A Field Guide to the Abeyance of Loss

“Life Cycles III” by Lydia Steenhoek

“Keep a ‘Life List.’ Check the birds you have seen.”

Peterson Field Guides Eastern Birds.

Abeyance of loss as absence:

I am walking along the Andes Rail Trail. Late April wind feels as cold as winter. It rattles bare maple branches. Two yellow-bellied sapsuckers drum, impossibly fast at the start of their rolls, then slowing down on the last four beats. One drums on resonant wood, the other answers, the first drums again. They are invisible, on other sides of their trees. One is high in a lichen speckled maple with a branch bent like a shepherd’s hook. The other is in a tree across the slope with several dead, broken limbs.

Tiny green sprouts of leaves are on honeysuckles. Green has risen higher on stems of rushes along a spring seep. Stones clatter under my feet as I step across it. At the edge of the woods, I hear leaves rustle beneath tightly woven briars. I focus my binoculars on slats of light that reach ground beneath them. I see darting fragments of a bird with brown and black mottled wings. I see his tail for an instant. Leaves fly when it scratches the ground. I finally get a glimpse of yellow spots on either side of his bill, black striped head and the white moon on his throat. He is a white-throated sparrow. There are others. I count three, then move on.

A little olive-gray bird flies to a low limb of an ash tree. I note its round shape, the barring on its wings. The bird turns and I see a white ring around its eye. By the lack of a brilliant red stripe on its head, I know it is a female ruby-crowned kinglet. I walk out of woods into a field.

As long as I focus on calls of red-winged blackbirds and look at the three turkey vultures circling silently over the hillside, I don’t think about Claudia’s absence.

As a verb, the basic idea of abeyance is hope deferred:

Six chimes, rising, falling rising again; a sound that seems unconnected to the world I am in interrupts my dream. My dream feels disconnected too, and slips from my memory as I open my eyes. I wonder what the sound is. The chimes sound over and over. I look toward the bookshelf. The alarm clock glows on a high shelf. Its circular rim is lit by LED light. Orange block numbers in its black center read 05:30.

I fold open blankets, sit on the edge of the futon and put my bare feet on the cold wood floor. I shuffle to the shelf. I tap my finger on the face of the clock trying to find the worn circle with a bell that will silence the chimes. The LED light goes out. The chimes stop. Claudia is still asleep in her hospital bed by the window. Her oxygen concentrator puffs. I cross the dark room and turn on a lamp.

I open the curtains. Empty bird feeders hang in the lilac branches. I put on my coat and go out to fill them.

Abeyance of loss as anticipation:

It sounds like someone is drumming on the kitchen floor. I drop the mop by the front door. Its handle clatters on the floor. I run.

“Archie’s having a seizure!” I say to Claudia.

I kneel beside our old yellow cat, holding his back as his legs kick, so he doesn’t bump into the wall.      

“It’s okay Archie,” I whisper. “Its okay. I’m here.”

He drools. Urine soaks the floor and wets my hands. I slide him to dry floor. His eyes are wide. His lips curl, as if he’s frightened. He pants. What does he see? What does he feel? It is like he has gone off to another world. I stroke his back. I can feel his bones. He’s been losing weight for a long time.

I remember our veterinarian saying, “Seizures are more pernicious in cats than in dogs. They tend to do more damage.”

When he stops kicking, he turns left, as if there is something there he wants to see, or maybe there is something on his right he doesn’t want to see. He tries to stand. He falls over. I keep my hands on him, easing him to the floor. When he seems like he is once again aware of this world, I carry him to Claudia’s bed. I lay him on a pillow on her lap. I wonder if he puts his losses into abeyance. He falls asleep.

I worry. His seizures are coming more often. I don’t want to lose him.

Outside our living room window, house sparrows have gathered at the bird feeders.

Abeyance of loss as a pointless expectation:

x^2 + y^2 = 1 is the equation of a perfect circle. As long as we only consider solutions in the domain of real numbers, it works. There are other domains though. Complex numbers are combinations of real and imaginary numbers in the form of a +bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is the square root of -1 , an imaginary number. When one puts complex numbers into the equation, the results are points of an entirely different space, a plane with one point removed.

“Were you telling me a story?” Claudia asks.

“No. I was just outside with Pepper,” I say as I turn on a lamp in the early morning darkness.     

She has a blank look of confusion. “You started with Dad said…”   

“You’ve been asleep Honey. It’s quarter of six in the morning. You must have been dreaming.” 

She looks angry.           

“You don’t talk to me the same,” she says.        

“I don’t mean to argue Sweetheart. You were just waking up.

Claudia cannot choose the path her life is taking. Neuromyelitis optica directs her, making life smaller, confined to her hospital bed until someone pumps the hydraulic ram of a Hoyer Lift to raise her up and into a wheelchair.

Still, every morning I wake up expecting life to be like it was before her illness.

Abeyance descends from the Medieval French-Middle English word abeer, which means to gape at.

Abeyance of loss as longing:

She strides across the parking lot, black boots clicking.  Her short black dress ripples. Her long dark hair tousles, as if she owns the wind. The way her legs and hips move astonish me.

She reminds me of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1889 painting, Bethsabée. The woman in the painting bathes naked on a rooftop, as David saw her, facing away from the viewer, unaware that she is seen, not knowing the longing she stirs. Hips swiveled, weight on her left leg, she sponges her arm. A wispy cloud is pink with evening afterglow. She gleams in dimming light.

I look at the pavement. I hope the woman in the black dress doesn’t see me. We know each other. I don’t want a conversation with her now though. I feel shame. I’m afraid to feel attraction. Claudia has been bedbound for fifteen years. It has been too long since she made me feel like this. The woman in the parking lot is the shape of loss to me. I feel like I’m standing in the dark outside a locked door with a sliver of light glowing beneath it.

I lift bags of groceries from the cart. I slam the trunk lid. I drive around the back of the parking lot so I don’t pass her car, and turn onto Route 28.

I pay attention to the road. I think about white-throated sparrows. The Vermont Center for Ecostudies data shows that their numbers in the Northeast declined 49.07% between 2010 and 2021. The steepest decline was found here in the Catskill Mountains.

Abeyance of loss as wondering:

Electrons give diffraction patterns similar to light waves. Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger’s equation describes the probability of waves that govern the motion of small particles like electrons.

It is central to quantum mechanics, like Newton’s laws and conservation of energy are to classical mechanics. Wave frequencies create natural harmonics like a vibrating guitar string.

Quantum mechanics tells us our world is a duality. Light and matter are both particle and wave. It is not a world where one event follows the one before in a predictable way. Chance is at its center. There are no fixed points.

When I was learning arithmetic in elementary grades, I would write long columns of numbers on a notepad. I would sit under the lamp in our trailer kitchen adding them up. I sometimes wonder who I might be if I had grown up in a family with more experience in higher education and stories of scientists.

My grandfathers were farmers. My dad worked for the State Department of Transportation. My mom worked as a secretary at SUNY Delhi. Their stories were of manual work. They expected that I might be a mechanic or a carpenter.

Abeyance of loss as doing things alone:

Back home in the kitchen I empty my bags of groceries. I put the milk and meat in the refrigerator, but leave ingredients for coconut citrus steamed cod on the counter. I pour a cup of rice into a pot of boiling water. I assemble our bamboo steamer over a frying pan filled with water. I wrap cod fillets in Swiss chard leaves and put them in the steamer when the water begins to boil. I stir a cup of coconut milk, a half-cup of orange juice and a tablespoon of cornstarch in another pan. I add soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger and sweet chili sauce. I stir it until it bubbles and thickens. I add mandarin oranges. In a cast iron frying pan on a back burner, I sauté chopped Swiss chard.

I scoop rice into white bowls. I lay a fillet next to each mound. I spoon Swiss chard into each bowl. I ladle sauce over the fish, then sprinkle each with slivered almonds and parsley. I carry the bowls to the living room. I hand one to Claudia.

I remember how Claudia and I used to work together in the kitchen making special dinners. Now I do it alone. 

Abeyance of loss as constraint: 

I’m sitting in a leather chair behind a big desk in my office. Frank leans on the door jam. He is wearing a battered tan cap with a faded green visor. His beard looks whiter every time I see him.

“How’s your wife?” he asks.

“That’s always a hard question. About the same I guess.”

“Mine too.”

“Is she still at home?”

“Yup. I can’t find any help though. I go to work all week. Saturday and Sunday, I stay in the house. I can’t turn my back.”

“I know. I’m there too. It’s risky just going to the grocery store if I don’t have someone to stay with Claudia. I don’t have enough help either.”

“We must be good men John.”

“Yeah. I guess so…” 

Abeyance of loss as inactivity:

Light through our living room window gleams on the chrome rails of Claudia’s hospital bed. It shines on the bottle of Tussin I left on top of the chest of drawers that holds her medications and coils of oxygen tubing hanging from the steel arm that holds the triangular trapeze above her head.

Outside the window, a few yellow flowers are on the forsythia bush. Pale green leaves are forming on the lilacs. Two grackles with iridescent heads, a blue jay and three male rose-breasted grosbeaks are perched near the bird feeders.

I pull Claudia’s bed to the middle of the room so she can see the birds. I sit on the futon and drink more coffee.

Abeyance of loss as wishing:

Further down the Rail Trail, a male wood duck swims past golden sedges at the edge of a beaver pond. White edges of his arching iridescent crest and his red eye ring gleam in my binoculars. A chevron shaped wake spreads across the surface of the water as he swims. Two modestly colored females follow him. Their wakes join as they all swim out of sight.

I think about Schrödinger’s waves.

I wish Claudia was here.

about the author

John Jacobson lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York. He has been a caregiver for his wife Claudia for the past fifteen years. He is working on a memoir about that experience.

about the artist

Lydia Steenhoek is an artist and musician from western Washington. They work in a variety of media, and make their living as a tattoo artist. Their work seeks to portray the poetry of the natural world.