10

Days of the Hummingbird

 

 

 

The Hummingbird is a symbol of regeneration or resurrection. Hummingbird is the creature that opens the heart.¹

TIME WAS FULL OF BRIO, FULL OF CARING FOR HIM, full of worrying, full of awe for his spirit, full of love. We'd moved to the country; his life was easier with no elevators, no concrete sidewalks. Carried outside, unable to walk on his own, Brio would lie in the grass to do his business. Then we'd move to a clean spot; he'd sniff the breeze. He'd lift his paw at me, wanting to show that he could play as we always did. I see him with his smile, eyes bright, speaking to me, telling me that he was there, always there. We shared many gazes in those days. He watched me move around the house; I watched him watching and wanted never to look away.

There was little sleep. He needed to be taken outdoors two or three times in the middle of the night. As the crickets whirred, as the stars shone or clouds passed over the moon, the moments stretched out, treasures to hold onto. There was magic in those days—how much I would soon come to realize.

The nights grew worse; he began to have some kind of seizures, probably heart-related the vet said. He would shake uncontrollably, his eyes glazed. All I could do was hold him until it passed. Tests and procedures were not recommended and made no sense at this point. One vet felt it was time to let go. Another, who knew him well and loved him, advised, “Not yet.”

Even in the stress and the outward chaos, he was my anchor through it all. He came out of the seizures and slept and ate his breakfast and sniffed the breeze through the screen door. In our private moments, I whispered a mantra in his ear, “Never, ever leave me.”

I wanted a pact. I said we would always give each other signs. Brio seemed to have an odd affinity for four-leaf clovers. I'd amassed a collection of them, because over the years Brio would often sit or lie down right next to one. It happened so frequently it seemed more than mere coincidence. I had come to see the clovers as confirmation that he had some special access to a mysterious realm from which he could manifest the clovers as gifts—as signs—to me. Part of me said, You're crazy, that's only wishful thinking. Another, more hopeful part, said, It's true.

I kept searching his eyes for guidance. I continued to feel him, to feel his spirit. Not yet, I thought. But in the evenings, doubt descended, and I called my animal communicators for guidance. I wanted them to confirm my own instincts. More than that, I wanted to know what they heard from Brio.

I didn't always get that. Often they sent me back into myself.

“Alecia, is he ready to go?” I asked with so much tightness in my voice that I could hardly utter the words.

The answer was about me, not Brio, and not really anything I didn't already know. “Two things are coming up,” she said, “the fear of letting him go and the fear of letting him suffer. You have to separate what's rational and what's emotional. The rational part is ‘I don't want this dog to suffer.' The emotional stuff is ‘I don't know how I'm going to live without this dog and be okay.'”

I was growing afraid to leave him alone. Yet I desperately needed a short break. I planned to go up to Martha's Vineyard where we had gone together so many times. I told Alecia I thought the trip would be too much for Brio and that I would leave him for a few days with the woman who'd boarded him for many years. The answer was immediate, and seemingly direct from Brio. “He tells me, ‘That doesn't feel right.' I'm asking him, ‘What doesn't feel right?' It's almost like he has a knowing that he's going to go and for him it's like, ‘No, we need to go out there and we need to have another great weekend and we need to spend this time together smiling, enjoying it.'”

Here was a message I didn't really want. I was ashamed of wanting to leave him behind and afraid, so afraid, that he would die in the car or on the island, away from home and help. I told myself, “Well, maybe this is Alecia talking, not Brio.” But that didn't feel true.

Alecia—or Brio—didn't let up. “You think you really need a break. But he's insistent. ‘I'm sorry but that's not what is going to happen.'” So we went. Alecia had said just to stay in the moment, to be always present. On the long six-hour car trip, I practiced that. I never lost the thought that he could go at any second, lying on the backseat. I clung to the conviction that this was what he wanted.

We made it, and his joy was palpable; I could see a spark, a light in his eyes as I lifted him in my arms to take him out of the car. His head was up. He was smelling the air. It was Vineyard grass and Vineyard smells and the sea breeze close, even that first night. At the beach, he even walked a bit with support to smell around the very rocks where he had always gone to check out recent dog visitors. We sat together on the rocks looking out to sea, and it felt like forever.

The second night he had a very bad attack. He lay gasping, eyes glassy, not seeing. As I sat through the dark hours holding him, feeling every labored breath, I thought this was probably it. At 4:00 a.m. I called Alecia in Colorado. It was 2:00 a.m. her time, and I woke her out of a sound sleep. She wasn't happy, but she agreed to connect with Brio and seemed to connect with him as quickly as ever. “He keeps saying, ‘I'm not ready to go.' It's about you staying present without allowing your emotions to ricochet you.”

The sun rose, and he still lay there, still with me. The local vet came and said it was not necessarily his time unless I decided it was. I could not. We had two more days at the ocean. On the last morning it was foggy and cool, with salt spray blowing in off the surf. I parked the car right at the edge of the bluff, by the rocks, looking out to the sea. I opened the side back door and sat with him, smelling his head as I always would when we sat together near the end of our beach walks, just looking out together. The wind blew his black curls. His head was up, looking straight ahead and far away, drinking in the wind and the sea smell and the light. It was blue-gray, ethereal, with just the hint of violet through the fog. After a long time, I got in the driver's seat and started the car down the road back to the cottage. But I could not leave yet. Back around I turned, back to our spot at the edge of the bluff. We needed more time, feeling the sea and this moment together.

I feel it now.

I knew how important this trip was. “As hard as it was at the time,” I told Alecia, “I am so grateful we went.”

“For him personally,” she said, “he really wanted to be there because he wanted that last experience. He wanted to be out by the ocean. He really wanted to partake of it with you. But it was also part of his path to experience it before he left the planet; that freedom of being in a dog's body; the way you're able to experience things in a physical body. He wanted to feel the breeze running through his coat. The beauty that you went and you were in the present moment. It's so joyous.”

We made the drive back home and settled into the days. He lay in the sun and ate well. I thought constantly of those last moments by the ocean, my head on his, smelling his curls, gazing out to the horizon.

A few weeks after we'd returned from Martha's Vineyard, Alecia suddenly echoed those very words that I'd been saying to Brio daily. “You've been saying, ‘never, ever leave me,'” she whispered. I had never told her of the mantra. “Brio doesn't want to leave you,” Alecia said, “but he can't stay in that body anymore. You need to tell him it's alright to go.”

I had to be sure. “How do you know that?” I asked.

“He tells me,” was the simple, confident answer.

The attacks initially had happened only at night. Now they began in the day. It became very difficult to leave him alone.

I also began to call Dawn several times a week, hoping—perhaps subconsciously—to hear someone contradict what Alecia was saying and my own instincts. She did not.

“It's getting harder,” Dawn said. “His passing is close. It's his choice. His spiritual path is complete in this lifetime. His relationship with you is secure. He's done everything he needed to do.”

I felt at last that it was indeed time—time to grant Brio the freedom to escape his suffering but also time to trust that the larger-than-life bond we'd developed would endure beyond death. It was time to test my faith in my newfound beliefs. I made arrangements for Brio's long-time vet from the city to come out in a few days, still grasping for hours, moments. And they did bring me treasures.

During those last days, I wasn't looking for Brio's four-leaf clovers—that sign between us. But one day as he lay in the grass I looked down and there was a four-leaf clover right in the middle of his flank, laid out for me as clear as could be!

I sat with him for hours on the kitchen floor. There we were again, his head collapsed on my lap just as it had been on that first day when I'd brought him home. Only now, unlike fifteen years ago, I couldn't imagine my life without—not my dog—my soul mate. Near the screen door, we could feel the summer breeze and hear the birds.

Other unusual things happened in those last days. Many will call them coincidences.

But I stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago.

Here in the country there were always animals around but never before had creatures come so close to the house or stayed so long. First, a frog appeared on the front path and just sat there for hours. Then a hummingbird hung endlessly right outside the screen door near where Brio and I sat. I had seen hummingbirds, but none had made a visitation like this and none ever did again while I was in that house. I felt somehow that they were there for Brio, to wish him on his way and accompany his journey.

The frog, because it's an amphibian that transforms itself, is considered a symbol of birth, death, and rebirth. In the High Andes of South America, the hummingbird is a symbol of resurrection because it seems lifeless at night in the cold and rebounds in the warmth of the sun. Hummingbirds are considered in many traditional cultures to be messengers between worlds. It's also thought that they carry powerful medicine, opening the heart to the happiness of life.²

Indeed, there was magic in those days.

Finally, one morning, I knew. The attacks were constant and devastating. I could not wait for my regular vet to come from New York City. The day was here. I arranged for a local vet to come that afternoon.

I had spent the night before lying next to him on his bed. He had breakfast, and we sat on that kitchen floor again. At lunchtime, I asked a friend to bring a pound of roast beef. We carried him outside and he lay in the grass, gobbling down the entire package. So Brio! Still, I knew it was time. Back inside, at our spot by the door, he gave a big sigh and laid his head on my chest. That was where he stayed; where he was when the vet arrived. I never let go of him.

I called Alecia. She'd arranged to be on the phone with me when the moment came. She stayed with me as I held Brio. I saw nothing, my head buried against his face. Brio was tranquillized, resting. I heard the vet ask if I was ready. Then I felt I was traveling with Brio. It was like being inside a centrifuge. I was whirling, whirling with him, going somewhere. For a moment it seemed I was being carried with him, borne by that energy. It was overwhelming, something I could not, would not, fight. I would have been alright going with him. In those moments there was no thought, no doubt, no pain, just sensation.

But then I felt he was off—I knew his energy was no longer in his body. For minutes I just sat there, still holding him.

“What was that?” I finally got out in a hoarse whisper. “Where is he?”

Evidently Alecia had somehow felt the same thing. “He was spinning. He was leaving his body. His energy came out of his body in a spiral stream returning to where it came from.”

“What do you mean? Where is he?” I repeated. “Where did his energy go?” I could hardly absorb in that moment what Alecia then explained. “Look at it this way. If energy comes into the body in physical form and condenses itself, when it's leaving there's going to be a tremendous amount of expanse. It's like the amount of energy we have is so enormous and then it gets condensed down into little bodies. Then when it gets freed again it creates a huge vortex.”

Animal communicator Margrit Coates has come to a similar conclusion based on her experience with animals as they pass over. “Energy cannot be destroyed, only converted from one form to another. As all living beings are energy forms, this is a property of energy that they too must surely obey. This means a soul that has left the Earth plane, whilst invisible to us, is not lost to us. . . . On countless occasions when I have been present at an animal's physical death, I have felt a surge of energy in my hands, a tapping or spiraling sensation under my palms, or a subtle change in the surrounding atmosphere if I have not actually been touching the animal.”³

“I just remember how enormous his energy was,” Alecia continued. “It's like you took a star and it just exploded through the universe. That's what I mean by the difference between the physical energy and the energy of the full consciousness of the being once it's out of the body. I was blown away by how enormous and how loving it was.”

I know the truth of what I felt. And it was echoed in Alecia's words. The sensation of that vortex was not something I thought or imagined. It was physical. I felt it. I experienced it. It had nothing to do with my own shock and grief. When it was over, when Brio had passed, I was in shock but I had no physical aftereffects such as dizziness or lightheadedness. It was Brio's energy that had carried me into the spiral. I felt he had taken me part of the way with him—perhaps one more lesson he came into my life to teach me.

I now knew that neither he nor I were limited to our physical bodies. There is a consciousness, an individual consciousness, that I completely felt even as I spun around and out—out of my physical body. I see that lesson now with clarity, though at the time the experience was too overwhelming to fully absorb. I see too that in my life before Brio I had avoided difficult emotional situations; avoided feeling too much. Yet there was never a moment's hesitation in my decision to be with Brio through his passage, the most difficult situation of all.

Dawn Hayman gave me a gift. She counsels many a dog person before and after their companion's passing. But it seemed, as she spoke with me day after day before Brio physically died, that she too had felt something special going on.

“This is where it became really, really clear that your relationship with Brio was different from what most people have,” Dawn explained. “You allowed him to go through his process very consciously. He died exactly as he wanted to go. That's not as common for animals as it should be. A lot of people euthanize early because feelings are coming up and they get scared and say, ‘I can't deal with that.' It's easier to euthanize. What you did that's different is that you really stayed totally present with him. He wanted to share this with you like he shared the rest of his life. That's what he came into this life to do, to experience a relationship like that with you. There's no bigger thing than to go through a relationship like that and say it's complete and whole. It's beautiful to watch. As hard as it is to hear what he had to say, you were open to hearing him. I'm not sure you understood it as you did it, but you allowed yourself to go through it. And you allowed him to take you on the journey he took you on.”

From that moment there was no turning back. I had, for a moment, touched the other world, that “other side” so often feared and revered yet scarcely comprehensible. I now felt an overwhelming need to know as much as possible about the truth of the afterlife. I believed, more than ever, that consciousness may survive physical death.