying yes. Lenna for being there through the hardest parts. Lynn and Amy for still listening after all these years. Kecia for always laughing with me. Christina and Deirdre for knowing what we needed, especially when we were lost. Amy, John, Deb, and Dave for so much I can’t even begin to say. Julia for being my friend—always. Peter for all the love, education, and support. Marcella for being real. Sharie for Trauma Incident Reduction miracles. And my Big Dreams group—Layne, Anne, Cathy, and Deb—it worked!