The Bones of a Thing

At the northwest corner of the walking path parallel the woods, past the Hill and beneath a stand of young sycamore saplings, what’s left of a possum is scattered and pressed into the cool clay soil, the work of some mystical arboreal curator who tends to the living and the dead with equal measure while we sleep. But for a wooden frame and some glass, I could be passing a museum of natural history’s exhibit entitled “Not That High on the Food Chain” or “Late Night Coyote Snack”. One of the creature’s mandibles, incisors perfectly intact, offers a ghostly half-smile and I sift through memories of all the encounters I’ve ever had with a living possum who might have been protecting her newborn babes, that snarling face frozen in defiance and indecision. Sections of lumbar vertebrae here, a radius there, the remaining missing bits carried deeper into the thicket of blackberry brambles by a predator who wanted to eat its meal in peace—I can only imagine what unfolded for both of them as one life was sustained by another (unwillingly perhaps, but how do I know? I wasn’t there at the time and mustn’t assume anything about how such arrangements are made). This pause on my morning walk moved silently from observation to tender memorial service. A whispered “Mitakuye Oyasin” reminds me that I'm not the only one here and someday, my bones too will rest somewhere in the cool clay soil. I hope it’s not a violent end to a life I’ve cherished on this side of gratitude. Having meant that as a prayer and not simply a meandering musing, I send it out and upward to the canopy above, resuming my walk with fresh humility and more than a side eye to the Grand Scheme of Things in whose circle I continue to dance my days.

There’s so much I really don’t know, or ever will.

I live most of the time in wonder and curiosity, hungrily filling my plate with the knowledge of others who spend their days watching and making notes (I know there’s more to it than that, and am certain that such work can be tedious or painstaking, even boring at times. But I daydream about it anyway). I do my own informal research, noticing how this year it seems the sycamores are shedding their bark in greater volume than I recall from past seasons as I step over the curling gray pieces in the short feathery grass of the walking paths. Their now-smooth trunks and branches are a pale celery color and somehow, they look stronger for it, less burdened. Stretching out of their old skin like tall snakes, they push themselves upward into a still-summer blue sky. I join them impulsively for a moment, raising my own arms as far above my head as I can. It does feel good (though my own skin remains intact, which I consider a good and helpful thing for now).

Until scientist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen accidentally discovered a way to view the bones of a thing while testing cathode rays in 1895 (leading to what we now know as the x-ray machine), we humans had to content ourselves with wondering about the inner supporting structures of a life form, or disassemble a once-living thing to get a closer look at how it all fits together. I’m like more than a few folks in wanting to know what goes on inside a being, how it stands upright or crawls sleekly through the wet grass, soundlessly and with such grace. What gives its flesh a place to hang, how does the architecture know when it’s time to get a move on and what sets it all in marvelous motion? It fascinates me in those last minutes of my lunch hour and I image-search the internet for a visual to satisfy my curiosity for a while. Then it’s back to work, to an aspect of my job that is equally fascinating, and privileged, truly—I get to interview people who want to become volunteer members of the hospice team. It’s no small ambition. The respectfully curious questions I ask help me get to a different set of “bones”—the structure of someone’s beliefs and perspectives, the rich soil of their most precious values, from which everything else springs forth, the nexus point on which all their decisions pivot. In an hour’s time I hear stories that give evidence to a life framed and enriched by giving, a gentle insistence that they be allowed to keep a promise to a dying parent, a clear vision of a future filled with patients of their own as they put their shoulders to the hard wheel of medical school. They tell me much more than I’d ever be allowed to ask, and I hold their answers in sacred trust, fully aware of the gift I’ve just received.

Some people’s values are as loud and clear as a trumpet, others ask that we watch carefully for the slightest nuanced clue before drawing an incomplete conclusion. And some don’t tell us at all until after they’re gone, having lead by example if we were paying attention. All this from what’s left of a possum beneath the watchful rustling leaves of a few young sycamores…

There’s so much I really don’t know.

Or ever will.