17

After

A relaxed and sleepy three-year-old. Stacey O’Brien.

AFTER WESLEY’S DEATH I fell into a stupor. I hardly slept, instead pouring out my grief by writing our story day and night, driven by a passionate need to remember. My mom graciously stepped aside while I monopolized her computer, even though this virtually shut down her real estate business. In three weeks I wrote the rough draft for this book. Then I slept for months, in and out of a fog.

Before I got sick, I had been taking Irish fiddle lessons from Cáit Reed, a woman who is a top Irish fiddle player in the United States. She plays in the subtle East Clare style that I love. My illness made it impossible to continue lessons, but by then Cáit had become one of my dearest friends. She was the first person to recognize that I was truly sick and needed help, although I was still trying to hide the seriousness of my situation from friends and family. She stepped in early and often took care of me.

A few months after Wesley died, Cáit invited me to a writers’ group in Palos Verdes. She’d often bring me to her house so I could sleep until the last minute, then would drive me to the meeting to read my story about Wesley to the group. The first time I went to the writers’ group, I walked by a shop with a stuffed barn owl in the window, which I took as a sign of encouragement and bought. A few months later, when I used the library conference room to work further on the book, a great horned owl came and sat in a tree just outside the room for the entire day while I worked. I kept going outside to check if he was really there and I wasn’t imagining it.

As the months dragged on, something changed: I began to recover. Since my prognosis had been hopeless, I didn’t even notice at first what was happening. But when I compared my current condition to six months before, I could tell there was improvement. I had switched health care providers and my new doctors at Kaiser Permanente found a way to control my symptoms so I was more likely to have days when I could actually function. They continued to tweak my treatments and didn’t just throw medications at the problem. My primary physician, Dr. Felder, a man of great intellectual curiosity who worked like a research scientist, always went the extra mile. I learned from this experience never to lose hope and never to take a bad prognosis at face value.

I found solace in continuing to volunteer, when I was able, at wildlife rescue and rehabilitation centers, particularly with wetland and seabirds, birds of prey, and possums. And wild owls still visit me. Even as I wrote these words a barn owl flew over my bedroom and screeched as he went off for his evening hunt. I feel connected to Wesley through these owls. He saved my life; they help me keep going.

My two friends, Cáit and Wendy, held me up emotionally during this time, kindly calling me every day as I wrote and rewrote this memoir. I had been sick and shut in for so long, hardly ever leaving the house, that I was isolated. Their friendship was the lifeline that got me out into the world despite my poor health and losing Wesley.

Wendy remarried and has been very happy for many years. She moved to Colorado and started raising Friesian, Andalusian, and Warlander horses and Ragdoll cats. An award-winning painter and sculptor, Wendy has also been a successful recording artist for decades. She also edited this book with me, sometimes going all night until we both fell asleep on the phone, helping me remember things about Wesley and his extraordinary life. Her husband, Don Francisco, is also an acclaimed recording artist and the kindest, gentlest man a woman could ever hope to find. Annie is now a grown married woman, still wise beyond her years, with a recording career of her own. Oddly enough, Cáit and her husband, Richard Gee, also moved to a high-altitude mountain paradise in Colorado, and they get together with Don and Wendy to make music.

I find great joy in talking about Wesley and sharing his life story with other people. Although I still sometimes feel guilt about his final days, I now know that this is a normal part of grief. Guilt is just anger turned inward—anger at our helplessness in being unable to change the inevitable. But we are not gods. We outlive our animals. There’s no way around this. So we choose whether or not to take the pain with the joy. I know people who have decided it’s too hard and have given up living with animals. But to me there’s no question that it’s all worth it.

My sister and I had made a vow when I was eight years old. We would live our lives not by staying in the shallow, safer waters, but by wading as deep into the river of life as possible, no matter how dangerous the current. We knew that we had only one chance at this life and we decided to try to make every moment matter. It may seem an odd vow for two little girls to make, but considering the intensity of our childhood—working almost full-time in the recording industry and also spending so much time at Caltech—we had had the unusual opportunity to see many different kinds of people living very different lives. Both of us have kept this vow. Neither of us regrets living this way.

Wesley taught me the Way of the Owl. In the human world, your value as a person is often intrinsically linked to your wealth or most recent accomplishment. But all the accoutrements of the material world were stripped away from me when I got sick. Wesley made me realize that if all I had to give was love, that was enough. I didn’t need money, status, accomplishment, glamour, or many of the empty things we so value.

As much as I still mourn him four years later, there’s nothing I’d like more than to adopt another baby owl, to take what I learned from Wesley to the next level. This time I would document and record every little thing—each verbal adaptation, each change in vocalization, every instance of his learning my language. I would make my observations official so they could be verified and stand up to scientific scrutiny.

We are on the cusp of a new understanding of animal communication. It was recently discovered that ravens solve problems by thinking them through logically, without need for trial and error. Ravens not only use tools, they create tools, making modifications that rival those of the great apes. Alex the famous African gray parrot, who passed away as the final chapters of this book were being written, exhibited an astounding level of intelligence and proved that he had truly acquired language—he understood what he was saying and what was being said to him. Able to create new word combinations to describe objects he had not encountered before, Alex was on the verge of proving even more complex abilities of symbolic thought when he died. May he rest in peace and may he be remembered as a pioneer on this journey of exploration into the intelligence and sentience of the creatures with whom we share the earth.

There is so much more to be discovered, and I’m sure in decades to come we will look back at this time as one in which we were emerging from the dark ages of understanding animals, their intelligence, and their emotional lives.

My life was forever changed by a single barn owl named Wesley. I will always be grateful to him for teaching me the Way of the Owl.