The call is coming from inside the house.

Last Friday we were awakened at six in the morning by Sebby's outraged barking.  You could tell from the barking that something was actually up. Upon investigation, we were immediately enchanted by the young owl who had clearly landed on our porch during an early morning flight, an owl without the flying skills to rescue herself.  We put the deeply offended Sebby in an upstairs bedroom and spent the next several hours watching the little owl scritch and scratch and fluff up her wings if we got too close to her with our cameras and our excited quiet thrill--it was a thrill, it was an honor, it felt like magic to be in the company, however briefly, of this creature of the night and the woods and clearly not of our porch.

He walked or hopped down the stairs, and eventually made his way up the sloping hill into the backyard and then into the woods.  It gets a little confusing here.  Avery knew where the owl's nest was, and when we looked, there was another little owl sitting in that nest, high up in a tree directly in front of our house.  We were sure it wasn't the owl who had just been hopping into the back woods.  We later learned that all this is common enough--the young owls learn to fly and crash somewhere and then must get back to the tree where their nest is and climb back up.  Really?  The tree is so tall and she seemed so ill-suited for a big climb.  I worried that we had contributed to the original owl's early death--was she out in the back woods, easy prey for coyotes, because we scared her into fleeing that direction.  Were we muddled--was there only one owl who had surreptiously flown back home while we weren't watching? My therapist told me we don't know much about owls--who knows why she was out of the nest.  Was she injured? Had her mother kicked her out? (That last thought didn't make me feel better--a mother was being blamed somewhere in that equation: either me for being a nosy human mother, or the maligned, invisible owl mother.

Now we can look out our upstairs window and see the other young owl.  Or the first owl.  An owl.

He looks right back at us.  We feel magic.  Zoe said looking into this owl's eyes is seeing God.  I feel sure that my grandmother has something direct and intentional to do with this owl. Sometimes I say, "Hi, Evelyn," while I am folding laundry and peering out the window, even though I don't think the owl is actually an embodiment of her spirit. 

Part of the sense of magic comes from a book called Owl Babies, which I read to my children--all of them--when they were toddlers, a book I received when Cameron was born because Rosie, Evelyn's youngest daughter, who is 9 years older than me, and functions like an older sister to me (with none of the childhood fights, which is a different kind of depth I share with my younger sister, Stephanie) gave it to me.  The story is simple and well-suited for a board book.  Three baby owls, who are somehow all little, variously little (there is definitely an oldest sister, definitely a middle child, definitely a baby-baby), wake in the night and their mother is gone.  They fret on their little branch, waiting in the looming dark for her to come back.
And she does.  She was out gathering food for them.

So our memories of this book, and how I read it aloud (the little piping voice I always used for Bill), over-layed with the extraordinary strangeness of being close to an owl, and the sense that my grandmother had a hand, or a wing, in this, coupled with the fact that my cancer has progressed, and Avery has just moved back from California to be near me, and my palliative care doctor told me this is my last chapter, and over all of this is this great, terrible pall, as if the White Witch has come to our world and taken away all of the joy, emptied out the color, this terrible pandemic which has people dying alone in hospitals, this world where every last decision about how you behave is read through a political lens, so that you are somehow signaling that you don't believe in our constitutional right to freedom if you wear a mask, this.  Made the owl's visit.  Extraordinary.

Some people react to my palliative care doctor saying this is my last chapter with horror.  Who is she to say that? Who is she to take away my hope and my will to live?  I actually found it very comforting to hear her say that--and I don't believe she would have said that to anyone, but she knows me now,  and she knows I don't really truck with the idea that we shape our own destiny in the face of cancer. I do think we have tremendous power in terms of how we are going to live in whatever time we are given.  I do think it makes sense to, oh I don't know, eat a vegetable or take a walk.  But I don't think turmeric or cleaving to the idea that there will be a miracle makes it any more or less likely that I will live longer.  A chapter can be a long chapter.  A chapter can be a single word.  There are still facts, even if there is a tremendously strong current in the water right now that says you can't know them, that truth is fake, that there is no there there.

I've seen some miracles during this time of cancer.  I've seen a woman on her deathbed--not in a metaphorical way--survive terrible surgery and enter into a clinical trial and respond to the medicine in unpredictable ways, and then go on to ski a year later.  Ski.  A whole year.
I've also seen--we all have--people taken "before their time." I've seen people who seem in relative good health (to whatever extent that can be when you have stage four cancer) slip away in the night, falling victim to stroke. I think, although I can't be sure until I go through my own actual death, that I accept the idea that "before their time" is a fallacy.  Sometimes, when I am feeling a lot of self-pity, I get resentful and all about "before their time."  I would have made a great old woman, I say indignantly.  I would be a great grandmother, I declare, looking sideways at the sky, where God always seems to live when I start thinking of him as this old, white man with long hair who has made some kind of counting error with my particular life.

My next chapter could be a long one, but I feel very awake, attuned to the idea that I cannot act as if it will be.  There's every reason to think it will not, and if I pause in seven years and take note of the fact that I "beat the odds" and I'm still here, tirelessly blogging away, and have to say, why, oh why, did I act like I was close to death when it turns out I had years left--so be it.  I will be thrilled to have my comeuppance.

What an absolutely strange time it is for all of us, and how quickly the normal drifted away.  I believe that in the beginning, I thought there would be an actual date when the numbers lined up and we would know it was safe for the kids to go back to school, where we would go to restaurants without thinking twice about it, when we would look around at the decimated economy and say, okay, how the hell are we getting out of this mess.  I thought there would be a date.  In late May.  Or August.  Now I see that there is no date we are waiting for--there are just a series of decisions we will all make--embracing our governor's orders, ignoring our governor's orders (especially if we live in Wisconsin today).  Much of what was normal is gone now.  It's impossible, from this vantage point, to see what will be considered normal again, sometime, in a month to be named later.  This is an opportunity, in some way that actually could honor our dead, to pause and look at what we want to keep and what we should change.  To see that we don't live in Massachusetts, or the United States, but on Earth.  That's how we should tell people where we hail from--Earth first, not last. 

I don't believe, though, that we are going to implement a lot of well-planned action plans based on a common consensus about what our shared values are.  One of which has to be to save this planet from implosion or explosion.  Remember what my father said would be the end of the planet?  Some kind of environmental disaster or act of war, which if it didn't decimate the whole planet, would lead to class warfare, riots between the haves and have-nots--a kind of zero sum endgame.  Of course, he would tell you about this, if you asked, while happily snacking on a piece of homemade pie with great relish, with pure love and gratitude for his family shining in his eyes when they lit upon you. He's a mathematician, which is not to say he is purely facts.  But that he isn't sentimental about our fallen state.

About a month ago I started to hear these small sounds at night when I was trying to sleep. Sometimes I thought it was the dog coming upstairs to climb into his dog bed, his collar faintly jingling. But I would look and there he would be, already curled up in his bed.  I thought it might be mice.  Or a bat.  Just the house settling.  But finally I realized it was me.  At night, when I am flat in bed, I can hear this little tuneless whistling sound, a kind of deep rasp that is somewhere well below my throat.  I figured this out by holding my breath and noticing that the noise stopped.  Which was so obvious and simple that I worry about my brain when I think about how long it took me to figure out the call was coming from inside the house.  I kept this to myself, but it was and is alarming to hear it, knowing it is likely connected to cancer, to the thickening of the tumor and other parts of my lung, which were among the revelations of my last scan.  It felt very private, and personal, this little raggedy noise haunting my sleep, this burgeoning relationship.

I woke up the other night, sitting straight up in bed, instantly in a panic attack, sure I wasn't getting enough oxygen.  Kyle was comforting me, and I said, you know, I think this is connected to these little sounds my body is making at night, and started to describe the noises to her, completely expecting her to say something dismissive, something reassuring. 
Oh honey, she said. 
I've been hearing those noises for weeks while you sleep.

Thump.  That was the feeling I felt.  This is real.  This is not my mind playing tricks on me (like I told Elijah his was when he explained to me this morning that he can see a hand waving to him at night in the vent (you would have been so proud of me as I explained why he thought he saw a hand, how it wasn't a hand, how we needed to get a handle on that kind of thought because there is nothing to be afraid of and I don't want him anxious at night. All the time I wanted to say: A hand?  That is terrifying! What kind of signs is it making?  Just a simple wave?  I'm hearing noises late at night. We should probably think about moving.  Didn't say any of that).

Thump.  Other people can hear these noises.  Why is it that every time my scans are bad, every time I change therapies, every time I finish up one of the treatment options my oncologist laid out for me at the beginning, do I feel like I'm hearing the diagnosis again for the first time?  My oncologist is supposed to be one of the best in the country.  During one of our first meetings, he said, reluctantly, that while every patient experiences their own individual reactions to cancer therapies, if he had to say, he would guess I would be on the first drug about a year [Tarceva:11 months] and the second drug about a year [Tagrisso: started first showing signs it was no longer controlling the cancer at around 13 months], and then I would be on straight, good old infusion chemo for about six months [I am scheduled for a biopsy next Monday which they will send to a lab for genetic testing that will help them decide which chemotherapies to use]. 
Does he have to be right all the time? 
Isn't that why I picked him?
I mean, sort of.  I picked him and MGH because I wanted to be with a doctor who would try every last thing before closing my file and sending me to hospice. I think I am with that doctor.  Some people take these drugs I have taken and they control the cancer for years.  Years.
The problem is there just aren't that many decisions or paths left to choose.  That's what's real, being fully aware of that actually helps me make better decisions about what to do with my one precious and wild life.  That's why I was helped by my palliative care doctor gently reminding me where I am in all of this.

Remember a few minutes ago when I said I don't really truck with the idea that we control our cancer destinies.  First of all, let me say that this has been the spring of idioms.  We have been working on the idea of idioms for weeks now in the ramshackle second grade classroom we have set up here in the kitchen.  If anyone wants to help me make a quick million, I have an idea about writing a new Amelia Bedelia series.  Anyone with me?  That book was my childhood book too, and remains the standard for teaching idioms to children.  But it's so dated.  Everyone in the book is super white.  These rich people have this hapless maid in their house who takes everything everyone else says literally.  So when they tell her to prune the hedges, she goes outside and sticks prunes on the bushes.  My children have no idea what it means to prune the hedges.  The lady of the house, who has a matronly bosum, tells Amelia to dress the chicken and Amelia Bedelia puts doll clothes on the whole chicken in the fridge.  My children have seen me make whole roasted chicken probably about every ten days their entire lives, and have never heard me say the phrase "dress the chicken," although they have witnessed me removing the gizzards, stuffing a lemon and some fresh thyme into the chicken's body, etc. I just think if we wrote a new book, with diverse children, without servants and with more current idioms, we could make a mint.  Get out of hand.  Call it a night. A blessing in disguise.  That's a good one. 
I'm operating on a kind of tight deadline, though, so let me know immediately.
Have no truck with something or someone.  I'll have no truck with her anymore, not since we had that fight.
I'll have no truck anymore with magical thinking that allows you to willy-nilly ignore facts, statistics, the truth about averages, the efficacy of masks and social distancing.

Said the woman who recently became enchanted with a magical set of owls, convinced her grandmother was sending her a signal that she, like all mothers, always comes back, even though the night is dark and lonely and full of quiet noises signaling doom. 

You all know I think consistency is overrated, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the hopelessnes of trying not to be hypocritical.
Can I have my cake and my tea?  Can I read fiction and non-fiction and fail to distinguish the differences?
Can I tell you that my cancer is progressing, and also ask you to believe in the power of magical thinking?
Sometimes, these days, when I look at the beautiful faces of my fellow travelers in my metastatic cancer support group in the only way we look at one another these days, which is to say, in the little rectangles of the Zoom platform, I could fall over knowing it is likely, it is probable, it is a certainty that I shall never see these women in person again.  Some of the women I love most in the group, because I have known them now for over two years, in this intimate, funny, sweet way, are failing now.  All of us have been told we will die if we get COVID-19, that we cannot go out into the world until there is an actual, tested, reliable vaccine, which means, for many of us, that we will not lay hands on one another again, will not feel the press of a hug, the stroke of a hand on the forehead. 

This has become true, finally, in my mind, for me with all of you too.

And this is why I need to embrace my ways of communicating with you--to write more.  And if you could write me back on occasion, drop a line or a comment, send a photo of the grade school in your dining room, or the delicious stew/curry you just made (nod to recent controversy about Alison Roman and chickpeas), forward your favorite poem.  Not a lot of writing, just a little.
I want to stay entangled in the broader world of the people I love until I can't, and that isn't going to happen with pasta dinners, with dinner parties, at the beach in Provincetown, at coffee at work, and so on and so forth.

And to those of you to whom I owe an email, a response to your lovely cards.  I apologize.  I was in some pain the last few months and now I'm back on methadone (let's talk about opium addiction soon), and so the pain is greatly, greatly allieviated, but now I am becoming a professional sleeper)--no excuses, but I am hoping to both receive and to give.

Remember when I hesitated to take a tylenol, and subsisted on four to six hours of sleep a night.  Not recommending it, but marveling that that woman is also me, the me who lives in my beautiful and beloved prison, by which I mean, Carlisle.  By which I mean, my house on Curve Street.  By which I mean the view out the second floor window to where the owl gazes inscrutably back at me.  By which I mean this body, in this time.

I do believe the owl mother always comes back. her wing cutting through the dark, cool night air, her children crowing with delight at her enormous, safe, harbor. I do believe that Evelyn is here with me, in different ways--a white bird in the corn field, an owl watching us from the corner of the porch, curled up inside me, waiting to ensure my safe passage.  As I will for my family, should I go first.  This isn't really a story about the power of motherhood, although it is that.  It is the story of faith.  Faith in the truth of owl feathers littering the long gray driveway, reminding us, days after, that the owls were here, reminding us to look up from the laundry into the night sky: there is someone, something, to receive our gaze, and, to return it.