This evening (August 7), we’ve been preparing for our interview with Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland Radio, which will be recorded on August 13. Since we’ll be interviewed separately, we’ve been trying to come up with different synchronicities for each of the 7 secrets. I imagined myself being asked what my best personal synchronicity was – and drew a complete blank.
A kind of panic spread through me and suddenly I was 11 or 12 years old, living in Caracas, and in a piano recital that was being filmed for a local TV station. As I sat down at the piano to play the piece I had rehearsed for weeks, my fingers froze, my mind went numb, and I heard nothing but static. Stage fright. I think I started crying, the cameras stopped, and then I was finally able to play the piece. The memory seemed like a clear warning to have something prepared. And then I remembered the message of the one-legged burrowing owl. I thought we had already used it as a post, checked, and we haven’t. I did write about it in Animal Totems, a book I co-authored with our friend Millie Gemondo. So here’s the one that stands out in my mind.
For the first 11 years of Megan’s life, we lived on a lake – a man-made lake that was dug as an enticement to buy homes in our development. It had a few alligators, a lot of ducks, and drew other birds and wildlife. For several years, we had a family of burrowing owls living in our back yard. They’re an endangered species, live in burrows they dig beneath trees and shrubs, and are slightly larger than a robin. They hunt between dusk and dawn and are rarely seen during the day.
One Sunday afternoon, Megan and her friend came racing into the kitchen, shouting about a burrowing owl perched on the atrium fence outside my dad’s bedroom. My dad had been living with us for about two years, ever since we had placed my mother in an Alzheimer’s unit. I knew that in esoteric traditions, owls are considered to be messengers between the dead and the living and my first thought was that the owl portended that my dad, who had Parkinson’s, was going to pass away soon. The fact that the owl was perched on the fence in broad daylight concerned me, too.
The three of us stood at the sliding glass door, gawking at the owl. Then I noticed that the bird was perched on just one leg. I thought that the left leg might just be pulled up, so we hurried outside for a closer look. It wasn’t the least bit startled as the three of us approached for a closer look. We realized its left leg wasn’t just pulled up; part of its leg was missing.
Unsettled by the whole thing, I convinced myself it didn’t mean anything. But at nine the next morning, the phone rang. It was the Alzheimer’s facility. My mother was on the way to ER, presumably for a broken hip. I rushed over to the hospital. She was in excruciating pain. X-Rays were taken, doctors arrived and left. By the end of the day, the prognosis was worse than a broken hip. My mother’s left hipbone- the same leg that was actually missing on the owl – had disintegrated completely. He wasn’t a candidate for a hip replacement because she didn’t have the presence of mind necessary for the rehab.
“So what are the alternatives?” I asked the doctor who delivered the news.
“We do wonderful things with pain management nowadays.”
Easy for him to say. She wasn’t his mother.
My mother was transferred to a nursing home, where pain management consisted of regular doses of morphine. She died three weeks later of pneumonia. The owl had delivered its message that Sunday weeks earlier.
