I remember Kathy pointing out the two owls. They were high above us, perched atop a tall pole,
one’s head nestled in the breast of the other, so it appeared to me at first to be a single bird.
Until a head popped out, making it clear that yes, there were two of them. I do not recall what
kind of pole, just that it was quite high. But the sighting of those owls that day struck both of us
as meaningful, and I thought I’d write a poem about them. In fact, afterwards Kathy looked up
the symbolism of owls. I forget what she discovered—something about the mystical—and I
never did write that poem. Do owls travel in pairs? I am wondering that now. At the time, I was
thinking about me and Michael, and whether the sighting, so close on the heels of my brother’s
death, was a message.
We were in my cousin’s pontoon boat. She was taking me out for a ride on the Delaware Bay
the morning after Michael’s funeral. To distract me from my sadness, I think. She’s kind that
way. I hadn’t had much time to process the loss, despite being intimately involved with his care
from the time, less than a year before, that he was diagnosed with cancer.
The news of his death in a long distance call came to me like a punch to the gut. I had just
returned to Florida from his sick-bed to catch up on my university classes and I couldn't make it
back in time to say goodbye.
Michael, just 72 and newly retired from the priesthood, was looking forward to a more relaxed,
enjoyable, and stress-free life that would never come. He declined rapidly, and the months
afterwards passed by as swiftly as high cirrus clouds. Hope, despair, untold suffering, more
hopefollowed by despair. Hospice was the endgame, well, next best thing.
And then there was his apartment to be dismantled, personal items to be distributed, and loose
ends to tie up. All of which Michael directed from his hospice bed. There weren’t many
personal items, or loose ends. Our Michael came out of the womb disciplined and organized.
His life was one of service to the Church, and he had little interest in material things. A small
closet of essential clothing. A few original works of art that hang in my home today. A personal
computer. Some Vestments. A breviary, a Bible or two, a volume of Shakespeare’s works, and
an impressive collection of novels that any English professor would covet. He loved traveling,
martinis with dinner, Broadway theater, and the newest best seller on The New York Times list.
He sprinkled pop culture references throughout his sermons, and his parishioners were wild
about him. He kept it real. He was accessible. He was their beloved Father Michael. One of the
good ones, as I liked to tell my friends, in an era replete with priest scandals.
In his apartment, he had a decanter with a matching set of crystal whiskey glasses from his trip
to Ireland, and pewter from a visit with good friends Frank and Marie in Switzerland. That was
pretty much it. All sorted and packed and bound for their destination by the time he died. Then
came the funeral preparations. Again, we got busy following his precise directions—who was to
say the Mass and give the homily, which one of us was to do what reading, and what hymns
were to be played during the Mass. All carefully written out. His financial matters, of course,
were also in order, and duly assigned to our lawyer brother to handle.
Did I mention that Michael came out of the womb directing?
The two owls stayed with me long after I returned to my home in South Florida, but the poem
would not come. Whenever I walked a familiar path to nearby Tree Tops Park, I would think
about those owls and my unwritten poem. And Michael. I would pass a tree—two trees really,
that from a distance give the appearance of being one tree. The smaller one, tucked inside the
shade of the taller one—some species of palm—is an oak. The taller, more commanding tree is
a good fifteen feet higher. It spreads its branches and arches heavenward. The shorter one’s
trunk grows so closely alongside it that its difference seems erased, its leafy tentacles tangled in
the taller tree’s magnificence.
Two owls. Two trees.
There were seven of us kids, and I feel a close bond to all my siblings in different ways and for
different reasons, but Michael came first, and I trailed behind a couple years later. Even though
we were just kids ourselves, we were saddled with caring for our younger sibs. That shared
burden made us tight. Our father worked two or three jobs, our mother was consistently
pregnant, and the household was not happy. Even though there was never enough money, the
kids kept coming because that’s what good Catholic parents were supposed to do. Have children
and send them to a private Catholic school they could not afford. And our parents were good
Catholics. Michael and I were two sides of the same sadness, or maybe of the same emptiness.
I don’t know what to name it, but it produced a shorthand between us. We didn’t talk about “it”
much, but we shared “it.” We lived miles apart and saw one another twice a year at best, but I
don’t think it is a stretch to say that he could be most himself when he was with me, and I, with
him. It was not easy growing up in the shadow of Michael’s tree but faced with his absence I’d
have to learn how to live in the light on my own, which explains why the poem took so long to
come.
Michael has been gone more than four years now. I keep on looking for that poem which, like a
phantom limb, both is and is not there, and will never grow back. And yet. . .
two different trees
tangled roots, limbs, and leaves as
owls clearly can see