The Raven Caws as the Owl Lands, A Modern Allegory

• Death and War (content)

When I was six, my Grandma Dora used to call me her blue eyed pixie.   Little did she know that I was far from a mischievous sprite.  Blonde hair and pigtails on the outside; inside, I was extremely introspective and philosophical, midnight feathered.  My trauma induced fears often surfaced as symbols in my nightmares; I would have the same recurring night terror every time I closed my battle-worn eyes and fell into a deep sleep.  It escalated to the point where I slept on my sister's floor so my mom purchased a brown fold up futon because I could not face the darkness alone.  Tomblike darkness was my only fear partially because that is when the nightmares surfaced.  To this day, I can still envision my recurring subconscious visions with that twisted rope jungle gym and its red bomb counting down as naive children continued laughing and playing despite their imminent deaths. . . tik, tik, giggle, tik, tok, boom.  Much like I could not rescue my father with a mythical four leaf clover and an unachievable wish prompted by a well meaning nurse, I could never save the laughing innocents from the explosion.  When I woke, I would then sit for hours imagining I would be able to talk Gorbachev out of war, as I listened to Sting´s “If the Russians Love Their Children too.”  Imagine me, a little girl in ribboned pigtails rehearsing then conversing with a Communist President about peace.  In my waking visions I did just that, successfully.   With closed lids the outcome ended in destruction. Tik, tik, giggle, tik, tok, boom!

Ironically, many years later, on my birthday, February 24th, Putin, a much more ruthless Russian dictator and oligarch, invaded Ukraine.  I have always viewed this as a coincidence that I had prophesied somewhat inaccurately numerous years before during my childhood, as it was labeled, for I was never psychologically young, as death had instantaneously and continuously aged my mind.  Father, pet, Uncle, pet, Grandmother, pet, Mother, pet, Step-father, pet. . .an endless tomblike procession.  But who can distinguish between the symbolic genetic bomb within my Father's chest and that dropped upon an entire culture without the enlargement of heart?

HOCM–the war within.  Gran, who became a second mother to me, moved into our house after my Father died of sudden cardiac arrest on the way home from vacation. He did not gently pass away as the euphemism promises.  There were no last minute hugs of comfort, shared memories or urgent goodbyes.  He simply dropped dead on cold inanimate trodden tile in an unknown town.  We had stopped in a small mom and pop owned pizza shop in rural Virginia.  Quickly maneuvering our rusty olive colored  Ford Fairlane, my dad parked rather haphazardly because my older sister and I had to use the bathroom and were already doing the infamous seated potty dance.  Moments later, as we were washing our hands in the cracked porcelain sinks, we were approached by a middle aged woman with a grave expression on her face, who hustled us out of the bathroom into the cacophonous restaurant saying with urgency, “Your father is sick.  Hurry.  No time for. . .”  Dad was there, lying like an inanimate mound, on the filthy hostile floor of the aging nameless restaurant, the scent of melted mozzarella cheese mixing with basil marinara sauce assaulting my senses.  I am not only allergic to basil now, I loathe its herbaceous aroma.  A clinical psychologist like my Father probably would have identified this as Proust phenomenon or odor induced memory.   

That was the last time my now grey, once blue, eyes would see Him.  As we rode cramped in the ambulance with sirens shrieking and my mom and sister sobbing, I knew He was already gone.  Death had started its invasive military-like march into my life at the age of five; I knew this and, clenching my teeth, silently thought how I had to be strong and stoic for my mother and older sister, who despite their tears still held hope.  I have always been the prophetic one.  I lived in my mind and learned to be a survivor before I learned to tie my sneakers.  Often, in later years, my mother would tell me that my autonomy sometimes frustrated her despite her being proud of me because she did not understand my independence.  Her relationship with my sister made them much closer, as they enabled each other to find comfort in the mutual misery of loss.  Instead of hugging her in duality of desperation, I clumsily broke the potted philodendron plant He had given her, destroying one of the only living vines to their past that she had left other than her children.  

I have never had a green thumb; rather, I harbor a connection with birds.  That day of wailing  sirens, we would never find the lucky four leaf clover hiding within the cloudy vision of green that the well meaning but clearly misguided bubble gum voiced nurse asked us to find and wish upon for our father´s survival.  As if willing it could turn to reality. . . .  My sister and I took this as our personal failure to save my father.  With my sister, it translated to years of self-hatred buried in depression.  With me, it morphed into a soaring need to save others, layered with a deeper intuitive streak, molting beneath.

I always knew I had inherited His hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy; I had also inherited his empathic nature and his ability to mold words into meaning.  Yet, my memory symbolically blocked like my blood flow from the left ventricle to the aorta, from the temporal lobe to the conscience, lost– the man who had nurtured me prior to that day.  While my visions are buried despite my digging, I still feel my Dad rooted in my olfactory and tactile senses.  I smell Him in the overgrown Limberlost pine forest.  And, then, there is that alternate connection with the afterlife that I sense when a Raven caws as the Owl lands.

My Dad's body collapsed in a small rural town in Virginia.  His spirit flies through the misty Blue Ridge Mountains, wings carried by the caressing wind that provides the closing embrace we missed.  His damaged heart struggles within me, reminding me with each breath, with each arrhythmic beat, that I am Him and He is Me.  One culture, crushed by invasion of the other as the bombs go off tik, tok, boom, and we question the survival of innocence with the sting of mortality in the heart of the exploding Mountain.  My father was a psychologist, an empath, a writer.  I am Him and He is Me.