I embrace those numb moments because this unfeeling never lasts too long. I can go for days, weeks even, without really thinking about Lydia being gone, but then suddenly it’s right there again. And it’s when it sneaks up on me that it hurts so much worse. An e-mail from an old friend of mine, or hers, who just somehow got the news through the grapevine. A photo posted on social media. A cashier at the pet store removing your punch card from the box behind the register—twelve bags of dog food, get one free.
“Cayton-Holland, got it! Lydia or Adam?”
Adam. There is no Lydia. Not anymore.
Those moments send me hurtling back.
Like the other day. Katie and I met my parents for lunch at a Mexican restaurant. We pulled into the parking lot a few minutes before my parents arrived and as we were exiting the car I blurted out, “I wonder if Lydia’s coming.” And I meant it. The whole situation seemed so familiar, a Sunday lunch with my parents, some enchiladas and crispy chile rellenos, a bowl of green chile on the side. Of course Lydia would be there. She’d order three bean burritos, not smothered, and she’d take one of them home with her in a white Styrofoam to-go box. She’d drink two Cokes over the course of the meal and devour the chips and salsa. I’d experienced that scene a hundred times in my life. It was so normal and safe and rote, so real life, I could feel her there with us.
“You’re kidding, right?” Katie asked, slightly concerned.
My frontal lobe took over. Oh yeah. Duh. Dead. No Lydia. Ever again. Not this meal, or the next one or the one twenty years from now. Not the next movie, not the next birthday, not the next coffee shop or comedy show or nephew’s soccer game. Not at her wedding, or mine. Or the birth of her child. Or mine. She’s just fucking gone. Forever.
Those moments feel like the first time every time. And unlike the memory of finding her body, I can’t store them away tidily in some mental filing cabinet. They’re too general, too broad. It’s a sense of my little sister that I’m missing in those moments, a feeling, one that exists inside of me like DNA.
I had to sit down on the curb outside that Mexican restaurant and catch my breath. And I had to do it quickly, before my parents pulled into the lot. Lest they see me like that; lest I trigger them. The perpetual thin ice of a proud, devastated family, unable to show just how broken they are at times for fear of breaking the others.
And I’m so mad at Lydia in those moments, every time. And I’m so sad for her too. And for myself. And for my poor family. But there’s not a lot you can do. There’s nothing you can do, in fact.
So Katie and I went into the restaurant and we waited for my parents and when they arrived we caught up and none of us said a thing about Lydia’s absence, which we all felt acutely, like we do every time. The moments we’re not sad about her are but brief interruptions from a grief we’ve left on pause.
We just do the best we can.
MY SISTER, THE HAWK
I was at the bar after a show when my buddy’s wife, Maggie, beelined over to me. She had a fire in her eyes. She had to talk to me, she said.
Okay.
Lydia was communicating to her, she said. Through her. Desperately begging her to talk to me, to communicate with me, to relay a message. Maggie was wild-eyed, her words were not coming out clearly. She started and stopped, stammered awkwardly as she tried to get out what she needed to say. She just had to tell me on behalf of Lydia that everything is okay. That she’s with me.
I must have looked at her like I thought she was a fucking lunatic because she grabbed my hand and put it to her neck.
“Here,” she said. “Feel my pulse.”
It was throbbing, practically beating out of her neck. If it were me, I would have gone to the hospital immediately.
“Jesus, Maggie!” I blurted out. “Are you okay?”
She couldn’t even answer. Her husband, Drew, intervened. We used to write at the newspaper together. He’s a cynical journalist type, a policer of all things bullshit; he knew exactly how I would react to his wife approaching me and discussing communicating with my little sister from beyond the grave. He quickly did his best to calm Maggie down, and then he tried to assuage my doubts.
“I called bullshit on it too, initially,” he said of his wife’s ability to tap into something higher. “But there’s been so many times where I’ve been proven wrong by her, eventually I just kind of accepted it.”
We talked it out for a few minutes and after a while Maggie calmed down. Her pulse returned to normal. She told me that she is just starting to understand this weird gift she has. She called it “energy work” and explained that she often feels the pulse of what people are feeling, or what people are working through. She said it has always been the case for her but only recently was she attempting to understand it, to learn how to talk about it, maybe even harness or tame it. But it’s still all very overwhelming for her, she said.
I had no idea what to say. I’ve known Drew and Maggie for years. They’re no flakes. But this was so out of left field, so hippy-dippy. And truthfully, I didn’t want to talk about it. I felt bombarded. I just wanted to tell some dick jokes in my friend’s new bar and then get hammered. The last thing I wanted was to discuss Lydia. Especially in some new-agey, spiritual manner that I had never asked for or invited. With someone whom I was a friendly acquaintance with, but hardly someone I would turn to about such matters.
I told Maggie thank you for talking to me and that we should discuss this further sometime. I didn’t mean it. I just wanted out. The next morning, she texted me a quasi apology and I wrote her back saying she had nothing to apologize for. And that was that. I didn’t reach out to her and she didn’t reach out to me. But I kept thinking about it.
Even though I’m a cynical comic, I’ve never shut the door to things like meditation, yoga, tapping into a higher power. And unlike most of my friends I’m always careful to label myself an agnostic, not an atheist. Because an atheist assumes they know. And that’s always been my problem with religion. How do you know? How does anyone know? I like not knowing. It seems more honest. My belief system was grounded in that simple truth my father taught me as a child, when Wade died and he pulled a picture book of the universe from the shelf. No one knows. But isn’t it amazing that we get to experience it all? And even if experiencing it all had lost its appeal for me, I still clung to the belief that no one knew. Since Lydia’s death I had embraced the mystery. Which made anything seem possible.
Like the idea of Lydia becoming a red-tailed hawk.
Our first encounter was a day or two after her funeral. My uncle Lauren was still staying at our house with his family, there for his sister, my mom, as best he could be. He let the dog out into the backyard and noticed a red-tailed hawk perched in our crab apple tree. It just sat there, totally nonplussed by his presence. There was something strange in its stillness. He showed my mom, who in turn showed me, and we all agreed there was something different about the bird. It was atypically calm. We speculated that maybe it was injured, or just a confused juvenile, not yet comfortable in its skin. But we couldn’t stop staring at it. It was so peaceful, so serene. We watched as a squirrel climbed the tree and joined it on the branch. The hawk could care less. The two of them just sat there, predator and prey, side by side. They remained there together until we went inside.
“Something’s off about that hawk,” my uncle concluded. We didn’t give it any further thought.
A few weeks later my mom came home from running errands and parked her car on the side street alongside the house. Something fluttered through her field of vision. She whirled around to follow it and was surprised to see that a red-tailed hawk had landed on the roof of her car. It stared at her. She stared back. Then it began rubbing its head on the car, over and over again. Bending low, twisting its neck so that the top of its head brushed the metal of the car, then returning to its normal, upright position. It would hold its position like that for seconds, bowing low, submissive. She had never seen a bird behave that way. It
seemed to be offering itself up for consideration, lying prostrate before her, as though my mother were queen of the red-tails. My mom was overcome. She remembered the strange hawk encounter from before.
“Lydia?” she asked.
The bird just stared at her. Then it flew away.
Of course, my mother only related this to me when I told her of my separate encounter. We were casting for the pilot of Those Who Can’t in an office space on the west side of town, right on the Platte River. The room we were in had one wall that essentially was a large, glass window through which we overlooked the entire complex. Suddenly a hawk shot past, then swopped low over the parking lot and landed on a fence some two hundred yards away. It was a slow point in the day anyway so I ran outside to get a better look. As I got close to the hawk, still perched on a fence, it stared at me, not with anger or fear, but a look I can only describe as knowing. Like we were familiar. I crept closer, a foot or two at a time. Soon I was so close that with a sudden move I felt as if I could touch it. The raptor never faltered, never flinched. Then it turned away from me so it was facing out, over a field, perhaps scanning for prey. I figured it would fly off but then it did something I’ve never seen a bird do to this day. It stretched both its wings wide and held them there, like the iconic Aztec eagle. It didn’t flap them, it didn’t stretch them out and then pull them back into its slender, powerful body. It kept them completely outstretched, in profile, as if to say behold. I stared in awe.
“Lydia?” I asked.
The hawk turned its head and looked back at me, held its steely gaze. Then it flew away.
I went back into the office, moved, but didn’t share what had happened. I just reported how close I had gotten to the hawk. But when I shared the story with my mother, she looked at me with wide eyes and we both just knew. That was her. That was Lydia. Just like it had been that day with my uncle. There was no doubt in our minds. We held no deep understanding of reincarnation. We couldn’t even say whether or not we believed we saw the same hawk. We just felt Lydia’s presence in those encounters and for us that was enough to believe. She was trying to reach us. She was trying to show us how beautiful and strong she still was. We saw red-tailed hawks all the time after that. In fairness they’re common, but the frequency was uncanny.
On her first birthday after she died, on the day she would have turned twenty-nine, I went to visit her bench. When I got there someone was already sitting on it, enjoying their day in the park. I liked that. Lydia had become a part of the park we were raised in, like a swing set on a playground, or an animal in the zoo. Or a gnome hidden in the museum walls. There was so much mystery and wonder right there in our backyard, if only people knew to look for it.
I left the woman alone on Lydia’s bench and went and lay down beneath a tree to try to wait her out. I’d visit Lydia’s bench after. As I lay there staring up into the branches a bird flew into the tree. I jumped up and tried to identify it, circling the trunk to get a better angle. Sure enough, red-tailed hawk. I couldn’t believe it. Had that person not been sitting on Lydia’s bench I would have never lain beneath that tree. And my hawk little sister would never have paid me a visit. It wasn’t too hard to convince myself that she had led me there all along.
A few days after my wedding to Katie, where Anna was a bridesmaid and Lydia was not, Maggie wrote me a lengthy e-mail. I later learned that she was waiting until after my wedding to contact me again. She didn’t want to bother me with missives from my dead little sister as I was preparing for what should be one of the happiest days of my life.
Your sister had been in my heart a number of times before we talked that night, after your show. It was a haunting but comfortable feeling, and for some reason I always knew when it was her. There was this one time that I was working with a healer, and she said, “There is a woman who died very young here with you.” And right away, I knew it was Lydia. I asked the woman who was helping me if she was my friend’s sister and she said yes, it certainly was.
I didn’t know what to think. I kept reading.
When I saw you after your show, I had no idea what was coming was coming. But once it started, I had no control. I spent some time after that night thinking about and coming to a better understanding of what happened, and how her energy took over mine. So here goes. You may remember my pulse. That felt insane inside my body, to have it all come on so quickly, like I had done wind sprints, and then to have it come back to normal moments later, once I released Lydia’s words to you. That was her excitement coming out. I am certain that she was so excited to have a way to communicate with you in a way she knew for sure that you would hear. Over the next few days, I think what I learned is that you ask her hundreds of questions, big ones about life choices, and little ones too, like which socks to wear, and once she knew I had you open to listening, she tried to answer every question you had ever asked all at once, and that was why my pulse went crazy, because I had never experienced that type of input.
I embraced the possibility. I couldn’t recall if I was asking Lydia questions or not. But I was talking to her all the time, in my own inner monologue, whether it was seated on her bench in the park or when I was on a jog. In those absentminded moments when you snap to after who knows how long of your brain wandering, I’d realize I had been carrying on a conversation with Lydia in my head. Maggie described herself in the e-mail as “an empath.” That resonated deeply. Because that was what Lydia was. An empath. I never had a word for it, but there it was. Someone who feels and commiserates to a level that may not even be healthy. Maggie said that as an empath, grief and suffering were some of the easiest things to pick up on. I thought of Lydia and her love of animals, her desire to not even see plants suffer. Was that why Lydia was reaching out to Maggie? Because they were both so empathetic?
Maggie said she could tell I was covered in grief. And Lydia could too. She could tell our whole family was still reeling. And that was driving my little sister crazy. That made her so sad. She didn’t want that for me. She didn’t want that for any of us. So she was reaching out to Maggie constantly to help me. Maggie didn’t know why Lydia was choosing her. She had met Lydia a handful of times but had no real relationship with her. She knew her merely as the nice little sister of Adam, nothing more. But Maggie figured Lydia simply was going for the person closest to me who was receptive to hearing such messages. I wondered if those times she had visited my mother and me in hawk form were before she found Maggie.
Everything Maggie was writing hit home so hard. And that scared me. Was this who I was now? Someone who believed in energy work and chakras? Someone who thought the dead spoke to us? Should I drive up to Boulder and hang out at Naropa? Buy lots of turquoise and start offering strangers shoulder massages on the Pearl Street Mall? I didn’t care. Everything Maggie was saying, I wanted to hear so badly. I kept reading.
The next thing I need to convey to you is that she is trying very hard to answer you. She wants you to know that she hears you when you are talking to her. Her means of communication are harder to interpret but if you open your heart a little wider you might find comfort in the little answers. Maybe a picture is tilted, something seems to not be in its usual place, an electronic behaves strangely, the lights flicker oddly when you turn them on or off. Be open to accepting that her energy is there with you.
I called Maggie a few days afterward. We talked for almost two hours. I learned things about Maggie I had never known. Like how her father died when she was five from cancer. He was diagnosed when her mother was pregnant with her. He was given six months to live, but he made it his goal to make it to the birth of his daughter. And he lived five years past that goal. Maggie always felt connected with her dad, but soon after he died she said she got a message from him. She relayed it to her mother.
Second drawer of the china hutch.
She didn’t understand what it meant but she told her mom that her dad had told her to pass it along. Her mother looked in that drawer. It was their life insurance poli
cy. She had been ransacking the house looking for it. The policy was expiring soon.
Ever since that day, Maggie felt she was more attuned, more tapped in to something bigger than herself. There were a dozen other such experiences over the course of her life confirming her suspicion. In her family, it was just an accepted truism: Maggie understands things on a higher level. She explained that her numerous experiences were rarely as clear a message as the second drawer of a china hutch, but they were these powerful feelings that would come over her nonetheless. And Lydia was something she was feeling as powerfully as anything she had in a long while.
And it persisted. Maggie told me that after that night of my show, Lydia kept harassing her. More than ever before. She needed to talk to me more, but Maggie kept putting it off. She knew how weird it would all sound. And she didn’t want to bother me before my wedding. She felt like she had already bothered me too much that night. But the day after my wedding, she started feeling this nonstop pressure from Lydia to reach out again. She and Drew went home to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving—while I was on my honeymoon—and for the entire thousand-mile drive back to Colorado Lydia hounded her to reach out to me. Maggie described it as this persistent, nagging voice:
You said you were going to talk to him after the wedding. It’s after the wedding. Why haven’t you talked to him? Are you going to talk to him at all? When are you going to talk to him?
She said it kept her from sleeping it was so relentless. That sounded like Lydia all right.
Tragedy Plus Time Page 15
