We love quiet; we suffer the mouse to play;

when the woods are rustled by the wind, we fear not.

Conestoga Indian leader, name not recorded in the account, speaking to the governor of Pennsylvania, 1796

When my sister Dorothy died suddenly at the age of 47, my perception of reality shifted.  If something similar has happened to you, I would love to hear your story.  For me, it began with a mouse...

We were gathered at a hotel in Traverse City, Michigan, dazed, disbelieving.  Did we actually have to plan a memorial service for our sister? The information did not process.  We knew she'd had chronic leukemia for a number of years, but all had been going well; she'd been receiving new chemotherapy treatment and three of us were perfect matches for a bone marrow transplant, if that became necessary.   A latent strain of hepatitis C, though, had a different idea. She'd contracted it years earlier from an infant she cared for in her job as an occupational therapist.  On December 22, she wasn't feeling well.  By December 25, she - who celebrated every Christmas with homemade rumballs, fudge and almond crescents, and gifts wrapped in fabric --  was in a coma. On December 27, in the dawning morning, she slipped away from us and left us aghast and bereft -- her three children, her husband, her mother, her father, and her four sisters and brother, her nieces and nephews.  On December 28, we were planning her service.

But I had, a month or so earlier, read a New York Times article about the medium George Anderson. The skeptical reporter admitted she could not explain what she experienced.  Might my siser still be out there, somewhere?  I began calling out to her, in my mind, over and over, "If you are still there, if you can still somehow hear me, send me a sign, send us a sign..."

My three children, along with their cousins, were watching a movie in a room down the hall, and everytime I checked on them, I vaguely registered that there were mice on the TV screen, dozens and dozens of mice, dashing to and fro.  I remember thinking, what is with all the mice?

By 3 a.m, we all stumbled off to our separate rooms, and as I started getting ready for bed, a dark brown mouse darted out from the bathroom of my hotel room and paused, regarding me with bright eyes.  My usual reaction to seeing a mouse would be to shriek and leap on top of the nearest chair.  That night, however, I felt strangely calm. Memories skittered through my mind.  Memories of bizarre hilarity and comraderie with Dorothy, arising from mice.

During my fourth year at Hampshire College, I stayed in Dorothy's house in the Connecticut countryside for several months, writing my Division III thesis.  She had a cat, and the cat was a talented mouse-catcher. We were talented screamers, squeamish and hysterical.  Once, when her cat left a dead mouse on the dining room floor, we spent over an hour giggling hysterically as we attempted to completely cover up the mouse with baking soda, waiting for her sturdy, unexcitable housemate to come home and remove the remains.

Yet  Dorothy also had a peculiar protective fondness for mice (and all living creatures, including spiders and ants). When her housemate moved out, Dorothy began using a live trap to catch the mice, but before she released them into the wild, she would spray-paint the mice with spots so she could see if the same little critters were finding their way back into her house.

That night in Traverse City, I was so exhausted, my mind so numb, that these memories hop-scotched through my mind and were gone.  The mouse dashed into the darkness.  I walked down to the hotel front desk to report the mouse.  The clerk was utterly disbelieving, in an amused sort of way.  He said he’d never heard of anyone seeing a mouse in the hotel, and when I asked what could be done he laughed and said he would bring his cat to work the next day.

The next morning (no sign of the mouse or evidence it had snacked on our leftover pizza), I lay in bed, making a list of all the things Dorothy had made for me (ranging from graduation gowns, winnie-the-pooh mugs,  and afghans to baklava, trivial pursuit pies, and a chocolate cabbage cake), to be read at her service.  As I was re-reading it, though, I saw that I had written “drunk mouse” on the list.  It flickered through my brain that the mouse didn’t belong on the list, but I couldn’t really focus, and left the list as it was.   In fact, the mouse was the only thing I’d written down that Dorothy had not made; she’d given it to me for my birthday the year after I’d stayed with her in Connecticut, a fuzzy, bendable grey mouse with an ice bag on its head, hugging a bottle of Scotch, in commemoration of our mouse hilarity.  

Later that day, I told my brother about seeing the mouse in my hotel room.   How strange, he said, and told me that Dorothy's 14 year old daughter had seen a mouse in the pool area of the hotel the day before.

The next morning, the day of the service, one of my other sisters came into my room and told me that her son had seen a mouse during the night in their room, a few doors down.  Was this a mice infestation?

As I went over my list of what Dorothy had made for me, I saw the words “drunk mouse” again and realized it didn’t belong on the list; it wasn't something Dorothy had made.  I crossed it off, but was left with a faint feeling of confusion, that I hadn’t quite sorted something out.

After the service, on the drive back home to Detroit, thoughts of the mice events kept skittering across my mind, but nothing came into focus.

It was several days after Christmas by now, the time I usually make an annual new year greetings card.  There would be no card this year, I was thinking -- I had no heart for searching through books to find inspiration for a card -- until I thought of “Touch the Earth”, a book of Native American sayings that Dorothy had given to me many years earlier.  It was one of her favorite books; she’d used a quote from it for her wedding invitation.  I hadn’t looked at the book in years, but I knew I still had it somewhere.

When we got home and everyone was in bed, I found “Touch the Earth” high on a shelf, and sat down on the couch.  As I began to open it, I had what can only be described as a Shirley MacLaine moment.  The book literally fell open to a page upon which, years ago, I had marked with yellow highlighter this quote:

“We love quiet.  We suffer the mouse to play.

When the woods are rustled by the wind, we fear not.”

A sensation of complete insight and understanding, as when an elusive, frustrating puzzle is suddenly solved, came over me. I looked through the book, and found no other mention of a mouse.  I opened the book over and over, seeing if perhaps it just fell open that way because the binding was bent.  But never again did it fall open to that page.  Then I went upstairs and found the little grey mouse, covered with dust, that my sister had given me over 20 years earlier, and I pondered.

A couple of months later, my younger sister Katharin went to give blood, thinking to herself that Dorothy would be very pleased, because, a few months before she died, she’d had to receive several blood transfusions, and had e-mailed all of us asking that we please donate blood and replenish the blood banks.  The nurse who took Katharin's blood that day was wearing a pin on her coat -- a pin in the shape of a little silver mouse.

we suffer the mouse to play

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