שנים עשר חודש

Shneim asar chodesh – Twelve months

Those mourning a parent additionally observe a twelve-month period (Hebrew: שנים עשר חודש, shneim asar chodesh ; “twelve months”), counted from the day of death. During this period, most activity returns to normal, although the mourners continue to recite the mourner’s kaddish as part of synagogue services for eleven months.

A year ago this morning I was waken by a phone call from Moses who had been standing at Starbucks watching over mom beaver as she huddled on a little patch of land, looking weak and disoriented. Jon and I hurried down to check after calling the others. We found her chattering and confused, at one point bumping into the wall while she swam. Cheryl drove down with an animal crate from IBRRC and we made the decision to pick her up and take her to Lindsay, where she was examined and euthanized.

Was it really a year ago?

It used to inexplicably feel like it happened a million years ago and like it happened yesterday. Like if you could inhale the stale breath of loss deeply enough you could trace it all the way back to the tremor of that morning – when loss was merely feared. Now the grief has had a year to sink in, the mud has piled high, and mom’s tombstone, in the jewish tradition, can be officially unveiled.

This morning I brought down some flowers and was happy to see that her children were observing the day in most commonly observed beaver tradition: doing what she taught them. Like all mothers, she obviously tucked a note in their jeans genes as she was leaving. They must have just got around to reading it because they’ve been hard at work being the beavers she meant for them to be. The note listed her priorities for them, and what appear to have become their priorities for themselves:

1. First Build a dam

2. Then Build a lodge

The secondary dam is looking very solid, and no one was bothering with it but a happy kingfisher who wondered why I wouldn’t leave so he could dive for dinner in peace.

Farther up stream, above the primary dam, two busy beavers cast ripples in the water.

Huge balls of mud were being rolled out of lodge number 1 and great excavations were occurring at the site of lodge number 2. I’m not yet sure where they’ll settle lodge nuber 3 but they obviously have plans in mind. Two beavers were working this morning and when the water wasn’t cloudy with their efforts it was emerald translucent glass.

Standing at the Escobar bridge, as I had stood for so many mornings when our colony was just starting out, I was struck by how much had happened and how very little had changed. Beavers had died and beavers were living. Dams washed out and dams were standing. Trees had fallen and trees were growing. Both banks of the creek were layered with an explosion of willow, growing up and out and over. This lush canopy was rich enough to cover a multitude of scars: the holes where mom sat when she was ill, the collapsed lodge that flooded and imploded in March, even the mistaken sheetpile that sealed a property-owners land and our beavers’ fate – covered over with new growth. Everything dead was covered by everything living.

I was reminded of a Carl Sandburg poem, which you should listen to just because of the musicality of his voice, another living thing covering ideas of death.