A Message From Beyond, Part I

I want to take a break from the intensity of Burmese study-related posts and tell a story I’ve been meaning to share since 2023. It’s an emotional story, sad, and long, but I think important, so I will tell it in two parts. This is the first part.

It’s fair to say I am the type of person who relies more on science than I do faith to explain what I experience in life. Most people who know me would probably describe me with words like serious, rational, skeptical, judicious, and methodical.

However, I have also long believed there are things we don’t understand about the human experience. In my opinion, sometimes things happen that we cannot simply explain (or explain away) with facts. Some things we simply feel, and intuitively believe to be true, even if we cannot prove it. This is a story about something like that. It’s a story about a message from beyond.

In the fall of 2023, I drove from Virginia to coastal Washington state where my dad and stepmom lived. I planned to stay for several weeks and work remotely while helping my dad take care of my stepmom L as she entered late stage pancreatic cancer.

Looking back, a lot of that time is a blur. I wrote nothing about it on the blog until after it was over.

I was not only working full-time from my dad’s dining room covering my portfolio of Hague Convention international parental child abduction cases, I was also doing frequent double-duty graveyard shifts on a task force set up by the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs to back up our missions overseas in providing consular assistance to U.S. citizens in Gaza, Israel, and Lebanon.

I spent day and night on the phone or on my laptop, trying to facilitate the return of children to their parent in the country of habitual residence after the other parent had unlawfully removed them to the United States. Trying to verify citizenship of people requesting assistance from our embassies and consulates to evacuate from the Middle East. Trying to action requests from people in various types of crises. Fielding inquiries from parents, foreign counterparts, judges, and attorneys.

And when I was not at work, I was trying to stay on top of the household cooking, cleaning, laundry, and pet care, and assist my dad with my stepmom’s personal needs, scheduled or unscheduled.

At any given time, her needs included cleaning her gastric tube, changing her colostomy bag, changing her clothes, stripping the bed (sometimes more than once a day), assisting her in and out of bed or her chair, making sure she didn’t try to walk by herself and fall down, bringing her water, blending some high-protein concoction in my Ninja and hoping she’d drink it, bathing her, facilitating calls between her and loved ones who couldn’t visit, distributing and charting her many medications, or meeting the hospice nurses that came twice a week.

Either Dad or I trying to leave the house to run errands or exercise was damn near impossible, so we mostly just stayed in the house.

By the last week in October, we had come to our own family crisis point where we were exhausted and needed more support. So we found a hospice house where L could have around-the-clock medical care, and my dad and I could go back (mostly) to being family members and spending time with her. The environment was great and the staff were terrific — a real godsend.

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The hospice house was about 45 minutes away from my dad’s house. My dad essentially moved into L’s private room with her, and I stayed back at the house to work and look after their dog and cat.

One cool thing about the hospice house was the staff’s love for animals — a value my dad and L shared. The home featured dozens of decorative owls throughout the house, patio, and front yard. And not only did hospice allow my dad to bring his dog and camper trailer to their facility, the house had several pets of its own, too.

The smallest resident was a black kitten with green eyes. She looked startlingly like a smaller, less fluffy version of my own cat back in Virginia.

A nurse told us the kitten, Caroline, was named for an elderly patient, Carole, who had previously lived in L’s room. In fact, the day L moved into the room, I noticed Carole’s name still on the decorated whiteboard outside the door. “Carole died of brain cancer,” the nurse said. “Many years earlier, their only son had also died of brain cancer. But he had been a young man in his 30s.”

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“How hideous,” I remarked, as L grimaced wordlessly.

“She talked about him,” the nurse went on, perched at the end of L’s bed. “She said he used to send her signs he was present — butterflies. She said whenever she was having an especially bad time with her grief, a butterfly would appear, sometimes many butterflies! They would be all over her yard. She knew they were from her son.”

A teary conversation ensued between the nurses, my dad, and I about signs we have all received from deceased loved ones. “I totally believe in this,” I said.

“Carole believed it too,” one nurse said. She continued, “And she loved animals. The day Carole actually passed away, this kitten showed up at our back door within the hour. We all knew she was a sign from Carole that she was OK with her son now, and her husband thought so too. So we named her sweet Caroline.”

We were almost speechless. L didn’t speak, but she lay listening, stroking Caroline’s fur as the kitten lay next to her on the bedspread.

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Since I was working on an east coast schedule, I was generally done with work by 2:30 in the afternoon, and would take a quick shower and then jet down to the home for a visit. I would talk to L if she was awake. But most of the time she was sleeping or non-responsive, so my dad and I would eat food I had pre-cooked or we’d go to one of the neighborhood restaurants to get him out of the room for a bit.

One night, after L had been in the home for around a week, my dad and I went to dinner with her younger son B, who had just come into town from California to see her. We ate dinner in a local diner, and then parted ways: my dad back to L, B back to my dad’s in his own car, and me behind B but with an hourlong detour to grocery shop first.

By the time I turned onto the last highway in a long series of winding mountain roads that lead to my dad’s house, it was around 10:30 pm and very dark. There are no lights along the highways once you leave town. It had been raining off and on during the evening, so I kept my window rolled up.

Needing to start work at 5:00 am hadn’t escaped me. But I drove silently, attentively, knowing I was finally almost home. A coyote or fox had already run out in front of me on the highway, and I’d also seen deer grazing near the roadside. The possibility of nocturnal animal collisions were nothing new to me, having grown up in a mountain town, but a perpetual worry.

Suddenly, there was a white flash off to my left. In my peripheral vision, I thought I saw a wing. I heard a sickening thump. What the hell was that? I rolled a few dozen yards, put my hazards on, and pulled over. I got out, and with my flashlight, I noticed a small feather stuck to the paint between the driver’s side window and the windshield.

Thinking I had hit a bird, I got back in the car and made a U-turn. I was going back to satisfy myself the bird had flown away and all was fine.

I was beyond shocked to come upon a large barred owl in the middle of the double yellow line, its wing broken. As the Volkswagen sat off to the side of the empty, pitch-black highway, I stood in the center of the road with my mouth open, pointing my flashlight at the owl in disbelief.

It laboriously turned its head to monitor my movements, fixing its huge eyes on me and clacking its beak in warning. I could feel my heart break looking at it. Waves of nausea washed over me and I fought back the sensation of needing to throw up. Why of all things, an owl?

I started to cry, kneeling down beside it and gently petting its feathers. It allowed me to do this, attempting to lift its wing in a weak protest. I didn’t know what to do. What could I possibly do to rectify this? It was hurt. It was suffering. I felt desperate. I wanted to hit rewind, run away, undo. I’m so sorry, I told it.

Maybe I’d left some of L’s morphine back in her bathroom? (I knew I hadn’t.) Maybe B would know what to do? The owl continued clacking its beak at me. Not wanting to leave it, but knowing wild owls don’t like human contact and not wanting to cause it further distress, I jumped back in my car and sped the three minutes to my dad’s to get my stepbrother. The person who always knows what to do and always stays calm — me — was losing their shit and needed help.

I scared B by crying incoherently as I climbed out of the car and tried to explain what happened. In my state, I didn’t even register that when I pulled up, he was already standing in the driveway because he had been locked out of the house. It also didn’t occur to me he might think his mom had just died. My only awareness was the horror I had just seen, caused.

Relieved my state wasn’t over bad news about his mom, he suggested we go back and try to help the owl. We took an old dog wash towel from the garage and two pairs of work gloves from my trunk and went back. I drove carefully, scanning the darkness for the correct part of the road.

As my headlights picked up the owl, I was again overcome with dread at what my car had caused to this majestic animal. I kept thinking there was something I could have done to avoid this, but honestly, I am a very good driver. This poor owl ran into my window while trying to hunt by the light of my headlights. My dad told me it happens with raptors out on the county roads more than you would think, and pointed out that had I been driving with my window rolled down, I could have been hit in the face with its beak or talons. (New nightmare level unlocked as I think of the thousands of rural roads I’ve night-driven in my life with the windows down.)

It was neither my fault, nor the owl’s. I never saw it. I never had a chance to react. It just happened.

As B and I approached the owl on foot, we saw it had already died. It thinks I just abandoned it here in the dark, I said, starting to feel hysterical. I apologized profusely to its spirit and begged for forgiveness.

After a prolonged period of me laying in the road crying and apologizing and petting its feathers (luckily this is the middle of nowhere and no other drivers came along) while B tried to coax me to get up, we were able to safely gather it and bring it back to my dad’s.

B and I buried it together on the riverbank, just outside my dad’s backyard patio, where you can often see hawks and bald eagles hunting from the trees. The summer before when V and I had been visiting, my dad had been excited to show us a family of owls hooting in one of his backyard trees, illuminating them at night with his flashlight.

I was really grateful for B’s help because as it turned out, I was useless with a shovel and managing my feelings about this. I sobbed openly the whole time we were putting this poor beautiful owl in the ground, and when I tried to cover it with dirt I cried uncontrollably to the point I thought I was going to be physically sick. We sat outside on the grass, impervious to the light rain for a long time, me feeling terrible and B trying to provide comfort.

We talked about mental health and I realized acutely that mine and that of everyone around me was in the toilet. Over the previous 18 months, between L’s progressing cancer, my ex-partner’s suicide, various ruptured relationships between me and other people, the weeks and months of prolonged intense work stress — the owl was like a dam bursting and it all just came out. The owl I struck by accident and couldn’t save became a symbol of everything I’d had to watch fall apart, helpless to stop or mend.

I barely slept that night and was distraught for days. I couldn’t stop seeing its face looking up at me from the pavement. I called V at an odd hour and cried so much he initially couldn’t understand what had happened. My sister-in-law, B’s wife, another bird and animal lover, contacted me the following day and said she would have reacted the exact same way. I later received a card from her that had an owl, and I cried my eyes out all over again.

On my next visit to the home the following day, my dad and I discussed the incident. I thought L was sleeping, but she opened her eyes and looked at me with sympathy while I was talking, so I know she heard me and would have understood how much I regretted this ever happening.

The owl I hit looked exactly like this picture below. A gorgeous, special creature, who now lives in eternal hunting places.

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To be continued… and the second part will be happier, I promise.