This post is the second half of a story from 2023 that I began to write last week. If you haven’t read the first half, I recommend you do so first so this post will make sense.
Ten days after the incident with the owl on the highway near my dad’s house, a Sunday morning dawned. For once, I didn’t have to wake up at 5 a.m. for work or to cover a task force shift. So I slept in for a couple of extra hours before getting up to shower.
Typically, I would drive to the hospice house six days a week: a 90-minute round trip. On this Sunday, I didn’t plan to drive down until the evening.
Instead, I had planned a big grocery run. I would spend most of the day at my dad’s house cooking, doing laundry, and tidying up to get ready for the coming week. Fortunately, my bills and personal matters were already in order, so I could focus entirely on helping out. My stepbrother B had also concluded his visit and returned to California, so I would be on my own while my dad held down the fort with L.
As I was about to dry my hair, the house phone rang. It was my dad. He said L was not doing well. As he relayed her respiration and heart rate numbers, I understood she was likely entering her final hours. I left the house within 20 minutes.
I can’t for the life of me remember what the weather was like that day. I think it was cool and partially sunny. Was it raining a little bit as I drove down? I don’t think it was. I don’t remember what I was wearing or many other details about that day. I do remember driving with laser focus on the road to get there as safely and quickly as possible.
And I do remember us talking to her, and to each other. She didn’t respond. She had been in a non-responsive state for many days at that point. I also remember my dad going for a walk outside after a friend had come to visit L and then departed. I sat alone at her bedside for a while, listening to her breathing, with its intensifying rattle.
I do remember when she died, at 2:37 pm, with my dad and I holding her hands so she would know we were there. We sat for several minutes before I opened the door and notified staff.
I remember a list we had of people to call; I took one half and my dad took the other, as pre-arranged. I stood in the front yard of the hospice house making notifications one by one and accepting condolences. My dad did the same sitting inside the cab of his truck.
I remember waiting hours for someone to come and pronounce the death. There were a couple of procedural misunderstandings between us and the hospice team that delayed that and movement of L to the mortuary, but my dad and I were too tired and mentally disorganized to really deal with it. It was like we needed someone competent to come and affirm for us that yes, this crazy surreal day was truly happening, and that no matter how long we sat in the room looking at L, she was not going to wake up. We hadn’t seen wrong. She had truly gone.
While we were waiting, the staff caringly changed L’s clothes into an outfit I had picked out at my dad’s request two weeks before. She wore black jeans, warm socks, ankle boots, a purple sweater, and a long beaded necklace. She also had a hat and coat. It was November, after all.
Because everything took so long, my dad and I didn’t get back to his house until around 9:00 p.m. Since they live in a rural area, none of the few local restaurants were still open. We were completely wrung out, having missed both lunch and dinner. We should have eaten or picked up something near the hospice house, which is in a bigger town—but it simply hadn’t occurred to us.
We decided to go to their town’s small local grocery store about eight minutes away for frozen pizza and ice cream. Oddly enough, it seemed like a winning idea at the time. We could have eaten food already at the house, but I hadn’t really prepared anything and wasn’t of a mind to.
We got back in the car and I drove us to the store in a daze. We added items to our cart with a sense of purpose, as if we just needed to expend one last burst of energy and then we could crash. I imagined what L would say about the amount of low-nutrition food we were buying.
“How are you?” the young cashier asked at checkout.
“All right,” I said. “And you?”
My dad stood quietly. I realized we were in shock. The cashier carried on ringing up our items as I bagged them. I felt like I’d had a head injury but no one could see it. It was bloodless. Invisible.
In most western contexts, there isn’t any culturally appropriate way to say, “Oh, my (person) died today, so it’s really not my day.” And if you do, you’re likely to receive an uncomfortable response filled with grief-illiterate platitudes or unwanted euphemisms. So we said nothing, in silent solidarity, trying to endure long enough to do the needful, as we’d already been doing for months.
After loading the car with groceries, we headed home for a second time. We didn’t encounter a single other vehicle as we left the main street in town and headed back onto the highway.
About halfway home, I approached the stretch of road where I’d hit the barred owl 10 days prior. I proceeded carefully, mindful of the darkness. Navigating around the corner before the straightaway where the incident had occurred, I slowed down instinctively.
Then my headlights swept across the curve and picked up a sight I nearly failed to comprehend.
A small barred owl was sitting right on the pavement in the opposite lane of traffic, its back to us. Its familiar brownish-whitish feathers jumped out at me like a ghost. I thought for a moment I might be hallucinating, but my dad saw the owl too.
“What is that? Do you see that?” I asked, pulling over. My first thought, crazily, was that it was the dead owl.
“It’s a juvenile,” my dad remarked in surprise.
I heard myself saying, “I cannot believe it.” I repeated that more than once.
I was looking at the owl, but I thought it might be a dream. For the five years I’d been going to see my dad since they’d moved to Washington state, I had never seen an owl on the road, dead or alive.
I put my hazard lights on. We quickly exited the car and approached the owl. The night air was cold and silent all around us.
The owl kept its back turned to us. It was young, maybe half the size of the one that I’d hit. It sat stiffly, one eye open and the other partially closed, looking stunned. Welcome to the club, I thought.
What was odd was that it appeared impervious to its surroundings, and entirely unconcerned about us and our movements. It did not track where we were as we circled it several times.
My dad pointed out it could be the baby of the owl that died, and it could be hungry or hurt. My heart sank and I knew he was right. We needed to find a way to get it off the highway.
My dad announced we should take the owl home, and promptly just picked it up with his bare hands — a live raptor. Its little legs hung down almost comically. “Dad,” I said.
My two pairs of gloves still sat on the back floorboard of my car, unwashed from handling the dead owl. After the first incident, we had researched local wildlife rescue options; we understood there were not any rescuers in his county or the next county over. I opened my mouth to say something else, but the owl appeared so docile.
Just then, headlights appeared in the distance, so I thought maybe we should just go. My dad was already getting in the car with the owl, with a “this-is-fine, this-is-all-fine” air about him.
I drove slowly, with my hazard lights on, as my dad cradled the baby owl on his lap. Its feathers were fluffy. It sat ramrod straight, its huge dark eyes fixed on him with a unflinchingness that was mildly creepy. I could barely grasp that the owl was real. It looked seriously unreal.
“Don’t make eye contact with him,” I advised, fearing the owl could fly in our faces and cause an accident. I love owls, more than I can say. I might even say I’m a little obsessed with them. But I also understood this was a wild animal who probably loved us less than we loved him. And who didn’t belong in the front seat of a Volkswagen.
Ultimately, as we approached my dad’s driveway, the owl panicked and spread its wings to their full span—wider than I would have guessed.
My dad, fumbling, opened the passenger door while I was still rolling. Luckily he had his seatbelt on, and I managed to guide the car into the driveway. In the commotion, the owl sank its talons into my dad’s hand and then bit him with his sharp beak as he tried to shake it off and set it on the ground.
As my dad ran into the garage to get a blanket to wrap the owl in, it stood in the driveway looking indignant and now very alert.
We secured the owl briefly in the garage while we went to my dad’s bathroom to clean his hand with hydrogen peroxide and mupirocin. When we came back, the owl’s vibes were a little unpredictable.
It stood in the middle of the garage staring at us. We offered it the cat’s soft bed and a clean towel; it responded by pooping on the towel and then pacing back and forth.
We were heartened when it began flying around the garage—it seemed to have recovered from whatever had left it in the road.
“We have a working bird,” my dad said.
But it was also a little scary to see it crashing into walls and the garage door, so we tried to coax it back outside where it belonged.
Opening the garage door didn’t initially have the desired effect. So my dad threw a dog wash towel over the owl, bravely gathered it up like a football, and hustled it out to a big tree in the front yard. We put some salmon on the grass at the base of the tree.
After a long 10 minutes of the owl staring at us as we stared back from the driveway, it finally flew away — back in the direction of the highway. We didn’t see it eat the salmon, but in the morning, the fish was gone.
How strange for my dad that the day he lost his partner of over 30 years, he had to be on the phone in the middle of the night with the Kaiser advice nurse to see if he needed a rabies shot after being bitten and scratched by a wild owl, all while I baked a grocery store frozen pizza.
Luckily, no medical attention for my dad was needed.
Several times that night, my dad and I discussed our belief that—just like kitten Caroline’s appearance after Carole’s death in the hospice—L had undoubtedly sent us this owl as a sign of comfort. For both of us, the baby owl wasn’t just a clue that L was all right, but also that she wanted us to know the owl I’d hit had offered forgiveness.
A series of unlikely circumstances, one after another over several hours, led us to be at that section of highway at that precise time. Everything contributed to the timing of our intervention on the owl’s behalf: how long we spent at the hospice home, how long it took us to get home, our decision to go back out to the grocery store, and even how long we waited in line to pay for our groceries.
L had been aware of my accident with the first owl, as well as my distress about it.
She had also explicitly promised both my dad and me that she would try to send us a message if she could. We just didn’t expect her to come through so soon and so powerfully. How wonderful that the gift of this baby owl in the road could have been our first sign from animal-loving L after she passed away.
Saving the second owl on the road—possibly the offspring of the dead one—also offered me a chance for repair and redemption. I don’t know where he went when he left our yard, or where he is now. But I know he didn’t get hit by a car that night because we were able to act despite our grief and shock (and despite the dubious wisdom of how we carried out our hasty rescue).
I like to think the owl knew we were trying to help him, and that L knew we got her message.
The owl was the beauty on an ugly day. And — I believe — a message from beyond. Godspeed, little owl.
Collecting Postcards 