Walking the beloved home

After what I thought would be a couple-of-week's pause in publishing the Wild Now at the end of June, life shifted in my household.

I'm so grateful to readers and former clients who've reach out asking if I'm okay, if my husband's okay, if it's good news (perhaps playing by the ocean or some lovely trip?) or not-so-good news.

Thank you, dear ones, for noticing my absence in your inbox, and caring.

In short, time came to move my husband back into hospice at home, clearly for the last time. A different kind of busy.

I've been capturing this end-of-life journey together in bits and pieces in my journal, the way I've always tried to snatch and store away what I notice in the world—whether the outer one or the inner one—like a chipmunk stashing sunflower seeds.

But. I felt it might not be the best for sharing with you.

Then a former client said, "But you always told me that sharing grief makes carrying it lighter."

Wow, you can't argue with your own words. Then she added, "You know, a lot of us feel seen in your writing."

So, with a gentle nod to her and others, and a 'heads up' that I'm talking directly about death and dying (in case you want to skip this issue), below you'll find some meaningful bits from my journal that may resonate with you. (I refer to my husband as T in my journal, or OwlMan, given his calling as a raptor biologist.)

For the foreseeable future, I won't be publishing weekly, though I'll share what might be helpful as I can. Namaste.

From my journal | Summer 2025

T keeps saying, "It’s so dark." Of course, at night now, moonless and a thick layer of marine clouds and being August rather than June, the nights are a cavernous black.

“It’s so dark, so dark,” he says.

I feel it, too, knowing it’s more than the night he’s talking about.

It seems now almost every visit I arrange for T to say goodbye to his people, his village of others he loves that’s grown so small at this point, someone inevitably gushes, “You look good. No, really, you look good.”

I can feel, even across the room, my husband’s body, his mind, recoil.

The last time, alone with each other hours later, he offered in his whispy voice, “Why do they tell me that when I’m dying? All my life, people never came up to me and told me how good I look. Who are they kidding?”

There are always multiple versions of me, my mind a kind of trunk full of costumes. I try on different replies.

Humorist: “Well, my dear, you’re one hot and handsome dying dude. Muy guapo, as they say in Costa Rica. They’re hoping they’ll look this dashing when their time comes.” He’s smiling.

Empathic Poet: “The closer we step toward death, the veil of life that holds us gets thinner. The light of who we are, our one-and-only selves, comes through more brightly. You’re luminous.” He’s blank, considering what I’ve said.

Coach and Realist: “Let’s be honest. Most people don’t say what you need to hear, they say what makes them feel comfortable. No one really knows what to say to someone approaching death. When we look at each other, no matter how different we are, we’re each a mirror. Who really wants to see, to be reminded of how temporary they are?” He’s nodding.

The next morning, wheeling OwlMan in for a wash and fresh fleecy trousers, he sits looking at himself in the bathroom mirror.

“You talkin' to me?” He says to his face. “You talkin' to me? Who else are you talkin' to? I'm the only one here.’’ He’s always loved impersonating young Robert DeNiro in the classic mirror scene from Taxi Driver.

Then his expression grows pained. “You look old and on your way out.”

My reflection frowns at his. I’m not dishonoring what he feels. It’s real. Heck, nearly twenty-five years younger, and I’ve looked at myself the same way at times.

Picking up his black, pocket comb, I glide it through hair that’s thin yet mostly still that baby-brown he’s had his whole life.

“Okay,” he says, to me, then looking back at himself. “You look good. No, really, you look good.”

With each goodbye, one tether to this world drops away.
The mind checking off a relationship being left behind. The body saying it’s okay to let a little of you go.

With each goodbye, the heart grows weaker, beating faster. The body, tiring, trying so hard to stay in this world, slips easily into sleep. The mind becomes a liminal space where waking and dreaming equally abide.

With each goodbye, as if two beads on a worn thread, I watch him slide forward, the distance between us lengthening. I follow along as long as I can. Both of us knowing he will spill loose before me. Neither of us knowing into what.

Once past toddler-hood, we take our ability to step through our days, upright and confident, for granted.

So eager we are to run, to walk, to skip, to dance, to spin circles in grass, to balance on a train track, to stand on a boulder top, to grip sand with toes resolute as a private army, defiant against the current, the crashing waves, trying to pull us out to sea.

I look at my legs speckled from years of sun and my homely feet that have carried me who-knows-how-many miles through this life. For now, I miss the daily jaunts in the woods, the weekly long walks along the beach, the local exploring at fern canyon or along one of the redwood trails, rock hopping and log leaping.

The one I love can’t be left alone for long, and no one wants to feel like a child with a sitter.

Who knew the goal of my life would one day be to prevent T from falling, to rescue a body, heavy with vulnerable bones and retaining water, from toppling to the floor.

In the last many weeks, I’ve failed.

His body has become some other being, a third entity between us, as if a wounded animal suddenly arrived in our lives, mysterious and unpredictable.

Stepping carefully with the walker he passionately hates, suddenly his arms and legs begin quivering, then shaking. I’m coming out of the kitchen, hearing him up, literally feeling his distress in my gut, and I know what’s about to happen.

He’s too far away from his recliner or the couch, so I grab a dining room chair, thudding it down right behind his legs, wrapping my arms around his waist, trying to guide him to a safe landing.

As his legs give out and he’s almost sitting, his body veers left. I’m fighting that momentum, pulling fiercely back toward the chair

I’m small but strong. I still haul 40-pound bags of 9-way grain and 50-pound satchels of firewood.

Pulling on him, I feel not just my muscles in full flex, but the fibers themselves taut. Piano wires, I think. I sense the muscles in my chest. I have muscles in my bony chest?

All this is happening. Fast. My mind is chanting, You can do this.

My mind and his body don’t agree. His body takes us both down, but at least I slowed the fall. The landing could have been harder.

My heart is pounding with adrenaline. Sweat is soaking his shirt, glistening on his forehead.

I shuffle up for a damage assessment. His left arm is buckled unnaturally behind and under him, his legs kicking a bit, still trying to find ground. It looks bad, but I’m hopeful anyway.

“You are a tough owl bird,” I announce. “Let’s check that wing.”

I sit back down on the floor, help him pull his arm up and roll over. He's okay, relatively speaking.

He can’t sit up fully, so I Iean his back into me and hold him.

“Let’s rest, let our bodies calm, and then we’ll get you resettled.”

Our legs stretching in front of us over the hardwood floor, our feet slippered, I wonder, Are we really grown up or just well-aged children slowly wearing out?

I take in his heat, the sound and scent of his open-mouthed breathing, stroking his hair back from it’s wildness. Fear has a taste, part nickel-part umami, and we swallow it. Fatigue, its own color, smoky-amber, tinting the air.

Pulses slowing, skin cooling, he asks, “How did I get here?”

“Well, my dear, I’m pretty sure your mum and dad had an amorous moment a long time ago.”

We laugh, which hurts him a little, but is worth it. I know, an absurd answer, but no more absurd than, “Who knows?”

Last night, T talking in his sleep.

“Show me the flower,” he says, clear as day. “I want to see the flower.”

Awakened, I pause to consider the request.

Yes, of course he wants ‘to see the flower,’ the perfect request when you don’t know what comes next—the flower, such an archetypal symbol of birth, blossoming, death, and rebirth.

Me: “Well, we had calla lilies for our wedding.”

T: “Did we eat them?”

Me: “No, but we had roses on our cake. We ate the cake, not the roses.”

T: “So just for decoration. Okay.”

I’d just fallen asleep again when I heard: “What time do we need to go?”

Ah, the classic end-of-life question, my mind says, interesting that he has me going with him.

Me: “Where are we going?”

T: “I’ve got to give a talk for Fowler.” Dr. Fowler was his former boss, a veterinary professor—together they started the first zoological medicine program within a US veterinary school.

Me: “I don’t think it’s tonight.”

T: “Oh.”

Me: “You could talk about owls.”

T: “Good idea.”

For the last few years, T has been sleeping in a breathing cycle that alternates between long pauses and deep, huffing inhales that slowly calm. When the end gets closer, the pauses will get longer.

I listen to him, the way you listen to the ocean. The rhythm. All that reaching and retreating.

Alone-ish and still awake, I amuse myself. Why not?

“We didn’t eat the owls, either,” I whisper.

T: “You’d don’t know how to cook that well.”

I sit up, surprised, laughing, and look down at his face. No, not awake, still lost in sleep.

Did I really hear that? Will it be like this ‘after’—his voice somehow answering?

Looking at our torti cat, a plush girl, shaped like a harbor seal pup when she stretches out on the living room rug, OwlMan asks, “Is she getting darker?”

I examine her.

She’s always been more black than tortoise-shell. She has lovely brown patches above each eye, a copper drizzle down her nose, also arcing over her fluffy chest like a necklace. Mostly, though, her fur is a shimmery ebony, lightly flecked with caramel.

Crouching down to pet her, I whisper, “Are you getting darker?” She stretches, letting out a “Mrrrifff!”

When I rise up and look back at my husband to answer, “I don’t think so,” he’s asleep.

I lie down next to Torti girl, listening to her breath blend with his breath. This house is a box of breath I’m living in.

I close my eyes, and we all meld into darkness, and yet, each is still a presence.

Torti girl starts purring—pulsing and resonant.

Maybe death is this. Bodiless. Listening to the living breathe. The darkness a soft purring all around you. Pretty nice actually.

As you look deeper, there is no eyelid pulled over the eye, no box containing you.

That pale ruby veil slips away to a space that’s expansive and endless, washes of chartreuse, indigo blue, a velvety purple merging into brilliant white. Dark and light, the same.

Call it eternal spirit. Call it boundless love. Call it nothing, if you want. Any word is just another limiting box.