One morning, quite early, I was awakened by some very loud birdcalls. Ravens, I thought. I got up and padded barefoot out onto the upper, back deck. There, across the yard, were seven or eight ravens calling back and forth between two trees. One raven was flying in fast, figure-eight swoops above the trees. Another joined in the aeronautical display, making large, loopy circles around the trees. Even as the screen door banged shut behind me, the ravens persisted with their raucous calls. Obviously, I was not to be a part of their calling. I was there under the great gray sky, standing in the early morning drizzle in my cotton nightshirt, for another reason.

It suddenly occurred to me that a raven had died and that these ravens were announcing its death to others. Do ravens do such things? I wasn't sure, but in my still-sleepy state of conscious this seemed to be true. Their calls struck me as holding anger and sadness, confusion and release, all braided together, as if part of some communal ceremony.

I thought of my aunt, my father's oldest sister, who is slowly dying of cancer. The last time I saw her, she was a little stick of a woman who could have easily been blown away by a gusty wind. Still, she was not giving up so easily. She made me laugh with her dry humor and insistence on living life as she always had. She drove herself every Friday morning to the beauty salon to get her hair washed and coifed; she hid in her bedroom to smoke forbidden cigarettes; and she had a stiff drink at the Elk's Lodge when we went out for dinner.

It was not lost on me that it was the ravens' calls that brought me to this place -- both out in the rain and in the shadows of my thoughts, where I could take a moment to reflect on the ways in which life and death continually entwine our days. Raven is sometimes believed to be an omen of death, though it is also part of Raven's lore to announce contradictions: of light and life emerging from the darkness, of mystery, magic and transformations.

I remembered my friend Ellen who had dreamed of death as an old woman gathering berries. Soon after the dream, Ellen was drawn to workshops on death and dying; she wrote poems about death, got her will in order, and began to believe that she was preparing for the end of her life. What came instead was the death of her son, an 18-year-old, young man out for a sail in weather that turned stormy.

The ravens called louder and louder, as if insisting that I should understand something. But what? What were they communicating to each other, to me, with those shrieking calls and wild aerobatics? Watching them reminded me of how strangely life moves within us -- slowly fading away, like my aunt, like old wood bleached by the sun; othertimes turning fatal in just an instant, like Ellen's son, a quick kiss good-bye, now you see him, now you don't.

Sometimes there is no answer, only the mystery. And so I stood in the gray morning drizzle and listened to the ravens' calls until my fingers and toes turned red with cold.