A year ago tonight

I drove down to the hospital after vestry to see if Naomi was still alive. I met and held her new cat who, at the time, had no name. The hospice suite probably had ten of us hanging out with people in and out of Naomi's room. We had no idea how long she would live other than not for long. And so we all just waited. Our hearts all were breaking as the inevitable stared us in the face and yet we went through the pretenses of smiling for the camera, laughing as we could and just holding up one another.

Last week, I went up to the family's for what would have been Naomi's 26th birthday. We planted a mock orange tree, had her favourite birthday cakes and wrote messages to her.

I managed to find her cat, Gifford, snorkled down inside blankets because he's always chilly. He has turned out to be a big cat but still incredibly spoiled.


He is looking at me as though to say: Huh? What are you doing with that flashy thing in my face? And how come you pulled all the covers down and then pulled them back up again?

He apparently got spooked or something and jumped onto Naomi's mother's head, hitting her so hard that she thinks he either broke or bruised her nose and then planted all his claws into her head. Needless to say, he did not make himself terribly popular with that move.


Requiat, Naomi. Yes, this is the turtle shell pouch that holds her ashes. Gifford has pulled the blue jay feathers off it several times and the family has put them back. And there's now a small plastic blue jay at the left end of the shell pouch. The purple Guatemalan tela is from my last Sunday at Saint Mary's (or could be one that I gave her as a bookmark).

A friend of the family, J, wrote this poem which I have been reading since the 31st:

Naomi

Nearer to heaven she pulls
All witnesses of her
Orquidean beauty
Moonlight pales
In the wake of her eternal force.

This Friday, the one year mark, we will gather at the house, at the time she died and perform the Native first year ceremony and fling holy water liberally and hopefully place a marker with her name in the backyard.

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I think this reality underlies my fatigue in dealing with other people's stuff as I have been and shall be the rest of this week. Once Friday is past, I can start breathing again.