La Lune!: a triptych
An essay by Catherine Simone Gray
I
Fall felt like one long death march, the last week soaked through with menstrual blood. For two days I felt immobilized by rays of grief and anxiety from every direction.
One grief: We buried our cat in the backyard, our second in three weeks found dead in the road. I’d bottle-fed them as kittens, their tiny claws latching into my finger flesh.
On Friday night the moon was full, and I knew one thing we needed. Our family piled into the car.
“Where are we going?” my six-year-old asked.
“Into the darkness,” I declared, my voice a solid mythic resin as we exited the highway toward woods on the Natchez Trace. “But you don’t need to be afraid. We’re together and the moon is bright.”
Under the moon, I didn’t know why so much death had happened in one season, but I knew I wouldn’t be asleep to it.
This was a trip of Grimm proportions. I’d just wielded a tiny funnel to pour my nana’s ashes into a gold vial, poking a silver needle into the tube to clear gray pebbles of her bone. I clicked the vial into the heart-shaped locket and clasped it around my neck. Mom had been wearing her matching gold heart for weeks, but I wasn’t ready for this ceremony until now.
Ma famille walked down the long-grassed hill at the Overlook and processed to the moonwater. I carried the Mary candle that had burned vigil next to my nana’s body. I read her obituary aloud, the words I wrote. The locket held my skin under my shirt.
By the end, our shoes were grass-damp and our hands were grained with sand. “Mama, this sand feels amazing! You’ve gotta feel it.” The children had shimmied down to touch the water, and I didn’t stop the youngest when he stepped onto a big rock on the waves. He needed this undisturbed flow of his body‘s balance, this belief in his teeter-capacity. We all do.
Under the moon, I didn’t know why so much death had happened in one season, but I knew I wouldn’t be asleep to it. I would follow one moon cycle at a time for glimmers of how to stay awake, to stay listening, to stay alive, truly alive, on this wet earth.
II
“La lune” was the first word Nana taught me in French, her mother tongue. We stood under a full moon bursting with light. “La lune! La lune!” she gasped and pointed up.
I must have been about three. But the glow of one moon cycle seeps into all the others. What I remember is how I echoed her words: “La lune!”
For years this was our call-and-response refrain whenever we were under the moon. Umbilical word, ancestral and future-ward on my own tongue.
In this one word was the beginning of a tidal pull to my origins, to an awareness that my story began long before me. My father’s side is a family tree; we can fill in many names. My mother’s side is a family sky, a mystery I reach toward. And yet, it’s complete without my understanding. Vast and constellated, glowing.
Nana died three moon cycles ago under the full moon of August, on my birthday. On that night I felt the radiance of her ending, swirled inextricably with my beginning. My birth day, her death day.
I was by her side in her final hours, and I arrived with the rainbow rebozo that I’d used in my last labor. I draped it across her shoulders. Her eyes wouldn’t open again, and her words were past.
Nana died three moon cycles ago under the full moon of August, on my birthday. On that night I felt the radiance of her ending, swirled inextricably with my beginning.
I could feel her laboring toward death in the way I labored in birth. Her body was doing its own inevitable work now, just as my cervix had dilated without my instruction.
She was breathing with what the hospice nurse called “the death rattle,” loss of the ability to swallow, saliva accumulation, bronchial secretions. I thought of my birth moans, more involuntary than any sounds I’d made before.
That she was laboring out of this earth on the day I came in, when my mother labored me out of her own darkness, vibrated like a testimony. To what? Our eternal connection, the dance of beginnings and endings, histories and futures, who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.
She and I were, are, will be imprinted in each other’s cells, cloud that wanted to be rain and rain that wants to be cloud, never separate in earth or sky, unending.
III
“Mama! You’ve gotta go outside and see the moon!” my son said. It was even bigger and brighter than the night before, he promised. I went straight to the door, and the children followed barefoot.
“La lune!” I gasped.
“La lune!” they repeated.
What a gift to look at the sky together. We’d been looking the other direction so much in recent weeks, downward, into dirt, into the holes we dug to bury our two cats.
“When an animal dies, their heart stops beating, they stop breathing, their blood stops flowing. When their eyes close, they don’t open again.”
Factual, honest, lovingly direct. We’d already walked them through this passage with our dog a few years before and for other community pets too. Then there was the death of their great grandmother, our matriarch, three months ago.
There is special healing available in walking our children through hard, sacred moments.
We asked them if they wanted to see the bodies of their kitties before we put them in the ground. They did. They stroked their fur, touched their hardened limbs. One son turned and burrowed tears into my chest. Another skipped off to the swingset with a shovel still in his hand.
There is special healing available in walking our children through hard, sacred moments. To guide with emotional coherence and gravitas that I could only find for myself in adulthood.
Not perfectly—I nodded to Lloyd to deliver the news each time on the couch because when I opened my mouth to say the sad sad words, a dimorphous grin overtook my face. I didn’t shame myself for the reflex to smile; my body was doing the very best it could, the way it had learned long ago.
So “La lune!” I gasped under the bright moon, full again.
“La lune!” they repeated.
And in this way we pass the light to the next generations. And in this way, they pass the light to us. The light doesn’t travel in one direction, and you and I, we share this moon from wherever we stand. We share this night.
Beautiful, beautiful.