When the World Begins to Rhyme

A week ago we woke up to realize that over the night our 22 year old ginger cat had taken a turn for the worse—he wasn’t eating, he was wheezing, he wasn’t pestering us for love. We’d been here before and knew that fluids, an anti-emetic, maybe a 24 hour antibiotic shot could often make him good as new so we called the vet. Unexpectedly their schedule was wide open—because wide-spread flooding was predicted for our county and the rains were already torrential. Our vet is 30 minutes away down a long treacherous stretch of road but we got in the car, the windshield wipers squeaking, my husband trying to see the lane lines through the torrent of water falling from the sky, the cat in my lap, the new puppy in my lap, all of us settting out into this crazy day, so worried about everything.

What better time for prayer?

We called in all of the usual suspects—our beloved pets on the other side, my father the doctor and all of his medical friends, St. Christopher for traveling safety. We prayed to Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Ganeshe and said various mantras and dharanis for protection. I prayed to St. Francis to whom I have been journeying on “my pilgrimage in place,” not just learning about him but trying to see around pious impositions to his true teaching, praying each day with him the Fransiscan crown rosary, always ending my prayers with the Laudato Si. Praise be brother wind, all weather is our nourishment.

Almost no other cars were on the road. Warnings flashed across our phones telling us to stay home. Great sheets of water were already streaming across the asphalt. Clark clutched the steering wheel. I held the animals.

“I don’t know if we can make it,” muttered Clark mostly to himself but I heard him.

At that moment we were passing one of the old Dutch graveyards so ubiquitous in this region. Through the gray wall of rain, I could just make out the crumbling tilted tombstones. “Whoever you are,” I said to them in my head, “We need help. Now. Who will stop the rain?”

The rain, in that very instant, stopped.

Sometimes the dead are surprisingly speedy.

Clark was stunned. We made our appointment on time. The vet wasn’t sure about our old cat but offered us all of the usual remedies. We would be returning in a week to spay the puppy. I let the dead of that cemetery we had passed so many times that I would return in gratitude, learn the names of those who had helped us on this frightening day. The storm, predicted to circle round, and come back worse, shifted direction and there was no more rain on the way home.

Our old cat Sputnik did not bounce back this time and died six days later. He was a super senior, probably around 104 in human years, which of course doesn’t make any difference to our grief. All of our cats are remarkably long-lived and his friend had made it to 25. There is never enough time for love. I prayed that our little puppy would also one day be a super senior, that Clark and I would be super seniors, that from this blessed life, these blessed soul reunions we have found ourselves in, that we may eke from it all grace and magic and joy.

The very next morning we were driving to the vet again to drop off the puppy for her operation. There was ambient anxiety about this routine procedure because of all we had just been through. On the way back we stopped in the graveyard. When I go to a cemetery where I don’t know anyone I often seek out the oldest and most neglected graves to see which name “sticks” and so I told Clark to drive past the almost-abandoned church and up the dirt raod that led into the graveyard proper. The oldest graves were furthest away. But as we approached them the dirt road circled round back towards the church so we stopped the car to get out and walk through the grass towards the tilted tombstones inscribed with old Dutch names.

But we never got to them.

When I got out of the car I was right beside a much more recent headstone for “Elizabeth J. Collins, DVM December 2, 1917 - October 4, 2017” Elizabeth had been a veterinarian. Elizabeth, at 100 years, was a super senior. Elizabeth had died on the Feast Day of Saint Francis. We had stopped, coincidentally, right in front of her grave.

With the dead there are no coincidences; there are rhymes. So many rhymes!

A rhyme in a poem is that moment of unexpected pleasure when two words, seemingly unrelated in meaning, are connected through sound. Time and space become folded over each other, collapse into the wonder of this hidden entanglement. When the world rhymes, we find ourselves woven into a surprising connection of intimacy, that reminds us that land of the dead is much more mysterious than we know, beings who we have seemingly never met are reaching out their hands to us, that we rhyme, that we belong, that we fit into this world exactly as we are supposed to.

I read “Betty’s” obituary when I got home. She had not founded the practice we go to but one in another town. But she had been one of the first women to go to UPenn and the first to become a vet. She had never married, had no descendants, no children, no surviving family but many beloved friends whose names were listed in her decade-old death notice. Still, they were probably old too.

When we die without children or family, we wonder who will remember us, who will tell our story. But the dead remember everything. They call out to us as surely as Betty called out to me during the storm to let me know that there were many of my deepest prayers that she could answer. Who is she to me? Someone who loves me and my animals and my wild animal self. My children go to this vet with their animals. We now have a shrine and a friend whenever we are headed there in an emergency. We will call on Betty and get to know her from the other side. I will tell my grandchildren about Betty, and they will tell their grandchildren about Betty. This is what it really means to become an ancestor.

As I always say, we cannot make these connections and experience these rhymes without asking for help. Specifically. Urgently. Following our intuition. If I had not called out in that moment in the rain, I would not have known that I had a lost mother watching out for me from her grave. Yes, I was calling out that day to many souls but there was one soul in particular who needed me to find her again.

Our necessities, our desires, our calamaties are all opportunites to get to know the dead. When we get to know the dead, we are embraced by the magic of all that is. What help do you need today? Who are you summnoning?

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Perdita Finn is a writer, a woodwife, an old witch. She has been a chestnut tree in a vanished grove, a seal (her husband hides her skin in the attic), a she-bear dreaming inside the mountain, and always a mother to blood kin, soul kin, fur kin and odd kin. The dead have, over the past thirty odd years, led her back to the old ways of magic and miracles.

She is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseeen World and Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors. With her husband Clark Strand she wrote The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary.