Thin Places

I combed my daughter’s hair, painted her nails, smoothed her shirt and when she looked perfect, I kissed her forehead and stepped back. Then I watched a man close the lid on the twenty years of her life.

I was deceived by the feel of her supple cheek that day after she died. She was like a green limb reaching for the sun, severed at the whim of the wind, the tree’s canopy of little protection. When illicit Oxy’s calming wind blew into her veins did she suddenly realize what she consumed was coated in fentanyl poison? Was it like being in the eye of the hurricane where there is calm for a moment before chaos takes over or was it like floating away on her favorite pair of Nike Airs™?

We call her Babe. We called her Babe. She was conceived out of risk and born to a mother with the courage to let her go, to trust in us to love her. That mother probably kissed Babe’s tiny face and said goodbye as her tears smudged her signature on a parental termination form. She had to walk away without knowing her baby was going thousands of miles away.

Babe grew from pigtails and pot belly, into a magnificent hugger, lean with agility and speed, full of balance, beauty and charm, and a softness for the underdog.  She was sunshine and moonlight. She was probably the love of her birthmother’s life. She was our love.

Shoe boxes lie stacked on the floor of her closet next to her smelly worn soccer cleats—a driven competitor never cares about appearances and a little dirt. These boxes are all that’s left of her shelves full of tennis shoes: blue, red, white, black, pink. Nike Air™, Nike Air Max™, Nike Air Jordan™, Nike Air Force™. Get them when they first drop and you are a Force of fashion, noticeable. Crease guards kept the shoes and her persona in perfect shape. All that Air can make you feel like you can fly.  It can make you feel invincible. Life to the Max.

For Babe, the slim space between consumer and consumed contracted into an unexpected past tense. On the day of her funeral, 1,000 pairs of tennis shoes peeked out beneath suits and dresses. Pockets of tissue and smudged cheeks flanked her casket, her soccer team served as an honor guard ushering her out of the church with a roaring game cheer. Babe always liked that kind of noise. Could she hear it? The pallbearers slid her casket into the hearse that drove her away for the last time.

On my visits to the cemetery, I imagine it’s too quiet for her in a box in a vault under so much dirt. Too often, a roar fills my ears, my gut, my heart, when I think about the quiet and her in a box. Her grave is marked by a planter pot of pansies to which her friends added seashells, pebbles, votives, a can of root beer, a buddha statue, a gnome, Mardi gras beads, and a single picture of her running on a soccer field, wings super-imposed on her shoulders. In the center of the pot is a single Airless tennis shoe, heel planted in the dirt, stiff toe pointing at the clouds. Next to that is a heart-shaped gravestone inscribed with her name.

I put down one knee and then the other, digging my toes into the grass to stabilize my emotions. But I can only fall prostrate, forehead in the dirt and green shoots and sob futile tears, their sprinkling of water insufficient to sprout her back to life. Do I kneel because I am coming undone? Do I rest my head in the dirt for the unspoken, the unrealized, the unknown? Do I kneel for forgiveness? Did I fail to keep my implicit promise to her birth mother to keep her safe?

Sometimes I wonder if Babe could still be here in the deer living around our cabin. Generally, deer rest in the tall grasses during the midday. They come out to feed early in the morning and again at dusk when the afternoon heat wanes and the setting sun casts long shadows to provide cover. So, I was surprised one mid-morning to see a doe in the middle of the road. For a slow minute her majestic form paused, eyes fixed on my stride, aware of my heavy breathing as I jogged closer unfazed by her powerful body. At the last moment when the spell was broken, wild again she bounded into the brush. The first time I saw her I assumed her untimely presence was an anomaly. One week later, she again appeared mid-afternoon.  She had my attention. The third weekend when I saw her it was still well before dusk. I wondered then if she was specifically looking for me.

Maybe Babe came in the free tickets we received to attend Australian Christian rock group Hillsong United’s sold-out concert. The group’s famous tune “Oceans” was performed by a soloist at Babe’s funeral.  I had never heard of the group or the song until someone pointed out it was one of Babe’s favorites. Months later we attended the concert and listened to the original version. It overtook us like a wave and drowned us in grief. When the lead singer kept thanking the crowd of 20,000 for coming back after the concert had been postponed due to COVID, we were curious enough to look up the original concert date. It was February 26, 2022—the day Babe died.

Maybe, for a moment, she was someone else. Months after Babe died and we had designed and purchased a grave marker, my frequent visits to the cemetery always began with me hoping to see her headstone. It never seemed to come. Then one day I parked on the side of the road nearest her grave and noticed a truck pull in behind me. The truck bed was weighed down by a very distinct heart-shaped stone­—Babe’s stone! As they exited their truck, I approached two men, one older and one younger, to ask when they would be installing the stone. “Right now,” the older replied while the younger took a step back. I hiked up the hill and took a seat under a large tree about 20 feet from the gravesite. It seemed like a miracle to be here at that moment, and I didn’t want to disturb the installer’s work. 

In a short time, I could see that the younger man was an apprentice.  He never said a word but watched and followed his coach’s directions to the letter. I could also see that the installer took his time, was very precise because both the apprentice and I were watching with careful eyes. He measured, mixed grout, applied and skimmed it, lowered the stone into place with a crane on the truck, cleaned up the edges, measured again, and adjusted the base with a slight taps of his hammer.

When his task was complete, he went to the truck and pulled out cleaning spray and carefully wiped down the entire stone until it was dust free and shined. The apprentice stepped back and smiled with a few unintelligible words of appreciation for his boss’ craftsmanship. And then, for the first time, he glanced my way, his eyes saying, “Look how we did, Mom. It’s perfect for you.” Turning, he gathered up the shovels and trowels and threw them into the pick-up bed. Together they drove to the next gravesite to install another stone.

Maybe these encounters were simply Babe’s parting gifts. 

Eight months later, I stood and stared at a disheveled pile of rocks on a gravel trail in northwest Spain. None of them resembled polished granite, none of them carved with a name. The beluga whale-sized mound of painted rocks some rough, smooth and jagged, some round and sized like grapefruits, apples, melons stacked and piled and placed around a blue and yellow symbolic clam shell sign. The sign directs pilgrims along the way of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrim’s route for 1,200 years. The stones represent burdens placed by pilgrims on the way. I was a pilgrim too. For the first time in my life, the journey was just for me: no mission, no agenda, except perhaps, unknown at the time, I was still in search of Babe. While not as heavy as a stone, I carried a bag of Babe’s pennies intending to deposit them on the trail.

Over six days, my husband and I walked 100 miles on a path traversed by thousands of pilgrims leading to the cathedral where St. James is buried. The presence of all the others who had gone before us was palpable in the pile of pilgrim rocks.

We began in Barcelona where we washed away our jet-leg visiting tourist sites.  Not intending to spend any time at the beach, we decided to just dip our hands in the Mediterranean Sea before flying to the opposite coast of Spain to begin our Camino along the Atlantic Ocean. Gingerly approaching the sea in our tennis shoes, we noticed a few pieces of green sea glass in the sand. Sea glass comes in all shapes and sizes, mostly miniscule fragments of soda bottles and other glass polluting the ocean.  Over time, as the waves toss and tumble, the sharp edges of the broken glass wear down and the clarity of the glass dulls into a frosty surfaced smooth stone. Collectors use the sea glass to make jewelry and art. 

We understand the value of sea glass in a different way. Many people compare grieving to holding the sharp edges of a fist full of broken glass. The one grieving can’t stop squeezing the shards even though they tear at their flesh.  Like sea glass, over time, grief’s edges are made dull and smooth, so what still feels like glass stops cutting your hand as you grasp it. Grieving people like me never release the glass; it just becomes less painful to hold.

I had been to a hundred beaches in my life and only seen fragments of sea glass that slipped through my hand like sand.  Here, we noticed large pieces of glass a quarter to half inch in diameter in a whole range of green shades. Forgetting about the beautiful blue water, we began picking up sea glass. First a few pieces and then we were filling our pockets with nickel-sized ones.  “Can you believe this!” I asked my husband as I stood rubbing my lower back stiff from all the bending.  “My pockets are full,” I said as I slipped a heart shaped green stone in my pocket and walked back toward the sidewalk at the edge of the beach. To no one in particular, I said, “I think Babe is here.” The next day we departed Barcelona to begin our pilgrimage on the west coast of Spain.

Signing up for a pilgrimage is very intentional, but the walk itself is the opposite. The only requirement is to move from location A to B and then prepare to walk from location B to C. The model fit our mourning mindset perfectly.

On a pilgrimage, the beat of your steps on the path are rhythmic and like prayer beads, rosary beads or worry beads, as you finger another bead or take another step, your breathing slows to an even pace with your steps.  When my mind found quiet, I began to see the small things around me that my busy mind otherwise discards as unimportant in the moment. Deeper still, I began to sense energy around me that wasn’t visible to my eye.

On the first day of walking, we encountered salt flat ruins. The Romans made basins along the shore to collect sea water that would evaporate leaving behind the salt, a valuable commodity for trade, food preservation, weddings and funeral ceremonies, and health. At a her memorial service, Babe’s soccer coach had called her “salt of the earth” because she was valued as a person, irreplaceable on the team, and most of all added flavor to our lives because of her “spicy” personality.

Imagining our life without Babe reduced our hope to the size of a grain of salt. Then 1,000 lights of hope showed up at Babe’s funeral all wearing tennis shoes. What is the measure of a thousand grains of salt? Perhaps so tiny it would only fill a teaspoon? Yet, a teaspoon of salt is the amount called for in most recipes to makes food both taste good and nourish. Encountering the ancient salt flats told me we were on the right path, and I dropped a penny in its basin.

Along with pennies, Babe collected lots of things as a child—Dum Dum wrappers, grocery receipts, Squishies—most of which had little monetary value—her belly laugh! Somewhere along the way, I heard in my mind, “Pennies from Heaven” an old Bing Crosby tune: “They toss a penny down, sometimes just to cheer you up . . . So don't pass by that penny when you're feeling blue; it may be a penny from heaven that an angel's tossed to you.” It reminded me our loved ones are somewhere out there just beyond our view.

The northern part of Spain called Galicia is known for its Celtic culture. The Celts famously dubbed the space between “here” where humans reside and “there” where deceased loved ones and God abide, “thin places” a place where the here and there collapse into one realm. The Camino is full of thin places.

As I entered a Spanish village on day five of our trek, I was inexplicably drawn to a small church like so many other ones I had seen along the way. I didn’t really want to stop, but something was telling me to go there. I rounded the corner and a short wall opened into steps descending to a small courtyard. Stepping across the cobblestones, I noticed a statue of St. James adorned by pilgrims with ribbons, flowers, pictures, shells, gourds, and other mementos. What I saw at the base of the statue seemed so unreal, I bounded down the stairs to it before it could disappear as a dream. There nestled under St. James was a real pair of white tennis shoes next to a real Colombian flag.

Babe was born in Colombia. Babe loved white Nike Air Force tennis shoes. I felt my daughter’s presence. In a thin place, here is always in there.  It was another sign. I couldn’t move my feet from the statue and wept. We never saw another pair of tennis shoes on the Camino, nor were there any more Colombian flags.

The last day of our pilgrimage dawned, so we rose early to arrive at the Cathedral in Santiago by early afternoon. Many had warned me, arriving in Santiago can be anti-climactic because the journey is the point and it would be over when we converged with hundreds of pilgrims in the old city center square.

The cathedral is massive, and ancient and awe inspiring. On the inside is a statue of Saint James whose marble robes have been touched so many times they bear permanent indentations. As we waited for the Mass in honor of pilgrims to begin, I wandered my way through all the chapels in the cathedral looking for a spot to leave the last of Babe’s pennies. Where would she hide if she could play a game of hide and seek in here?  Where would the housekeeper not dust her penny away? I found a chapel dedicated to the Black Madonna, who I had read was a symbol of earth and nature, and growth in agriculture, a goddess of the living and the dead and a sign of motherhood. Black Madonnas were carved out of ebony wood, which is naturally dark in color. This particular Madonna was the only depiction of a person of color in this whole church, and I knew this would be the chapel in where Babe would want to be. Along the back wall on in a dark corner I slid my last penny into a crack in the chair rail molding, taking care that no one saw me. 

Back in the main part of the cathedral, I took my seat on the aisle so that I would have a good view of what I waited two hours to see.  I am not Catholic, and the priest was speaking in Spanish, so I was unable take in much of the Mass. Suddenly, in lockstep, five men wearing floor length red robes approached one of the massive marble support pillars near the altar.  They untied an enormous rope attached to a hook on the pillar and together stepped into the sanctuary. They released the rope slowly to activate a pully that lowered to the floor the world’s largest incense burning receptacle known as a butafumeiro.  Leaning into the five-foot, 180-pound silver structure, one of the men lit the burner and smoky incense began to waft out of the carved notches on all sides. 

Activating the pully again, the five men came together and bending in unison to use their combined weight, pulled down on the rope raising the butafumeiro high above their heads. In a single motion the men rhythmically lifted and lowered, thrusting the silver orb to the left and then to the right causing it to swing ever higher from one end of the church to the other until it nearly kissed the 100-foot ceiling. 

As it passed within two feet of my seat, I gasped in fear it would swing off course and take me out. But these men kept the butafumeiro precisely in line. Eventually, they began to ease the burner into ever smaller arcs until one of them grabbed on to the orb itself and spun in circles until he could steady it to a rest on the ground. Dense incense smoke hung like clouds over our heads, the pungent smell burning our noses. So worth the wait, this ceremony resembled the size and perilousness of my grief, sometimes spinning out of control as I hold on and try to steady it, releasing the dark smoke inside me. The church has always been a space where souls unburden themselves. Maybe it was here that Babe finally floated away in my heart.

Years later, I still trudge through the cemetery, eyes fixed on the tree canopy, blinking away the dappling sunshine. I’m searching for a glimpse of Babe’s soul in a rare bright goldfinch or a warm breeze that feels like her breath, or in another child’s perfectly contagious belly-laugh—anything to tamp down the ache of her absence.

At the same time, when I see the flowerpot with its fading Nike Air shoe cradling a few pennies and a sprinkling of sea glass, I hope she is not there. I am hoping she is somewhere else, that she is more than brittle bones in a concrete vault marked by a heavy stone. Deep down I know my search is in vain. Her time here is complete. She is thousands of miles away. My impossible task is to summon the same courage of her birthmother twenty years ago and let my baby go.

-Shelly Gill Murray

Shelly Gill Murray is a My Life, My Story writer in a trauma hospital, a jail volunteer and a former Ombudsman for crime victims. A participant on The Moth, her essays are in American Writers Review 2021, Gotham Writers, San Fedele Press e-book Art in the Time of COVID-19, Mandala Magazine, Mn Women’s Press, Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition: Honorable Mention, Hindsight, Caringbridge.org, Adoptive Families Magazine, AAA Travel Magazine. She lives near Lake Harriet, which she has circled 7000 times.