The Last Word On Nothing

I recently came across this bucket at one of our local coffee shops — a common drop and collection point for free goods, from books and magazines to excess zucchinis and figs. The bucket and its sign reminded me how much I like this dusty little town and its inhabitants, human and wild. So I called Jeff and asked him if I could write a blog post about the acorn collection program. He obliged with an enthusiastic rundown, emphasizing that I should really call the folks at the zoo and rescue. We chatted long enough to discover that, like everyone around here, he knows my dad. 

A few weeks later, Jeff posted on our community listserv, passing along an email from Kelly Garner, the fawn program director at Sierra Wildlife Rescue. She shared photos of fawns feasting on the donated bounty, thanked the community, and reminded us to use only grocery-sized bags or 3-gallon buckets, as “anything larger can be tough for our volunteers to lift.” Kelly recently took over as fawn program manager from Dave Cook — a legend in the wildlife rescue field who, over the past two decades or so, grew Sierra Wildlife Rescue from an essentially one-man operation into one of the leading fawn rescue operations in California, rehabilitating dozens of fawns a year. 

It was Dave, Kelly told me, who established a relationship with Jeff and Barbara Lee, and got them to help him recruit the community to gather acorns. In addition to leaves and other types of forage, the acorns that shower the ground here in late summer and fall — some dark and shiny as roasted espresso beans, some mahogany or pale yellow — are a staple food source for the convalescing fawns, who also need to eat 10-15% of their body weight in leaves per day. 

During fawn season, from mid-May through late July, the wildlife rescue gets hundreds of calls about fawns that appear to be abandoned, but usually aren’t. Many of these calls are about fawns that have just been left alone for a few hours, but this typically isn’t cause for concern, Kelly said — even when it’s tiny and weak, a fawn’s spots camouflage it well from color-blind predators, who see only dappled light against a dappled background. Unlike mature deer, very young fawns also do not emit scent that predators can detect: they have only one scent gland in their tiny hooves, which produces a chemical their mothers can follow. “Does are excellent mothers and keep their babies well fed and groomed,” Kelly added — if a fawn is alone, mom is often just delayed.

Seeing or hearing signs of distress doesn’t necessarily mean a fawn is an orphan, so when someone calls in, Kelly and her team ask them to keep an eye on it for a while, in case the mom comes back. If a fawn is orphaned, however, the youngest get bottle-fed formula by a single volunteer, so that they don’t get used to more than one person and lose their fear of humans; the goal is always to get rescued fawns back to the wild, Kelly said.

Kelly went to the same high school I did, we learned as we chatted. We both missed the wildlife here when we lived out of the area. Now, at Sierra Wildlife Rescue, she helps nurse hundreds of fawns back to health each year — working with them in groups of fawns around the same age to try to recreate the natural, matrilineal herds they form in the wild. Although the fawns don’t arrive as a family, the young ones can still form this kind of social structure over time — but that requires keeping the groups together and rehabilitating them for months, which is why they need so many acorns. “It really does take a village to feed the fawns,” she concluded, offering to send me more photos of the fawns munching. Then, after kindly answering all my questions, she signed off to feed some rescued foxes and a ringtail.

My mother has forgotten she wants to die. For as long as I can remember she has been, not exactly planning it, but asserting her right to control her manner of death. When our family gathered for an Easter lunch during my freshman year of college, I announced that I had received a full scholarship to study abroad. She announced that she was going to kill herself at 80.

She would have been 48 then. She is 78 now. In the interim, packages have arrived in the mail every now and then from ‘living will’ companies. Advance directives have been stashed in locked filing cabinets. Powers of Attorney have been signed and placed in safe-deposit boxes to which she alone has access (folks, do not do this).

Also in the interim, a long-fought battle for Medical Assistance in Dying triumphed in our jurisdiction and just this month the government announced new legislation to allow advance requests in cases like Alzheimer’s. You no longer have to play roulette with timing—just make the request compos mentis and trust that it will happen once you’ve lost the plot.

It’s a recognition that what someone would want for themselves if they were in sound mind should be, if not automatically deferred to—particularly in something like death—seriously considered.

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Grief is a persistent little bugger. It never really goes away, just changes shape. Well after my last book came out without the fanfare I’d hoped for, I’m revisiting a version of grief that I hadn’t known existed, and that’s still with me. It’s no long a dart; I’d say it’s more a smattering of dust motes. But there it is, still hanging around.

This is how I thought about it when it first hit me.

My dad died last year at age 94, his death a blessing for him and, while immensely sad, a relief for me. My grief felt over too soon, but I realized it was because I’d been grieving him for years. I looked back thinking about those so-called stages of grief we learned about in Psych 101: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These five were originally proposed by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, and while they were derived unscientifically and are clearly massively oversimplified, I have found truth in them. As my father was declining, I’d first denied his trajectory by posing unrealistic plans that required him to have a future (e.g., turning my husband’s workshop into a little apartment for dad, never mind all the nursing care he required). I experienced deep anger at people who didn’t see worth in healing his various ailments, and I begged any higher power who was listening to keep him whole until I could find solutions to unsolvable problems. Eventually, I sat in darkness knowing there was nothing I could do to adjust his heading. I slid in and out of each of these feelings, in various orders, numerous times as he lay dying. By the end, acceptance was all that was left.

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