When the Sky Falls
A prayer for what we cannot save and the immeasurable weight of grief
(warning: today’s writing may be particularly raw for those who have lost a child or a parent, so please be gentle with yourself)
Yesterday, the sky fell.
No thunder. No crack. No warning.
The day began in a quiet room, preparing for a sound meditation, with stillness hanging in the air like dust in sunlight. The scent of freshly made tea lingered, sharp, sweet, grounding.
I was with a friend. She had just received word of a death in her family. A young life, gone too soon. A child left behind to learn how to live with absence. Grief with its suitcase barely unpacked. She didn’t say much. She didn’t need to.
The singing bowls began. Then the gongs. Then the breath.
The air trembled with sound, warm and metallic. A kind of shelter, an architecture where grief could stretch its arms. The vibration didn’t solve anything. But it rearranged us anyway. Witnessing. The resonance filling in where language faltered.
And then, something else.
As I softened into the sound, I began to fly.
Not metaphor. Not memory. It was vision, vivid, visceral.
I soared over green lands, dense, humming, thick with a knowing that did not come from experience but from somewhere older. A knowing that predated language and resonated deeply within me. The air there smelled wet and alive, like rain clinging to leaves.
Eventually, I reached a stone building. Worn, crumbling, soft with age. No door. Moss on the walls. Plants growing from the cracks like it had been gently swallowed by time. The stone radiated coolness. The moss smelled like quiet.
I flew up. Into it. Through it.
Unafraid. Certain.
It was unknown, and it was mine.
I knew it without knowing it.
Then the bowls sang again. Then the breath. The sound pressed against my chest like a hand. I carried that resonance with me as I left, like a hum under my skin.
I could still feel it in my ribs a short while later as I was driving in a residential neighborhood, on my way to deliver a MOLST form to a hospice patient’s family. (That’s a Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. The paper that says yes to this, no to that. A map for the end, when the road begins to unravel.)
That’s when the sky fell again, on a lawn like any other.
I saw them: a rabbit, two impossibly small, perfect babies. Trembling. Still learning how to be here.
Then the crow came.
Sleek. Sharp. Unapologetic.
It descended in silence.
Snatched one of the trembling babies.
Gone.
The mother rabbit leapt.
Not to escape, but to chase.
She flung her whole body after the bird, defying gravity, reason, mercy.
The second baby sat still and silent in the grass. Another bird hovered above.
I didn’t move.
I didn’t breathe.
I didn’t know which mother to pray for.
I longed to fly again, to bring that trembling baby back to earth. Horns honked behind me.
I kept driving. I delivered the MOLST form to a daughter, shimmering with grief, another life on the brink, another sky slowly falling.
From there I went to the nursing home to visit another hospice patient. His brother showed up and began telling stories. “He used to catch rabbits,” the brother said. “And gophers. Helped the local farmers out that way. Not for sport, but to be of use.”
I thought of the mother rabbit again.
Her wild leap into the air.
Her devotion or desperation.
Her inability to do anything but try.
While he spoke, another patient down the hall began to cry out.
“I want my mommy,” the voice said.
“Where is my mommy?”
”Where is my daddy?”
“Why won’t anyone help me find them?”
“I’m scared.”
She repeated the words like an incantation.
Over and over. A loop of longing.
A child’s voice in an aging body, pleading for someone long gone.
The nurses didn’t flinch.
The brother kept sharing his memories.
I nodded at the appropriate moments.
We all pretended not to hear her.
But I did.
I heard everything.
Her voice looped in my mind, laced with fear and something primal. She was calling to what made her. Calling for the ones who once lifted her out of bed, out of sleep, out of the dark.
And no one came.
And I thought of the rabbit again. Her baby lifted into the sky, and her, leaping after it, heart-first.
We are lifted by those who love us.
And sometimes, by those we fear.
And still, we reach, toward what made us, what left us, what we cannot stop chasing.
But inside me, something shook.
The same part that had been opened by the singing bowls.
The same part that soared above green lands.
The same part that watched a rabbit try to fly.
And I thought: this is what the end of life sometimes sounds like.
Not always silence. Not always grace.
Sometimes it is the child inside the dying, wailing for someone long gone.
Sometimes it is a bird tearing through the blue.
Sometimes it is the one left behind, throwing herself toward the sky with nothing but the need to try.
Unexpected.
Unbearable.
Unfathomable.
And still, we keep driving.
Keep doing.
Keep turning toward the next task.
Later, I remembered something I’d once read,
that grief is not something to move through.
It’s something we move with.
A companion. A second skin.
A song we carry, quietly, everywhere.
A taste in the mouth that never quite fades.
Salt and memory.
Yesterday, I carried many songs.
One in a sound meditation, sitting beside a friend whose loss had just arrived.
One over green lands, flying toward an ancient stone ruin that knew me.
One on a lawn, watching a rabbit mother leap into a sky that had already taken what she loved.
One in a nursing home, listening to a brother remember how his sibling caught what burrowed.
One in the hallway, echoing with a voice calling out to the dead.
And one, unspoken, still inside me.
The sound of being lifted, carried, taken.
Yesterday, the sky fell
and fell
and fell.
And each time, the world kept turning.
And somehow,
still,
we sang.