Just before sunrise, Kathryn awoke with a sense of decisiveness. She stretched her whole body and her fingers and toes, rotating the wrists and ankles as she had been taught to do in yoga class. Turning her head from side to side, she took her time to gather her wits and to transition into morning wakefulness.
Stepping into her fleece lined slippers, she wrapped her soft, flannel robe about her. As she pulled her simple white curtains aside from her windows, she paused to study the sun rising just to the right of her front yard between the huge white pines that lined the drive.
The sky was waking up, too, and turning into a delicious golden pink right before her eyes. Since it was early spring, the windows were open to the soft sounds of morning birdsong. The fragrance of pine wafted in on the warm breeze.
Sam, her Austrian shepherd, preceded her down the hall, and she let him outside. In the kitchen, she poured coffee beans into a grinder and pushed its button. She got fresh water from the small water cooler in the corner and filled the coffee pot’s basket with the fresh-ground coffee.
Leaving the water to filter through, she turned her attention to the soiled dishes in the sink. Kathryn loaded the dishwasher and washed a few pots by hand in warm sudsy water, taking in the lavender sent of the dish soap.
Last night’s dinner guests had included two of her dearest friends, her daughter, son-in-law, and her two nearly grown granddaughters. After they had dined on her homemade spaghetti, they played games and talked and laughed until quite late. It had been one of the most fun evenings that Kathryn remembered in a long time.
Her dog Sam scratching at the door brought her back to the present. She let him in and fed him, noticing the cheerful sounds of the dry dog food hitting the bowl and the dog quickly crunching down his food.
Back to the freshly brewed coffee, she poured her first cup. How Kathryn loved her morning coffee time! She sat in the sitting room, relishing her coffee and rubbing the fur of her small Aussie sitting next to her. Through the French doors that led to the screened-in back porch, she observed the birds at their backyard feeders, identifying red cardinals, back and white chickadees, grey titmice, yellow finches, a red-bellied woodpecker, and a couple grosbeaks.
Kathryn picked up the book on the small table beside her well-worn off-white love seat. It was a book of meditation for grandmothers that her daughter Ellen had given her as a Christmas gift. Being a grandmother gave her such joy. She reminisced for a few moments about her Tessa and Livvy girls. They were beauties no doubt, but it was their small kindnesses and good manners that she remembered most about them. Once again she thought what a fine job Ellen and Nekos had done of raising them.
Once she had finished her first cup of coffee, Kathryn moved over and sat in front of a small altar. The altar contained a painting of Jesus, a small statue of Buddha, a smaller statue of Ganesha, a mezuzah, blue and white prayer beads that Kathryn had made for herself, chimes, and a candle. She lit the candle, rang the bells, picked up the beads, and sat in meditation and prayer for a few moments.
With her second cup of coffee, she moved to her computer. Preferring to write in the mornings when she was better rested, she finished up a piece of writing that she had been working on for her writing class. It was a poem, and she was pleased with its wording, images, and flow. Printing it out, she left it in the printer.
Then she turned to her correspondence on the computer: a few responses to her latest blog post, to emails, and to facebook messages. Shutting down her laptop computer and putting it away, Kathryn wrote several notes by hand on note paper that she had created herself, using ink and watercolor drawings. Her handwriting was still strong and distinctive.
Her stomach reminded her that it was empty. She prepared old fashioned oatmeal with sliced bananas and fresh blueberries and ate heartily, again watching the birds peck into their seeds. By now, Sam had grown restless, letting Kathryn know that it was time for his late morning walk. Quickly dressing in her shorts, she pulled on her wool socks and hiking boots. Instead of walking in the neighborhood, she decided to take Sam to the city park, where spring was making its slow show.
Since a flood had nearly destroyed the original river walk in the park, the city had restored the park by planting trees and flowers, mostly native to Tennessee. Kathryn examined the light green of spring leaves, the early yellow of the daffodils, the purple of the redbuds, and the white flowers of the dogwood trees, and she was profoundly content.
As she walked along, Kathryn reminisced about her best days of teaching high school English. Teaching was her first love. She had loved getting to the classroom early in the morning and organizing it for her lesson plans ahead. In her first classroom, she had had old wooden desks, which she loved, and dusty chalk boards to clean, and the students had had books, filled to the brim with literature. How she had loved literature and her students! Kathryn recalled fondly the old days of teaching, before the invasion of TVs and power points, computers, smart boards, and the internet.
Since it was a week day, no one else was in the park. Ignoring the city ordinance to keep her dog on his leash, she allowed Sam to run free and to swim in the river. Watching the sparkles of the sunshine on the river and the swooping kingfishers and peaceful blue heron on the other shore reminded her of her many adventure-filled days spent kayaking the rivers of Western North Carolina. Sam’s exuberant spirit energized her. Lifting her face to the sky and warm sun, she noticed the clearest, bluest sky and whitest cirrus clouds, her favorite kind of sky.
Feeling her heart sing, she walked on, breathing in the rebirth of another spring. The new green grass of spring seemed so vivid to her. Whitman had said, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;/And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,/And ceas’d the moment life appear’d./All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses;/And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
In repeating those lines to herself, Kathryn felt a sudden fatigue come over her, but she kept putting one foot in front of the other, as she had always done throughout her life. After a while, she found herself moving along with such a sweet lightness, and the spring’s colors became even more vivid, like on that fall foliage trip that she had taken to New England many years ago.
Then she noticed that Sam was no longer running ahead of her. She turned around and saw that he had stopped beside the body of an old lady. She recognized the fallen lady as her earthly self and sensed that she could go back if she chose. But already she viewed her beloved body as an empty shell.
Kathryn chose to keep walking, and on ahead, she saw her old golden retriever Spice, who had died decades ago, bounding out to greet her.
With her heart full to overflowing, Kathryn knew that she was ready to cross over. Her experience here on earth had taught her much--the least of all that we can not control life nor death--and she was now ready to wake up to a new life, to transition. Without fear, she let go and joyfully surrendered herself to the unknown and the unknowable.
“Our [death] is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us [is] our life’s Star
[And has] elsewhere its setting.
--with apologies to Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
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