Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying

chapter one

Day One

Odometer Reading: 182 Miles

Richard opened his eyes as I slowed the car for the turn to the gravel ranch road. I lowered the windows, letting in the rich smell of new-mown hay, along with a distinctive, throbbing call: Khrrr, khrrr, khrrr!

Sandhill cranes! A smile creased Richard’s tanned face. He reached for my hand. I’m a lucky guy.

The man sitting in the passenger seat next to me had moon face, the high cheekbones and chiseled profile gifted by a Cherokee-Chickasaw ancestor now rounded and puffy, a symptom of the steroids that controlled swelling from a growing brain tumor. His deep-set hazel eyes protruded; his muscly chest was soft. But when I looked at him, I saw only the mile-wide smile, joyous and tinged with mischief—the same smile that had captivated me when we met, almost twenty-nine years earlier; the smile that lit up everyone and everything around him. I felt a rush of love, a flood of oxytocin, that excited and terrified me as much as it did when I first became his lover. Now, I was his caregiver. He had terminal brain cancer. And we were setting off on a four-thousand-mile, belated honeymoon journey because our time together was short. Because we were determined to live every moment.

Scanning Richard’s face, I was searching for grace, which to me is the ability to embrace life with a combination of balance, harmony, and beauty. The ability to be present, heart open, even in—especially in—the moments when our hearts want to flinch, freeze, or turn away. When all seems lost: the wounded bird dies in our hands; the strayed child is not found safe and sound; the light of life on this animate planet flickers, as if to fade out.

I swiped at tears with the hand that should have been holding the steering wheel and drove on toward the ranch headquarters, a cluster of white-painted wooden buildings. I parked in our usual spot under the spruce tree by the bunkhouse. I’m going to haul our stuff upstairs.

I can help. Richard pulled his six-foot length slowly out of the car and then reached behind the seat for his briefcase. I grabbed our duffel, the box with his medications, my briefcase, and his pillow. We walked across the lawn and into the historic ranch house. As I turned to go up the narrow stairs to the bedrooms, Richard stopped. You go first, he said. Uh-oh.

Richard can manage the stairs, can’t he? Betsy, the facilities manager at Carpenter Ranch, had asked when I called about our stay. I relayed the question to him.

Of course. His voice carried the confidence of sixty-one years of having inhabited a muscular and appealingly male form. The voice of a man who could free-climb a cliff, sculpt a one-ton boulder, or juggle three balls while balancing on one leg. A man who could bound up that steep flight of steps, carrying our mound of gear. His sense of self hadn’t changed, but his abilities had.

This Richard froze at the bottom step, his tumor-impaired right brain struggling to make sense of how to ascend. I stopped at the top, arms loaded, watching with a stomach-churning mix of horror and fascination, compelled to witness the effects of the disease I could not stop. Finally, he reached for the handrail and took the steps slowly, one at a time, like an old man.

When I was a child, I knew love when Mom reached for my hand to help me up a steep bit of trail, or when Dad carried my knapsack once I tired. When my brother Bill, two years older and more popular than I, let me tag along. Love showed in my granddad Milner’s quirked eyebrow and dry banter when I challenged him at chess, and when he never let me win. I understood love as a partnership based on deep respect and affection. Now, love meant fearlessly supporting my partner, the strong guy who still held my heart in his shaky hands.

We had begun visiting Carpenter Ranch, a working ranch owned by the Nature Conservancy, the previous summer, after being awarded a service residency inspired by our concept of terraphilia, humans’ innate affiliation with the earth and its web of life. As Richard’s website explained it, ‘Terraphilia’ is a word my wife and I started using to convey the notion that each of us is inextricably connected to the whole world, and that a happy, well-adjusted human being ought to have kind, loving feelings extending beyond the illusory boundaries of our skin, and we ought to recognize and acknowledge those feelings.

Our assignment: transform a half acre of unwanted, water-hungry lawn behind the ranch house into a public interpretive space that would honor the ranch and surrounding wild country. We envisioned a part-wild, part-domestic garden with sculptural structures that would, in the words of ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan, re-story the weedy ground. An artistic landscape that would reestablish the bond between land and community. The project was our first public collaboration, melding Richard’s heart work of abstract sculpture using local rocks and found industrial materials with my passion for plants as pioneers of natural restoration. We knew when we accepted the residency that Richard had brain tumors. He was healthy then, his prognosis good. We didn’t imagine his life would end before the work did.

Why didn’t we do this sooner? Richard asked, as we strolled hand in hand out the ranch driveway that evening, his stride sure again on level ground.

The honeymoon road trip? I asked. Or the collaboration?

Both, he said, and swung our joined hands high in a joyous arc.

We were too focused on earning a living. I kept my voice dry.

Oh, that, said the guy with the PhD in economics. It’s only money. He grinned. Just money!

He chuckled over his joke until we stopped to admire the sunset flaming the western sky. Then he drew me against him, my back fitting his chest, his chin resting atop my head. The hardest thing for me now is that I can’t do much. I don’t have the energy.

I chose my words carefully. I don’t think it’s about the doing, sweetie. I think what matters in life is being. Your evident love for life, even now, inspires us all.

He smiled, teeth white against cherrywood-colored skin, and repeated, I’m a lucky guy.

I gripped his hand, willing away tears. I love you.

This wasn’t our plan.

We hadn’t even reached retirement, which for us, an economist turned sculptor and a freelance writer, didn’t mean quitting work. It meant quitting worrying about earning money and focusing instead on work that fed our spirits. Richard had only begun to explore his art, his notebooks full of sketches and ideas about how to give native rocks their voices as ambassadors of the earth. I found myself increasingly drawn to the service of restoring our planet, nurturing Earth’s community of diverse life and lives.

When we met in graduate school at the University of Wyoming nearly three decades before, Richard was the brilliant PhD student with the soul of an artist, the one who could grasp a complex mathematical model as effortlessly as he could hike up a mountainside, move a refrigerator, or heft Molly, his cute-as-a-bug daughter, onto his shoulders. The tall and handsome guy with a dream of a college teaching post in some small town where he could buy land and build a passive solar house with his own hands, milling the lumber from trees he logged. And grow a self-sufficient, light-on-the-land existence with intellectual pursuits balanced by physical work. A mash-up of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond with Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Good Life, informed by the ingenuity of the Whole Earth Catalog.

I was the shy, slender, and freckled field ecologist born to a family of nature-loving scientists and artists. A recent diagnosis with lupus, a potentially fatal, incurable illness, had imploded my first marriage and torched my field science career. I found refuge in a communal household practicing urban farming, with chickens and a huge garden, and graduate studies melding right-brain writing with left-brain science. I worked as the director of the campus women’s center.

One of my volunteers, an econ grad student with Richard, decided that he and I would be the perfect pair. I fended off Sue’s matchmaking with some crankiness. I needed a man right then like a fish needs a bicycle, as the poster on my office wall said. Illness had unglued my old life, and I hadn’t put the pieces back together yet. I was still trying to figure out the damn pattern.

Undeterred, Sue connived a meeting at her birthday that December. True to form for someone intent on cramming more into every moment of each day, I arrived late. I dashed into the restaurant and paused to wipe glasses fogged by the sudden warmth. Sue, with her patrician face and straight brown hair, waved from a long table across the crowded room.

I saw with a sinking heart that the last seat remaining was between two guys, both single dads, whom I knew only from her descriptions. One was Richard, with Molly playing at his feet.

I swallowed nervousness, sat down, and introduced myself. I know I spoke to the other grad student, but I can’t recall his face. It was Richard who made my belly flutter, my breath catch, and the heartbeat rendered chronically erratic by my illness actually stumble. It wasn’t so much his looks, though I appreciated his muscled form, skin sun-warmed even in the darkness of a Laramie winter, and his El Greco oval face, deep eyes, and silky black beard and mustache. It was the way those eyes held mine, his slow and beautiful smile, his musical-tenor voice, and that he listened when I spoke. As if I already mattered to him.

And three-year-old Molly in her purple corduroy overalls, with that same hair and engaging smile, who climbed into my lap and sat trustingly, eating bites of my food.

At the end of the evening, I hugged Molly, set her down carefully, and shook Richard’s hand. I pulled mittens over fingers that still tingled, zipped up my jacket, and walked away. I reminded myself firmly that a man and a kid, no matter how appealing the package, were not what I needed. I had to figure out me first. It was winter break: I would head south to visit my parents in Arizona, and get over this flutter before I returned.

I never got over the flutter. I’m a scientist—I don’t believe in love at first sight. Show me the data, not the flutter. The data are that we moved in together five weeks after Sue’s birthday party and married eight months later, Molly in attendance, a crown of garden flowers in her hair.

We had a plan: create our personal Good Life with the sunfilled house in the woods and the big garden for growing healthy food. The first hitch was where.

Could you be happy away from Wyoming? Richard asked one evening as we walked together, Molly perched on his broad shoulders.

I love you, I said, as two pairs of gold-flecked brown eyes watched me. I can try.

And try I did, as Richard’s career bounced us from Wyoming to West Virginia for just two semesters, and then to Washington state, where we bought land with a tumble-down farm-house we put a lot of love into. We then moved to Colorado for a year, while Richard finished his PhD and I wrote my first book, a journal of nature in town, after which Richard was offered a research post in Iowa, and off we trucked to the Great Plains.

Then came southern New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, where Richard got tenure at New Mexico State University, I wrote five books about the desert, and Molly took up flute and won a music scholarship. After one practice semester at the university where her daddy taught, Molly, now tall, with her father’s elegant bones and restless mind, left us for Portland and Reed College.

We left too, still pursuing our dream of a sustainable life. That took us north to Salida, the small town in rural southern Colorado where Richard had lived as a child. The high-desert valley bounded by the tallest reach of the Rocky Mountains didn’t offer a university for Richard to teach at, but it did provide stunning scenery, friendly people, and reasonably priced land.

Within months of our move, we bought a half block of junk-strewn former industrial property. Our decaying industrial empire, as we dubbed it, boasted a glorious view of the peaks, a dilapidated but spacious century-old brick building perfect for Richard’s studio, plus space to build the passive-solar house he had envisioned for so long. It also came with frontage on a block of channelized and trash-filled urban creek, fulfilling my lifelong dream of having a creek to play with. Whenever we had both money and time, we worked on restoration. Richard began with the shop, progressing upward from the cracked concrete floor to the leaking tin roof. I weeded and planted, patiently working on healing land and creek. We were both putting down roots.

It was not smooth going. The consulting work that had allowed Richard to leave his academic post dried up, taking his income with it. His identity as a breadwinner gone, he sank into a black hole. Eventually, my patience ran out.

Goddamn it! I shouted one night, as he silently ate his way through the dinner I had carefully prepared. We have savings; I have writing income. Quit feeling sorry for yourself! This is your chance to build the house you’ve been dreaming of. You’ve got a brain and muscles. Use them!

He finished eating, stormed out without a word, and sulked in his studio for days. Then one evening, he came in with sketches of kitchen cabinets. What do you think of ash face frames pegged with mesquite at the corners, Craftsman-style? he asked, as if neither fight nor sulk had ever been. After that, he picked up his tools and went to work.

The next year we took on parent care, moving my folks from Tucson to Denver so we could watch over them. Two years later, we commuted the thousand-mile-drive to Arkansas each month to help with Richard’s father’s hospice care. The following year, Molly was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and we drove to Portland to help her weather surgery and radiation.

It’s a wonder we survived, much less continued to love each other.

The July that Richard turned fifty-six, the house was done enough to pass its occupancy inspection and we settled in with relief, crises behind us. Or so we thought. Until one perfectly ordinary August morning three years later, when Richard saw the birds. Our days were about to get harder and more dear than we could imagine: The birds presaged a tumor growing in his right brain. A tumor that would kill him, though we didn’t know that then and didn’t believe it for far longer than the data warranted. The human capacity for optimistic denial is astonishing and persistent—as demonstrated by America’s slow response to the coronavirus pandemic, and the mess Earth is in now.

Our impending parting was what took us to the Nature Conservancy’s Carpenter Ranch in northwestern Colorado on that September day. It was the first night of our twenty-nine-years-belated honeymoon, a road trip from our Colorado home to the Pacific coast and along that wild edge from Puget Sound to Big Sur.

We hadn’t had time or money for a honeymoon when we fell in love in graduate school. By the time we got as far as dreaming up a list of potential honeymoon destinations, Molly had left for college, Richard had traded academia for consulting and then sculpture, and I had written seven books. We were happy, holding hands wherever we went—secure in our belief that we had many years ahead together.

And then came the morning when my love saw those thousands of birds, tiny birds on each blade of grass, huge birds on the rims of distant mesas. Richard had always watched birds, fascinated by their flight and forms. The avian multitudes he saw that quiet morning were hallucinations—winged messengers manifested by the deadliest form of brain tumors, glioblastoma—and our reminder that our forever pledge was finite. Those birds sent us on a grueling journey through brain surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy, and eventually, on our honeymoon, a celebration of the love we had nurtured through it all.

No one with an ounce of sense would set off on a three-week road trip with a guy whose brain was being commandeered by a growing tumor. You’d have to be crazy with love, and also an incurable optimist who believes that time and compassion heal all wounds. That’s me.

That night at Carpenter Ranch, as Richard slept beside me, I lay awake, hearing bats fluttering outside and reviewing the route ahead: the two-day drive across Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon and into Washington, ending in Olympia with my family for the weekend. After that, following the coast south, we’d stop here and there at favorite places before spending a weekend in San Francisco with Molly. From there, we’d wind down wild Big Sur before turning inland for home. And then we’d begin another journey, our final one together: Richard’s hospice care.

Driving four thousand miles in three weeks had seemed reasonable when we planned the trip in our living room. Now I wondered if I was nuts. I would be driver, guide, and nurse. The tumor impaired Richard’s coordination—hence his difficulty with the stairs—and his bladder control. It created in his vision a left-side blind spot large enough to hide all of me. I felt at times like a sheepdog herding a cheerfully impaired elephant. But an elephant eager to make the trip!

What the hell were we thinking? Part of why we were both so determined to go was that the trip represented a return to some kind of normality, a way of reclaiming lives taken over by cancer treatment. Seeing it as a belated honeymoon was also lifting a metaphorical middle finger at fate, brain cancer and all. At heart, though, the trip was simply our way of celebrating the body of love, as Richard called it, that we had nurtured.

A great horned owl hooted nearby: Who-who-who? I padded to the window to look out at a sky full of stars, then returned to bed and snuggled next to Richard’s warm skin.

A haiku formed in my head, inspired by the owl and our trip. Poetry has run through my life since my earliest memories, whether of Mom singing nursery rhymes or my Scottish grandmother, Chris, reciting Robert Burns in her best bonny braw Scots. I turn to poetry the way I suppose some turn to prayer, as a way to express wonder and gratitude, explore what I do not understand, or comfort myself when the vastness of existence becomes overwhelming. I write a haiku every day to practice attention, both to individual words and to the stream of moments that make up our lives. Hence the verse taking shape as I succumbed to sleep:

owl hoots, unanswered

lonely? I wonder

speaking only to a dazzle of stars

chapter two

Day Two

Odometer Reading: 204 Miles

Our first stop the next day was our friend Terry’s bookstore and coffee shop in Craig, the heart of northwest Colorado’s oil patch. We lingered over my cocoa and Richard’s pungent americano, talking about books and art and life. When it was time for us to hit the road for our night’s stop at a favorite hot spring in Idaho, Terry traced a back-road shortcut on our map, a route that would take us by petroglyphs I had long wanted to show Richard.

As Terry escorted us to our car, Richard walked straight into a low-hanging street-tree branch with a thunk.

I didn’t see it, he said, as I checked his forehead: just a scrape, no lump.

It was on your left side. I felt guilty. It was only the second day of our trip, and already I had failed to anticipate an obstacle. Some shepherd I was proving to be. I’m sorry.

I’m okay. My head’s hard.

That’s certainly true. He grinned—as I had hoped—at my tart tone.

Terry hugged us, tears in his eyes.

Richard, who until brain surgery number four had invariably commandeered the driver’s seat, climbed into the passenger side without complaint. I had mixed feelings about that change: It was a relief to be able to drive without an argument. I just hated the reason. We didn’t realize then—though perhaps we should have, or at least I, who was still of intact brain, should have—that Richard’s tumor growth was accelerating. In our time on the road, his brain function would deteriorate dramatically, challenging us both.

We were simply naively happy to be off on an adventure, traveling hand in hand as we had for so many miles over the years. Road trips were our best escapes. No matter where we were headed or what the reason, many of our most insightful conversations and richest shared silences had come while watching the landscapes of North America roll by the car windows, holding hands. Isn’t that the American dream: car as personal magic carpet, redemption beckoning around the next bend? (Of course, car as contributor to climate change as well, which is why we now drove a compact SUV, instead of my beloved truck.)

As a child growing up in an eccentric family, I lived for hitting the road. Our family vacations were an escape from the suburbs and my schoolmates’ teasing about my unfashionable clothes, our family’s homemade camper van, the sack lunches my brother, Bill, and I toted to school, and Dad’s habit of biking to work, lab coat flying. That camper was my winged horse, my portal to the halcyon wild.

We would pile into the van on a Friday evening. Dad drove; Mom, chief navigator, sat next to him with her magnifying glass and road maps. Bill and I lounged on opposite sides of the dinette and read, played cards, or bickered as the world rolled by the windows. Dinner would be squishy white-bread sandwiches with lunch meat and