Three Otters and a Funeral

My mother had been dead for three days, and I was numb. Not the kind of numb that comes when you’re all cried out from a nasty breakup. It was the kind of numb that makes you pray you don’t get out of bed in the morning.

“Let’s get out. Let’s go do something.”

The last thing I wanted to hear at 8 o’clock in the morning was the cheerful chirp of my girlfriend. I looked down at my phone and hit the power button until the screen went black again. Who did she think she was? How could I possibly want to get out of bed when there was nothing left? It irritated me. I was heartbroken.

Two hours later, I was in a car and heading for the highlands - my boyfriend’s Canon camera strapped around my neck.

You see, I had moved to Scotland from America a few years earlier. Tough times with family, as well as the calls of a new career, sent me tumbling across the world to land squarely back on the shores of my ancestors.

It’s a beautiful country, with rolling hills and bottomless locks that shift like silver in the quickly changing Scottish sun. When summer comes to the rocky shores, the entire nation blooms. Locals whip off tops and every type of birdsong fills the air. There’s no beauty as wild and as wonderful as Scotland, but it can be brutal too - with high winds that ice you to the bone, and lashing rain that beats you into a puddle even when it’s sunny.

This day, we were blessed with a high sun and the kind of light Robbie Burns used to write ballads about. Fluffy white clouds whipped between hills, while we whipped down a winding road with the windows down and the wind whipping through our hair.

“Have you ever been to Loch Leven?” my friend asked, red hair tangling over pale, freckled skin. She smiled behind the latest Primark shades and pushed her foot down a little harder on the gas.

“No,” I grunted. “Never.”

It took a little more than an hour to arrive. Cutting through the whitewashed walls of a tiny village, we came to a crowded carpark and a sea of giggling families crowding the distant boat docks.

I immediately groaned.

“Come on,” she told me. She turned over the engine, and the car sputtered into stillness and silence.

“I don’t want to do this.”

“I know you don’t. That’s why we’re going to use the trails. Come on. They won’t move from the boat docks.”

I looked out over the impossibly silver waters of Loch Leven, where a spray of colored paddle boats - each filled with a giggling, smiling family - bobbed and danced. Hearing laughing children was enough to make my eyes sting and my stomach turn.

I didn’t have any happy memories like that. Not with my family, anyway.

“Fine,” I sighed after a long pause. There was no going back now when the weather was nice and we were over an hour from home. Summoning the last of my courage, I grabbed my water bottle and climbed out of the car.

We took a trail to the east and soon lost sight of the car park as we made our way around the loch. The sun climbed higher and the sound of fortunate families faded. In a few moments, we were entirely alone on a trail that was draped in cool shadow. Massive oaks lined one side of the path, while a tangle of grasses and water weeds trailed off to the loch-edge on the other.

For twenty more minutes, we walked in silence. Nothing but the sound of birdsong and the rustling of leaves separated us. The sun warmed me, and for the first time in days I allowed myself to get lost in the complicated tangle of my thoughts. I was so lost in my thoughts that I never saw the looming shape of the cross that was rising over the bend.

The cemetery was old and overgrown, a memento of another family that had long since passed from these lands. Ancient trees bent over its crumbling stone walls, and several headstones stood awkwardly, bent and broken onto their sides. At the center of the spot was an enormous cross, though, standing proudly and apart from all the chaos that laid around it. Carved in a Celtic knot, its proud shadow stretched across the ground until it landed right at the tip of my feet.

My friend looked awkward and kicked the ground a little.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and I knew she meant it. “I forgot about this spot. Let’s keep going.”

“No,” I returned. “It’s fine.”

The truth is, it mesmerized me. Grief’s like that. I was in such a weird headspace, that the appearance of the cross and the cemetery had brought be stumbling right back down into reality.

My mother was gone. My loving, supportive, compassionate, angry, broken, complicated mother. The only constant figure in my life that had chosen to love me time-and-time again.

We had a complex relationship, my mother and I. Adopted when I was an infant - I was the daughter she had always dreamed of, and the absolute apple of her eye. My mother was a narcissist, though, and with that came an inability to love me in any actual way beyond the reflection of self that I offered her. Our entire existence together was fraught with the most toxic conflict imaginable, yet she loved me and I loved her in return.

All of it came rushing back to me as I stared at that cross and imagined the stiff body of my mother lying motionless and alone on an icy table six-thousand miles away. Tears were coming, but I didn’t feel them. All I could feel was the twist of my belly and the tightening of my chest. Pieces of reality shattered and fell down around me.

“What am I going to do?” I faintly heard myself cry as I sank down into the damp, sandy trail. Somewhere nearby, a family of boaters brushed close to the shore, intimate witnesses of my collapse. “What am I going to do?”

My friend was beside me and her arm was around me, but there was nothing she could do.

My mother was gone, and with her all hope of healing the wounds that she had handed me. I weighed her failures (and my own) and it made the grief that much deeper. I was lost in it. Swallowed by it. To me, the world had turned into a chasm of misery and there was no way out of it.

That’s when I heard the first chirp.

Turning slowly in my self-pity, my friend and I were startled to see the sharp little shape of a nose emerge from the tangle of weeds near the shoreline. Seconds later, it was followed by inquisitive black eyes and the slick body of a small otter. Native in parts of Scotland, an entire family of them appeared from the undergrowth and pattered curiously along the path - watching my grief with genuine interest from a short distance.

As quickly as the tears had come, they stopped. The otter family left us both transfixed.

We watched as they lolloped and rolled across the path, bumping into one another and jostling each other as they formed a sort of semi-circle around us. A few of the big ones inched within a couple of feet, but most of them stayed far enough away to scram at the first sign of danger. All the time they chattered to one another in their little language, and never took their eyes off the crying girl and her friend in the sand.

No doubt brought out of the water by my cries, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The otter was one of my favorite animals, and had been a sort of totem to me in really hard times as a child in a hard home.

I watched the family of otters for what seemed like an eternity until my friend pinched me on the arm.

“Your camera!” she hissed. “Take a frickin’ picture!”

Remembering the lanyard around my neck, I plucked up the heavy body and pressed the awkward weight of the Canon into my cheek. Fiddling only for a few seconds, I snapped a few pictures and prayed. Curious no longer, the otters scudded back into the undergrowth - spooked by the appearance and loud clicks of the camera.

“I can’t believe that just happened!” my friend shouted. She jumped up and did a sort of dance along the path. I wasn’t as quick to get up, but when I did, I turned to face the shady little cemetery.

It stood as silent as ever, but there was a heaviness to it now that was both a relief and a sad recollection.

“Thanks, mom,” I whispered under my breath. I didn’t want my friend to hear me. I looked up through the tangle of branches and glimpsed blue sky and bolts of white.

Somehow, I knew those otters had been sent there. Directed by my mother, or some other unseen hand in the universe, they had come to me in a moment of need as a message. Was it a goodbye? An apology? I wasn’t sure, but I couldn’t deny what felt cosmically obvious to me.

My mother was gone, and it was time to move on. There wasn’t room for sadness in such a beautiful world.

“Wow. Can you believe it?” my friend asked again in her heavy Scots accent. Her excitement was palpable.

“No,” I said, wiping a half-dried tear from my cheek. “I really can’t.”