John said “Hi” to me today.   He got my attention by screeching as he flew to the very top of the Redwood tree that towers above our house. There he perched, 100 feet above, looking down at me.  I waved.  He screeched back.  I waved again, silently thanking him for checking in.  He twisted his head so he could get a good look at me.  I think he might have winked, but really, he was too far away for me to tell.

John’s spirit animal revealed itself on the day we dedicated his memorial bench in Sibley Regional Park. It was an incredible 45 minutes wedged into a busy Christmas Eve day, chosen to accommodate John’s friends home for Christmas. Torrents of rain and hail fell in the morning but began to ebb as the time drew close. We scanned the sky as we drove toward the bench, hoping the weather would hold off. At the stroke of noon, the appointed time of the ceremony, the clouds broke above us and sunshine poured through.  At 12:10, just as I was trying to figure out a way to get everyone’s attention, a solitary Red Tailed Hawk flew directly overhead on a straightaway north to south path screeching the entire time it was over us. The hundred or so people gathered were instantly silenced and awed. It was nature’s flyover to open the ceremony.  It was John. It was an unforgettable moment.

The Red-Tailed-Hawk-that-is-John has built his nest in an equally tall pine tree on the fence line between Shelby’s family home and ours.  He can easily keep an eye on us, and see Shelby and Ally-dog if they happen to be home for a visit. This makes me particularly happy.  I know it’s not really him, but it offers me daily proof that life, in its many ways goes on.  As in the passage from Wallace Stegner’s book, Crossing to Safety that I read at John’s Colorado Memorial.

Still none of us found anything to say. Air moving uphill from the woods and lake stirred the seeding flower-heads of Delphinium that rose above the wall. A Monarch butterfly caught in the draft was lifted twenty feet over our heads. I saw Sid look away to follow the Monarch’s movement. Perhaps he was fantasizing, as I was, that there went part of what had once been the mortal substance of relatives who had passed before this, absorbed by the root of a beech tree in the village cemetery, incorporated into a beechnut, eaten by a squirrel, dropped as a pellet in a meadow, converted into a milkweed stalk, nibbled and taken in by this butterfly, destined to be carried south on a long, unlikely, interrupted migration, to be picked off by a flycatcher, brought back north in the spring as other flesh, laid in an egg, eaten by a robbing jay and laid as another kind of egg, blown out of a tree in a windstorm, to melt into the earth yet again, and thrust upward again, immortal, in another milkweed stalk preparing itself to feed more Monarch butterflies.

The timing is about right.  John’s DNA, seeping into and enriching the soil in various places around the West have nourished the roots of some plant, that was nibbled by some insect, that was eaten by a small bird that was preyed upon by a Red-Tailed Hawk that laid the egg that hatched into what is now John’s spirit animal living in our back yard.  He calls to me every few days.  I go out and wave, a catch in my throat, a little extra moisture in my eyes and grasp a sliver of hope and comfort from the experience.  In some small way, he is here with me.