Holy Water | photography

Holy Water

There is power in water.

I once read about this woman. Slipping closer to death with each day, all medical heroics exhausted, her family took turns parting her lips, dribbling teaspoons of water past her teeth onto her tongue. And so, she lived long past what was believed possible. Until one day, in barely audible breaths and spurts, she begged, “Do not give me another drop of water.”

Two days later, she died.

My early years were colored by the relentless, cavernous roar of the great falls. The falls that legend says was formed by an underground poisonous serpent. The falls that devoured Indian maidens sent over its precipice with fruit-laden canoes. The same falls that spared the 7-year-old Woodward boy, the first one ever to survive a plunge over the wondrous Niagara without a barrel.

So how is that some are spared and some devoured?

I remember the clear, blessed sprays that would shoot from the priest’s gold-globed holy water thrower. The water that almost burns when it hits. The water that filled the tiny moon-shaped bowl under the light switch in my mother’s home. Holy water, they say.

Is it holy water in baptismal pools? The shrine at Fatima? Stigmata tears?

The water we sprinkle inside Ivy’s grave before placing the first shovel of red earth over her cooling body, is this holy water?

What makes it holy?

The priest’s blessing. A minister’s words. How is it a human can somehow transform what already seems holy into something better? Holier than virginal rain spewing from overburdened clouds?

Ivy loves rain. For more than a decade we’ d walk in gentle mists, letting it dampen and curl our hair, mine more frizz than curl, hers like chocolate waves along her back. For more than a decade we slept curled belly to back, lulled by the tinny sounds spattering the roof, tent or van as we stopped along the highway on one of our many adventures.

Ivy, like her golden sister Emilie is a traveler. Ivy and Emilie, my dog girls. Girls that love to stay in hotels, get room service and lounge long into the night on the two side-by-side queens. We stayed at Hiltons, Sheratons, Motel 6.

Together we covered stories for newspapers and magazines, The New York Times, The Washington Post and even the offbeat Gadfly.

We once spent a week with Frank Serpico, the famed New York City cop who turned the police department upside down by exposing dirty cops. The same dirty cops who left him in a pool of his own blood to die at 778 Driggs Street, Brooklyn. Apartment 3-G, after a heroin bust gone very bad.

“You’re bringing your dogs?” Frank asks before we meet him just beyond the Catskills, near Hudson. “Sure,” I tell him. “Sure, they go everywhere with me.” And I say it like it’s normal, like why would he be surprised they’d be covering a story with me.

But Ivy doesn’t like Frank. She barks and jumps and lunges, the same way she does when she gets a whiff of Bogie, one of the farm dogs who bares his teeth in nasty snarls.

It rained that whole week in New York with Frank. Rained unforgivingly, so that the lakes were cold and pock-marked from its harsh drops. It wasn’t the kind of rain that gives life and nurtures parched, drought-scarred earth. It was the kind of rain that swells rivers beyond their banks, ripping roots and homes and bodies on its turbulent journey.

Since we placed Ivy in the earth, the rain seems to come and come and never stop, like the earth can’t stop crying for her. Or is it me who can’t stop crying?

There is power in water.

The phone rings like shards of bitter metal. “Ivy,” I whisper.

Just hours before we sat curled in blankets on the floor of the Vet hospital, my husband, Ivy and me. All day I watched the water drip, 200 drops, 400 drops, 2,000 drops. Drops that kept that woman alive and surely drops that will keep my Ivy alive.

Now I am home in bed without her, and she without me. I think of her alone. Is she trembling? The way she does when she’s afraid, or cold or just wanting attention. If she is, does she know I want to be there to wrap her in blankets, hold her close to my heart, whisper gentle words into her ear? Does she know they made us go home, wouldn’t let us stay by her side? We’ve never slept apart until tonight. It seems like hours before my hand reaches the receiver, but I actually answer on the first ring.

“Ivy’s not doing well,” the Vet whispers. “I’m afraid she’s not going to make it.”

“What do you mean, not going to make it?”

It’s as if I am in one of those vaporous, just before waking dreams. The one where the faceless, ashen man moves toward me in the blackness, moves so close, he can touch me. So close, he presses his finger into my heart, like a bullet, like tearing flesh. But there is no blood, only pain. I can’t stop the pain.

We’ll be right there,” I choke in barely audible breaths. Blindly, I pull on jeans. Running through the house, I wail. My breaths come in heavy groaning bursts. I don’t recognize these sounds coming from my body because now it doesn’t feel like my body. My husband drives. I heave, sob and turn inside out. I see her on the table, her beautiful brown body. The body I’ve held and kissed and inhaled for what seems like a lifetime. She looks over, golden warm eyes still trying to keep me safe. Still unselfish as if wanting to keep me from the pain.

Our eyes link in a knowing connection born from years of knowing. I put my mouth near hers, trying to breathe some of my own life into her lungs. We have only seconds. I want to selfishly sob. But I don’t, not at this moment. Ivy hates to see me cry. And now trapped on this table she can’t run to find a toy, a shoe, a Kleenex box; anything to make me laugh.This is our final time to share a piece of the other. I want it to last forever. But now she’s drowning in her own blood. I hear it in her lungs. I caress her head, kiss her thick pink lips, whisper, “It’s OK baby. It’s OK to leave Mama. I love you.”

I lie with her still warm body. Same as always, belly to back. And now like rivers swelling past their banks, like the Niagara’s unrelenting roar, my tears fall and stream and never seem to stop. I lie here with my friend, inhaling her paws, running my hands over cheeks and lips and muscled thighs.

There is power in water.I fill a large copper kettle with water. It boils. I trickle golden, oily drops of tea tree into the rising steam. There is comfort in this scent, like deep rich earth. Like the earth my husband lifts shovel by shovel.