I Will Always See Thestrals

What a gorgeous day it's been here in Fayetteville, today. This morning as I huddled under a blanket sipping coffee waiting for my 3yo to wake up, my house was 67 degrees. I believe we had our first frost last night. The highest the temperature here will hit today is 70 degrees. It's been a most impressive fall day.

At my tennis club this morning as I ran, I watched two courts of senior mixed doubles play matches. I'd forgotten my headphones which is usually a huge disappointment, but this morning, I got to watch tennis and run which is a close second to having music.

There is one man who is not at all a stereotypically looking tennis player who I see around the club, often. He's in his late sixties I'd say, maybe even 70, and he has shoulder length gray-ish brown hair, adorned every time I see him with a bandanna tied around his forehead, like he just hopped out of 1970. He was wearing shorts and a cut-off at the belly button t-shirt. Love watching him.

And then ... I thought of my dad, who would have been around his age today - 66 years old. At that moment, I was glad I was the only one in the cardio room.

Loss is a hard feeling or emotion to describe. The best way I know how to put it, is that to me, it feels like constantly being homesick for something. To know grief is to know a true rite of passage. It catapults you forward to a strange, uninvited kind of maturity whether you're ready for it or not. It separates you from those who don't know it. But ... with those who do know it, it gives camaraderie that one just can't have with those who don't know loss.

For those of you willing to be immature and nerdy enough to read children's fiction like me, Harry Potter. In The Order of the Phoenix, Harry and his friends are arriving at Hogwarts being pulled by what they thought were magically moving carts. What most didn't know, except Luna Lovegood, Harry's rather odd classmate, is that they were indeed being pulled by thestrals.

These horse-like creatures are described as this:

"Thestrals have a quite disturbing appearance and the wizards who are capable of seeing them often describe these animals as being sinister and spooky. And that first impression it's not only because their big, bony bodies, but also because their dragonish faces with white, frightening and glittering eyes lacking both expression and pupils."

When Harry (for those of you who don't know Harry Potter, Harry's parents were killed when he was an infant and Luna's mother was killed, too, when she was young) first sees them after realizing that no one else but Luna can, he says,

Harry Potter: "What are they?"

Luna Lovegood: "They're called Thestrals. They're quite gentle, really... But people avoid them because they're a bit..."

Harry Potter: "Different. But why can't the others see them?"

Luna Lovegood: "They can only be seen by people who've seen death.

This is what knowing loss is like; you know something only someone that's experienced it, too, can know.

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine from high school who has three sons, the youngest of which is two years old and has ocular brain cancer, lost her husband. He committed suicide.

Last week, one of my oldest friends went in for her 20-week ultrasound, only to find out her son had died in utero. His umbilical chord had knotted. That night, because it was too late in the pregnancy to do a DNC, she was induced into labor and had her sweet baby boy more than 24 hours later.

While I know grief, I can't truly know the kind of grief above. My guts hurt for both of these friends, literally for days, or anytime I stop and think about it, really.

I had almost an hour to myself today. I sat on the back porch without music or something to write on, without my phone ... just me in a chair under blue sky with nothing else but the sound of birds above and my thoughts. I was having one of those moments where it feels like in my everyday life, everything is spinning above my head in a violent tornado in which I am standing in the center and watching as things fly around me.

As I processed all that I've taken in lately, I had a moment where it felt as if someone flipped a switch and everything spinning in the air around me got sucked away with incredible force and all of the sudden, there was complete silence. Sitting there, feeling the sun on my lap and the breeze on my face, I had one of the purest moments I've ever had in my life ... I appreciated life. All the preying vultures out there that peck and pick at my flesh like they do, taking only little bits at a time ... they meant nothing. And then, I smiled at the future.

I was still homesick for my dad today, especially as I watched that hippie-man play tennis and then later when I thought of how my dad will never know my children. I'm sad they will never know him, too. Thing is, I will always miss him, even when I'm 66. And because I do, I will always see threstrals.