The Turning

When you wake up and your dog is dying. Again. You lay on the warm kitchen floor listening to her labored, whistling breaths, your head buried in her thick black fur.

You wonder if this time is it, if you will leave on Monday and return to a silent kitchen. Maybe that will be easier you think, maybe she would want it that way? The bacon may help, her favorite, a Saturday morning ritual. We wait.

Everything feels quiet, even though it isn’t. My husband is watching reruns of tennis matches, a reminder of life before sickness. Muted applause like white noise, rhythmic matches punctuated by cacophonous commercial breaks.  We wait.

On the radio, another rock legend is dead, another sports hero passed, more voices are silent. When your teenagers ask you about these people, why they mattered. Did you and dad listen to them? Had they ever heard one of their songs? I wonder about that, how many of us die before we share our songs, before we shine our light. How many have died young this year, now silent. 

I wonder about my light, the one that is pushing through, getting louder, insistent, demanding. I wait. Will it be like a zenith, a supernova or maybe a satellite passing through a cloudy night. I’ve always loved the photos of supernovas, the ones that your Mac has a screensaver, the ones that remind me at least that I am not alone. It’s funny I’ve often thought that my favorite screensavers are the ones of the supernova and the deep ocean, the unknown, the unknowing, how the earth makes me feel tethered, stuck, heavy with gravity, weighted. I wait.

It’s been a week. I never used to say that, felt like giving up too easily, surrendering at the end of the match. But now I say it often. Too much? I say it again to myself, out loud. It’s been a different week, I tell myself. Yet, I wait.

I read the words back on my phone.

When day comes, we ask ourselves,

Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

Beginning in restless fear, the waiting, the unknowing, the darkness before the light. The hope. We waited. Every day, we waited. We worried. We waited.

I read more, like I’ve read it every day this week.

We’ve braved the belly of the beast

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace

Out the window, the birds don’t seem to notice the quiet, too busy scouring the dried fern fronds for the discarded seeds of the squirrel’s messy breakfast. Look up, I want to tell them, look up. A full feeder awaits, yet they scurry across the hoar, hopping between the heaving frozen mounds of earth. Look up. I wait.

I think about the past four years, my gaze downward more than upward, reading news at traffic lights, on sidelines, during interminable Zoom calls. Wasted years, waiting. Wasted isn’t the right word, a life can’t be wasted. Can it? I wait.

Look up, I think. I need to look up. 

I look down and I read the closing verses of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.”

When day comes we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid

The new dawn blooms as we free it

For there is always light,

If only we’re brave enough to see it,

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

It’s been a different week. I look over at my old dog, now sleeping by the window, morning light resting on her. We wait.

- Eliza

Eliza Phillips founded Phillips Philanthropy Advisors in 2007 after a successful development career as the Director of Leadership Gifts at the University of Virginia. Since 2007, she has worked with a wide range of organizations and family foundations to help their leaders take the next step in organizational growth and development. Eliza and her husband, Blaine, make their home in Pennsylvania with their two sons and Rainey, their beloved black lab.

To learn more visit http://www.phillipsadvisors.com