My mom tells these stories about how my dad lingered with us for a few days after he died. In the last one, she had this vivid dream that he had reincarnated as a bird soaring over the Sierras—“a hawk or an eagle,” more precisely. She woke up feeling comforted; that was his favorite place. The place that, when she had asked him where he felt most whole, most himself, it was there. He was an avid backpacker. And she went to wake up Grayson and I that morning (we were three years old), and Gray woke up and said “Mom, I think daddy’s an eagle.”
My dad died on Earth Day, and on the twentieth anniversary, I was living in Humboldt with my friends. I texted my mom and my brother. “I noticed today marks 20 years since dad died. Just wanted to say I love you both.” Twenty is such a round number, such a big number. It weighed on me that day, how big the loss had grown. They said I love you back, and my mom said they were eating his favorite for dinner, pesto pasta with salsa.
I had a date that night. There was supposed to be a meteor shower. We went out to this rock with sheer cliffs on three sides, overlooking a big gorge. It’s a spot people go for the view. And it was totally overcast; we couldn’t see a single star. We were the only two there. I had probably just googled “astronomical events” looking for something to ask her to, something covid safe. So far, we’d had a picnic at the community forest lawn and gone to the beach, twice.
And I saw the most incredible shooting star I’ve ever seen. It was enormous. I remember it in three parts: it turned on, like a lightbulb; it slid across a corner of the sky; it turned off. I want to say it was half the size of the moon. I remember the awe I felt, how I frantically touched her shoulder padded in the jacket I had lent her, my eyes still fixed on that corner of the sky. Somehow she missed it, despite how long it seemed to last. We hadn’t seen another and we didn’t see any after.
I told her, “I wish you saw it.” Then, on an impulse, I joked that I could be lying and she wouldn’t know. And the funny thing was, she really didn’t know whether to believe me after that, even when I tried in earnest. The effect of the doubt I cast was irreversible. But the shooting star was better than I could have conveyed, anyway.
She said something else that night. I don’t know if it was before or after. She said, “When I die, I want to be reincarnated as a hawk or an eagle." She said it just like that: “a hawk or an eagle,” how my mom always says it in the story. I felt no shock, the words so familiar to me, my dad already on my mind that day—I felt as little surprise as if I had said it myself. But I was immediately aware of the coincidence. It was those words exactly, and on this day out of all. I was the only person in the world who could see it. I felt something sublime. A touch. But I had no desire to tell her. We just kept talking.
It’s not something I interpret or would want to. She had her own reasons for saying it. She was a new person to me, someone I liked a lot. I was obsessed with her, really. She was a botany major, she liked to look for frogs after it rained, the first concert she ever went to was Weezer. She didn’t have much time for me. She had nothing to do with my dad.
Later, I’d imagine myself running into her and breathlessly explaining the whole thing. I told it to my mom and brother. It bothered me to keep it to myself. They asked me why I didn’t tell her. But in that first moment, and I don’t know why, it was enough just to have it. Like a little gift.
But now I am telling it again, and it did all really happen. The shooting star, the twenty year chasm and the coincidence that bridged it, a moment, a phrase, a reference to reincarnation.