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a trip to the ER, a Father's death, Barred Owl, are you grieving just a little?

It’s been a while since I’ve had capacity for this space of writing.

Thanks and welcome to several new subscribers! Thanks for older subscribers for being patient. I am toying with dissolving this newsletter but can’t quite bring myself to do so just yet. Last month I turned off all paid subscriptions because I haven’t had capacity and don’t think it’s right to take money from folks when I haven’t published anything since September.

I wrote about the recent floods in WA and destroying indigenous lakes and slaughtering keystone species like big old trees and that actions have consequences- but didn’t publish it.

I wrote about abortion, my own in 2016 that saved my life, and others-how data tells us that most people who get abortions already have children; the rage I feel at men like Senator Richard Cash of Anderson SC (my home state), who introduced legislation to charge women with murder for seeking an abortion- but didn’t publish it.

I wrote about my almost two year obsession/ADHD hyperfocus with baby wearing, and this amazing online niche community and Moms around the country who’ve bought, sold, traded, and sent me wraps on holiday and how I cried and cried and cried after I stood up to a gun loving baby wearing comment thread and a moderator of an international baby wearing group chose to remain anonymous and told me I was fear mongering and took my post down because deaths by gun are now the NUMBER ONE WAY CHILDREN ARE DYING - but didn’t publish it.

I wrote about the legacy of white supremacy and how I fell in love with hippies and WHY I think I did, and how I used to be an anti-vaxxer, Raw Milk drinking, herbal tincture slingin’ mama who didn’t understand survivorship bias, the nature fallacy or truly how science illiterate I was and (mostly) still am- but didn’t publish it.

Does anyone have any interest in reading those pieces of writing? If so please comment below or email me. I need some encouragement to keep going.

For now I wanted to share a more personal piece of writing about current events because this past week has been really tough. All spelling and grammatical errors are my own as I don’t have an editor. It’s just me typing away at my desk in my messy living room in between child rearing.

Sending care!

Last week after traveling cross country with my two youngest children I ended up in an emergency room in a wheelchair just north of Seattle. We still had over an hour drive to home. My husband kept asking me if I could just make it through. But I couldn’t. The pain was the worst pain of my life as if someone was stabbing my skull, my neck, my temples. We left the airport and the traffic on I-5 north just outside of Seattle was thick as ever. I leaned my head on the window of the rental car as waves of nausea rolled over my body. I cracked the window for fresh air but the thrum of the cars ricocheted inside me and the pain intensified. I could feel the panic rising. I saw the graffiti on the underpasses. I saw the invasive English Ivy threaded through the slopes on the east side and thought of how ivy chokes out any native tree it can. I saw the tarps and tents and bags and waste of the homeless, whose areas of making home have grown and grown and grown further past the city limits over the past eighteen years I’ve lived in western Washington. Every aberration in the pavement I felt in my body. Every slight bump felt like a stab. It was hard to breathe. I knew I needed a Tree, I a nap in warm Sunshine on a bed of grass, at the very least I needed a warm bed, I needed rest like I’ve never needed rest before, I needed loving arms around me. None of which were possible or available. My husband rubbed my neck and his touch was stabilizing but also too much. hadn’t slept a wink the night before in anticipation of rising at three a.m. We had flown on two separate flights and traversed the expanse of the Chicago airport while carrying small children, so many bags, wearing KN95 masks while an unmasked man on the flight to Seattle sneezed and coughed and sneezed and coughed across the aisle from me. Where the children bucked and whined and I could not breathe it was so hot. Where an older white man with a toupee snapped at me before we’d even taken off to quiet my toddler who kept loudly exclaiming "WOW!!” at all the airplanes. My reaction was slow. My husband’s always better with the come backs but he was one row back kitty corner and couldn’t hear this exchange. "I can’t really tell a toddler to be quiet. He doesn’t really get that.” "Well you need to discipline him then!” the man snapped. "That’s not even developmentally appropriate!” I snapped back. I wish I had said "Like how? Beat him? Muzzle him?” And I thought to myself that this is the kind of man who hates children who hates women who wants us charged for murder if we need to abort a pregnancy we did not want, while never holding men accountable for their irresponsible ejaculation or rallying for mothers to be paid for their never ending free labor. And then we still had a four hour flight in front of us.

We landed and waited and waited to get off the plane. We relieved our bladders. We drank water we could taste the chlorine in and missed the well water of my parents rural place of the well water of our rural place we thought, in that moment we were less than two hours from. We went to the food court first and ate clam chowder and french fries and a woman sang folk music and Fleetwood Mac and I gave the 4 year old a $5 dollar bill and explained about tipping for music and pointed out the open guitar case. The children danced to the music. I rubbed the back of my neck. By the time we got to baggage claim our bags and extra car seat were off to the side being guarded by a man who smiled at us and then helped us schlepp them across the way. My husband took the toddler to the rental car area. I took off my mask and sat by the long windowed wall past the baggage claim and fed sour gummy worms to my 4 year old and drank an icy blue Gatorade, stopping to press my palms firmly into the nape of my neck, or massaging my temples. I could feel the pain searing throbbing growing and nothing I did lessened it. It was close to an hour before my husband was back with the rental vehicle and its automated touch screen that blasted me with hot air and the nausea rose up. We got through Seattle and I began retching again and again into one of the animal printed wet bags we use for outings with the children. I felt my bowels let go into my underwear and hoped it wasn’t leaking through my sweatpants onto the rental car. The intensity of the pain was akin to labor contractions where there is no out, there is no escape, except for in labor there is an out, there is escape there is the respite of the rest period between contractions, for which by the time you are birthing your third child as I did in the Spring of 2024, you are over the moon in gratitude for. This pain did not rest. I could find no comfort.

We pulled off the road and parked behind a Winco grocery store. I listed off names of my girlfriends, I texted another… "They know about pain! They know about migraines. I don’t know what to do!!!!!!!” I wailed to my husband. I got out and vomited again in a dirt patch. I leaned on the car, I tried to walk, nothing helped, nothing mattered. We got my friend M on the phone. "Take her to the ER! We had a friend who just died last week after having a migraine.”

It was so cold when I got out of the car. South Carolina had been sunny and in the 60s. The cold air and the sad as fuck never ending grey sky and chilly damp air that settles so quickly under your skin that north west Washington is known for felt like yet another assault.

In the check in of the emergency room a young woman had wheeled in her mother into the bay next to me. The mother wailed and whimpered. They were brown skinned with lustrous long black hair.

"She won’t stop crying.” The daughter explained to the check in nurse who came to take the mother’s pulse, who was a white man with a strawberry blond beard and dark tattoos snaking up his arm. Who had just taken my blood pressure as well.

"She just keeps screaming. I keep asking her what’s the matter.. but she’s not talking. We were just here last week.”

My family came in and my daughter saw me and she cried and held my hand. The toddler had been in his pajamas all day. They took me back after a 20 minute wait and from one room to the next. My daughter sat on the lap of a nurse while a doctor interviewed me. "Do you feel safe at home?” The nurse asked me with my husband behind me. "Yes. Yes I do.” And I thought of the history of my bad temper and a hole in the wall from a slammed by me door. I thought of my rage and my shame at my rage. I thought of the psychologist who explained that rage outbursts are common with autism/adhd/neurodivergence. I thought of the rage corner during a community grief ritual. I thought of women truly not safe at home. I thought of good guys everywhere who claim to have never raped a woman yet every woman i know has been assaulted or knows someone who has been. They wheeled me to another room and a nurse asked what vein they use and I showed him. He tried it but it wouldn’t take so I was handed off to another nurse. She wheeled me to yet another room and got the needle in on the other arm. Out came vials of blood. In went a saline bag. I popped a pink pill of Benadryl. I was still sitting in my shat upon underwear in the wheelchair but still felt too out of it to walk. There was no comfort. I had my husband bring me a change of clothes. The toddler ran around the room. My husband took him to get food. The 4 year old panicked and tried to open the heavy glass sliding door and knocked to try to get the nurse to come back but no one listened to her; she knocked and every nurse who walked past just smiled but did not acknowledge my daughter as a full human. We felt so trapped and there was no comfort. My phone had died long before and I had no charger. I could not let her watch Angelina Ballerina on YouTube or make a digital collage on Pinterest. The bag of Saline dripped into me but they left the lock in my arm. I found my way to the bathroom and cleaned myself up with rough thin brown paper towels. I attempted to wash out my high waisted mint green underwear in the toilet bowl the way I do with the soiled cloth diapers but the automated flush sensor tripped and the toilet roared and sucked my panties down the pipe. I scrubbed and scrubbed my hands. I bundled my dirty sweatpants which thankfully were not soiled, and walked slowly back to the room. A kind doctor came and asked me a whole lot of questions, wanted to know if I’d had these headaches before, "no,” seen a gastrointestinal specialist, "No” and ordered a CT scan.

For three hours we had waited and juggled children melting down between us. By 8pm my body had taken in the saline drip, the pain relief and the benadryl. My teeth rattled in my brain, and my jaw was aching more than prior to the medicines. My mouth was so dry. I had no appetite though I’d not eaten in eight hours. They wanted me to go for a head scan but the children were doing circuits over the padded furniture, barely missing a bearded burly man waiting for something, while a woman in a fleeced hooded blanket sat facing a wall in a wheelchair as a bag of saline dripped into her and her boyfriend reassured her and they smiled and chuckled at my children.

"How long do we have to wait for the scan?”

"Well trauma and stroke have priority so I really can’t say.” The male nurse at the desk told us.

"I get it. I have littles at home too.” He smiled kindly.

Then I put the toddler in the baby carrier and he arched his back and wailed and wailed and wailed and the doctor came out and she asked again if i wanted a turkey sandwich, to which I again declined, and I said "We have to go. We still have over an hour til home. We just can’t wait any longer.” To which she said "I understand.” And handed me a prescription for anti-nausea medicine, (which I promptly lost until two days later) and encouraged me to follow up with my doctor and still see if I can get a brain scan. Yes yes. My husband drove us home and I passed in and out of a light sleep tracking the weigh points- Mount Vernon, the low area in Acme before the lake the speed changes, and then the Bellingham exits, getting closer and closer to our own.

We got home in the dark cold.

I chucked the vomit smelling wet bags into the perennial bed underneath the cherry trees and had a moment’s pleasure that the snow drops are up- their bowed white bell shaped heads gleaming in the dark. Upstairs in our apartment I breathed in comfort. Clean, calm, incredibly cold, our beautiful small home with the windows on either side looking out across our ten acres of fields. I could feel the kind loving presence of our house sitter. I somehow got the toddler into a fresh diaper and the four year old stripped down to her underwear and we all belly flopped crawled into the king side bed that only fits in the room because its up against a corner wall. The sheets were cold and the children snuggled up into the crooks of my arms… I didn’t even brush my teeth. I slept until 4am when the of course, the toddler woke us.

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The day before we flew from Columbia, South Carolina to Seattle Tacoma international airport, I was inside making one last dinner for my husband, children, and my Uncle. My husband was playing in the front yard, pushing our daughter on a thick rope swing my Uncle set up for her a couple years ago on a thick branch on a Magnolia tree I loved to climb as a child. Meanwhile the toddler was walking near by when out of the sky Barred Owl swooped down, claws stretched out going after my son; our small boy instinctively ducked to protect himself and then cried out. Later, eyes wide as he gets, "Haw! Haw! Haw!” He told me about the near Owl attack. (Hawk is what he calls all birds). We checked his neck and Barred Owl just grazed him, leaving a curve of a long white scratch, a surface mark really, along his left occiput.

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The next afternoon after my trip to the emergency room, we drove thirty minutes south to a hospice house. My daughter stroked her grandfather’s hand. My blonde sister in laws, their mother, and my toddler niece were there. The room crowded around my husbands father, who looked feeble and sick. I started crying. The toddlers ran around. I sat outside at a picnic table shivering in the cold with the low afternoon sunlight peaking behind gray trees, waiting for a telehealth call with a provider from my doctor’s office to get a prescription for migraine medication and anti-nausea medication since I didn’t know then that the ER doctor had given me a written a prescription for the anti-nausea medication instead of calling it in so my usual pharmacy had no record. Just the drive to visit my father in law had triggered my symptoms and the nausea flooded me again and my jaw was aching in pain again. Soon he drifted off to sleep and we quietly snuck out to the gathering room. There were comfortable chairs, coffee pots, clam chowder, an array of packaged cookies and crackers, all type of tea. We helped ourselves. I looked at the pamphlets with titles like "How to talk to children about Death.”

Two nights ago at around 10:30pm in this small calm building on the south part of town, with just twelve beds available to those who need them, my father in law, Roger Almskaar of Bellingham, WA, took his last breath. Only a hospice nurse was with him. We were asleep by the time my sister in law called my husband to let him know.

Less than a week in hospice. He did not linger.

His body is now at a funeral home in Stanwood, WA, not far from their Norwegian family’s burial plot. He will be cremated shortly. He asked for his burial to be on the Summer Solstice.

Photo by Sonder Quest on Unsplash

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post script

I’m struck by the woman next to me in the ER who was wailing and weeping. What is she grieving?

I’m struck by my daughter saying "I don’t want to cry!” When we told her about her Grandfather being close to his Death time. But when faced with saying good bye to him she tenderly held and stroked his hand.

I’m struck by Barred Owl who visited us at my parents/my teenage home/now my Uncle’s home, many times over the past two months. How Barred Owls are known to be territorial. How I do blame Barred Owl for attempting to strike my son. Was it an omen for my father in law’s impending death? I’m struck by how mythologies around the world connote Owls with the supernatural, as messengers of Death, foreboding fate, and wisdom keepers.

I’m struck still now with a resurgence of pain and nausea six days after my emergency room visit. The frayed seams of my nervous system. I don’t know what’s going on or how or when it will unwind.

I’m struck by despite all my learning and practice in the ways of grief I feel illiterate, bereft and unmoored. "Shouldn’t we go sit with his body? Sing something in Norwegian?” I asked my husband. Will there be consequences that we couldn’t/didn’t?

And I keep thinking of my friend M’s text when I told her about my father in law’s death- simple, perfect, followed by with the broken heart emoji

"Aw. I’m glad he didn’t linger.”

what a mercy that is.