“Rainer Maria Rilke expressed familiarity with the concept of pain in his tenth of the Duino Elegies.
Moving from a time to a space metaphor, he suggested that we are always trying to wriggle out of the space of our pain, searching for a time when it will end.”
— Gael A. Hodgkins, 15 November 1979
*****
It was already past nightfall, the sky glowing orange to the west where a hungry wildfire swallowed meadow after mountain, when I slipped out of bed, leaving my sleeping husband and dog in our rented cabin to walk under a burning Colorado sky, counting not stars but embers.
How do you love a burning world? The question was smouldering through the coils of my mind when my eyes landed on a constellation of white speckles across light brown velvet.
An elk calf, her chest rising and falling at the familiar speed of ache.
She was tottering stiffly on spent legs. Her journey out of the inferno, in search of mosses or her mother or some place to nest, had led her into the middle of town.
At the trill of my cellphone, her ears began to periscope, trying to decipher yet another layer of cacophony. Unknown, flashed the caller ID. Rarely did I answer for unfamiliar callers, but the fire had me on edge—what if the danger was moving closer to town?
“Hello?”
“Echo?” The voice was unhurried. “Is this Echo Guernsey?”
“Yes!” I had to yell over the cyclone of hot winds. “Who is this?”
“My name’s Carol. I know it’s late, but ah, your grandmother’s cousin, Gael… she’s died. I’m at the house and found a letter that you wrote her a few years back. It had your number on it. Hope it’s okay that I, uh—”
The calf bent at the knees, her tufted forearms giving way to meet the earth. She plaintively licked a rock for salt.
“You still there?” asked Carol.
“Yes. Here. I didn’t know Gael very well. But my grandmother and her were pretty close when they were growing up. I have a picture of them outside a corner store on their bikes as teenagers. They look happy.”
“Yeah, she talked about the old days a lot.”
I was sifting through my memory, cobbling together the few facts I could conjure about this distant relative. “Eureka, California, right? Gael lived up near the state’s northern border?”
“Yep. There’s a service planned for next month at the local Zen Center. It’ll be livestreamed if you’d like—”
“Gael was a Buddhist?” Despite my sprawling family, I’d always believed I was alone in my spiritual convictions that absolutely everything is connected.
“Yeah, she found the dharma back in the 60s. Long before I knew her. Anyway, about the service. Gael wanted to be cremated, so the sangha is thinking we’ll spread some ashes near the bird feeder. I can text you the information.”
My phone rumbled. The calf bleated. I opened Carol’s text: Memorial for Gael A. Hodgkins, Eureka Zen Center. The Zoom link had a password: Disconsolate sister.
“Wait, Carol?” I asked. “Disconsolate sister, as in:
‘Oh you nights
that I grieved through
how much you will
mean to me then.
Disconsolate sisters
why didn’t I kneel
more fully to accept you…?’”
“Damn! You sure know your Rilke. That’s funny. He was Gael’s favorite poet, too.”
The little elk let her back legs give way and toppled onto her side, her breathing coming in fits and starts.
“This a bad time?” Carol asked. “Sounds like you’ve got company—”
“I’m in Colorado for a writing conference. There’s a fire just outside of town. I couldn’t sleep and went for a walk, but found an elk calf.” Sometimes it’s hard to give context to a stranger.
“Poor creature is probably dehydrated. Fuck big oil for letting it come to this!”
Fuck big oil indeed, I thought, as a hunk of ash the size of a dinner plate passed overhead.
“Carol, do you know if young elks drink water, or only their mothers’ milk?”
“I’m not an expert, but I’m guessing she’ll take anything you can spare at this point.”
I unscrewed the cap from my canteen and used my hands like a bowl, offering myself to the calf, who eyed me suspiciously for some time until a sandpaper tongue shot out sideways.
“Oh, she’s drinking!”
“That’s really good,” there was a rise in Carol’s voice. “Means she’s got some fight left.”
As the calf lapped against my palm, I thought back to my last phone call with my grandmother’s cousin. The timbre of her voice reverberated through my mind, like a banshee or a logged tree moments before it falls. Gael was all wails and quivers.
“Gotta say, picturing you there, offering water to a thirsty soul—reminds me of her.”
“Will you tell me more?”
“Let’s see… she loved watching the birds. Her prized possession was a pair of Swarovski binoculars. Was devoted to The New York Times crosswords. She once wrote a play for her retirement party in which she was rebirthed as a ‘lounge lizard.’ Hysterical! Of course, you know about Marilyn?”
Monroe? No, that couldn’t be right. “I don’t think so. Was she a family member?”
“No! … Well, suppose there’s nothing to hide now. Gael was a lesbian. Marilyn was the great love of her life. They were together while Gael was earning her doctorate at the University of Chicago. Had two cats, a big orange one named Temporary and a little black kitten named Eternal.
“When Marilyn lost her life to suicide, that nearly ended Gael, too. They’d been creating a life, trying to build a refuge in each other.”
“How heartbreaking.” I picture my husband asleep beside out little dog back at the cabin.
“Yeah, Gael really struggled, though I’m guessing you’re no stranger. From what Gael shared about your family, sounds like your genetic code isn’t exactly evolutionarily adaptive, that your kin have their own amino acid seemingly coded for despair.”
I had so many questions. About Gael and her amino acids of despair, about Marilyn and these cats. “Did Gael die at home?”
“Sure did. Looking out her picture window at her favorite redwood tree.”
As I sat amid the falling ash, playing the role of river to the elk calf, I closed my eyes, trying to picture Gael’s last vision: the tallest tree species on Earth, dating back to the Jurassic. I imagined Gael and I side by side at sunset in a verdant forest of ferns and gentle brontosauri.
“Anyway, there’s so much here at the house. Her writings and photographs. Her Rilke collection. Her impressive collection of embroidered denim vests! Gael’s niece and nephews don’t want any of it and she never did have children. Still, I can’t stand the thought of tossing it out. Don’t suppose you’d be interested?”
The winds picked up, coating my face and the calf’s rising ribs in a fresh layer of ash.
“Please, send me everything,” I said, my voice a steadying quiver.
“Makes me happy, Echo. It’d make Gael happy, too, to know she lived on.”
As the winds howled, the elk sniffed at the air, as if trying to decipher something familiar, recognizing something thought lost, the scent of lodgepole pine mingled with the musk against which she had only nights ago slept safely, curled against the steady breath of refuge.
“Well, text me your address when you—”
“Carol!” I wasn’t yet ready for this call from the unknown to expire. “Did Gael die the same way as Marilyn?”
“No, no. Don’t get me wrong, there were years, whole decades, when she was haunted. But she made it. Passed from old age. And now she’s free. Well, I fucking hope she’s free—”
“Me, too. A new star or a blossom. Or maybe she’s a life-bearing stream,” Rilke’s poetry forming a tether from me to Gael, from the calf to her mother. From the pain back to the love.
*****
Six months later, on a day when both Gael and the elk calf were far from my thoughts, a box arrived on my front porch. Amid Polaroids from 1969 of Gael and Marilyn in their Chicago apartment—3 x 3 inch still lifes of birds in flight and a small garden growing tomatoes and two cats sitting side by side at the window, tails entwined—I discovered a stack of dharma talks Gael had written for the Eureka Zen Center.
On the subject of Rilke’s tenth of the Duino Elegies, she went on to ask:
“Instead of wriggling out of our pain,
searching for a time when it might end,
might it be wiser to consider our pain a resting place,
a heart,
a refuge into which we can settle?”
*****
So, how do we love a burning world?
By holding the darkness of eternity in one hand and the fiery embers of temporary in the other, as we settle into the refuge of our pain, disconsolate sisters destined to become new stars.
“Eureka!” I hear Gael calling.
