Message from a Moose

On unexpected griefs and gifts

Last Wednesday, I was sitting on the patio when a young moose walked into the yard. I had only come outside a few moments before, having just ended a phone call with my midwife in which I expressed the anxiety that had started trickling in again, like the army of ants that shows up in our kitchen every time the weather warms. I was trying to beat back the ant-line, to fill the holes in my mind where the worry was getting in. She did her best to reassure me—it has been a healthy pregnancy so far, with no indication that that will necessarily change—but there was a subtext that became clear: nothing is guaranteed. Get comfortable with uncertainty. “Whatever happens, you will handle it,” she said, and I thought back to fourteen months ago when we learned that the first baby had stopped growing, and how my first thought then had been, “I don’t know how to handle this.”

I’m afraid of being blindsided again, afraid that even after a year of learning the lessons of acceptance and letting go, I won’t know how to handle it if things don’t go according to plan. But do we ever really know how to deal with the blows? It’s more that we don’t have a choice but to handle them, to absorb the shockwaves, to incorporate the reverberations into our bodies where they eventually become indistinguishable from our breath. If we are to live, we are to face a lifetime of no guarantees.

So anyways, this moose. It came up from the river across the street, and I watched it step up onto the slope at the edge of our yard as if in a dream. The shape of its body was like a children’s drawing: all legs, a tall scribble of brown. Majesty in the way it moved through the branches, wearing them like a crown. While there are plenty of moose in the upper regions of New York state, it’s rare to see one so far south. Because of this, and because I was outside at just this moment and not still inside on the phone, it felt like nothing short of a gift from the universe. A reminder that alongside the precarity of living and loving and having hopes and dreams with no guarantees, there is a good kind of mystery too. We never know what’s about to step out of the woods to bless us.

I think of my friends handling their own blows. Chronic illnesses and fertility challenges, the death of beloved pets and the loss of parents, bad break-ups, loneliness, layoffs, and the looming prospect of divorce. After the miscarriage, so many of these friends showed up for us with their love and support. Maizy made us dinner, brought over in individually labeled tupperware: the salad dressing, the parmesan for the soup. Kenna dropped off a care package that contained the most impossibly soft socks. Nellie gave me a grief tincture made with hawthorn and rose. What can I do for them in their moment of need, I wonder now, knowing how much it means to show up? If I could, I would send them each a young moose, emerging like an enormous miracle in their gardens. I would show them how the unexpected gifts of this universe can be a counterweight to the unexpected griefs.

I wish I could say I quietly watched the moose in the yard, bearing witness to the wonder. Instead, I fumbled with my phone to film it, and the animal quickly spooked and ran off. The whole encounter lasted maybe twenty seconds. I wish I had just stayed still.

“At some point when tending someone you love who is in pain, you reach the edge of a lake, and you look at each other with such joy at the stillness,” writes John Berger in From A to X. In our pain and our uncertainty, let us give each other this: a moment of being still, together. Inviting in whatever is waiting to step into the circle of our attention and then just watching, staying present with its presence in our lives.

And so I send you this sudden bluster of magnolias, this song of the migrating Louisiana waterthrush, this wayward moose. May they fill all the holes. May the weight of their arrival reverberate like the blows of a church bell, bringing us back into balance.