Firefly Beyond

Jane's 22 year-old daughter Ashley and her boyfriend Tyler had gone missing for 4 months during their trek in the Himalayan mountains. The following passage is about waiting, hoping, and finally learning after searching, that Ashley and her boyfriend Tyler had died.

Signs

A week or so after moving to Bainbridge Island, I took a walk on the beach with friends, picking up round stones as we went along. I gathered a coat load of them and, when I returned home, sorted through them until I found the two smoothest oval gray ones. I wasn’t thinking of Ashley, but I remember saying, “You only need two.”

Letting all the others drop from my coat to the sand, I walked inside the house and placed the favored stones on the kitchen counter. Then I moved them to the table. I kept moving them around, finding myself staring at them during conversations with friends who came to visit during the day. Later that night, I brought them upstairs to my bedroom and set them on the bedside table where I could keep my eye on them. Not satisfied, I took them to bed with me and held one in each hand. After a few days of sleeping with the rocks, I said to myself, Jane, you are nuts. You are sleeping with rocks. I made myself put them on the shelf in my bedroom.

Four months later, after the memorial, in a rare moment when I was alone, looking out at the water from my bedroom window, I asked the question that had bothered me since I learned Ashley had died. I felt as her mother that I would have known that she died, but I had not. I asked her, Ashley, since we are mother and daughter and so close, how did I not know that you died? How come you didn’t tell me somehow?

I had an immediate vision of the stones: finding them, sorting them, watching them, being inextricably drawn to them, moving them around the house with me, and sleeping with them. I was grateful.

The little ones you can
hold in your hands, their heartbeats
so secret, so hidden it may take years
before, finally you hear them.

—Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
          (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 37.