This is a story back from eastern Newfoundland, but it’s stayed with me and I can’t help thinking that it ought to be shared. Patsy was one of those friendly local Newfoundlanders you don’t easily forget. We crossed paths in Deep Bight.
“I was born on a small island in Bonavista Bay called Bragg’s Island,” she told us. I looked it up later and for me it’s a bit hard to imagine. Scattered, rugged islands of the bay lie to the west of Bragg’s Island, and to the east is nothing but the open water of the Atlantic Ocean.
I don’t remember at one point I realized I was listening to a truly important story, but I have no doubt that that’s what it was. Patsy’s mother died in childbirth with her, and after the first few years of her life her family relocated to Clarenville on mainland Newfoundland. I don’t know a lot about resettlement in Newfoundland but I know that it wasn’t an easy thing. She didn’t go back to the island for decades.
About four years ago, Patsy was in contact with a cousin who’s father owned that original house; who told her about a vision of a young woman sitting on the foot of her bed. Patsy’s mother. After talking about it with friends and family, she and one of her brothers decided that they were being called back to the island for some reason.
“I know you’re not going to believe this,” Patsy said, putting her hand on my upper arm, “because I wouldn’t have believed it either. It sounds ridiculous.”
They arranged for a boat and spent the morning crossing the open water to Bragg’s Island. She and her brother had lunch in their childhood home, and then prepared to go to the cemetery where their mother was buried. “That’s when something or someone powerful told me to look for a yellow butterfly. I could feel it. I knew what I was supposed to do. We looked as we prepared to go and as we left the house my brother called me over and there it was, the yellow butterfly. When we were leaving that day our butterfly followed us to the boat and then turned and flew back toward the house.”
I tried to imagine it. An old, run-down house. A long-abandoned cemetery. A yellow butterfly.
“And do you know what a butterfly symbolizes?” she asked, her hand back on my arm. Her smile was as warm as I’ve ever felt. “A woman who died in childbirth.” She said she and her brother have gone back twice more, and their butterfly has always been there waiting for them.
“It’s her.”
This isn’t a story about ghosts or reincarnation, at least that’s not what it meant to me. She didn’t talk about that either. It was a mystery, yet at the same time a story of certainty. And for a woman who had left her island home behind, for a daughter who had grown up with the grief and guilt of a childbirth death, for a sister connecting with her brothers in order to find a long-held piece of their past, that certainty must have meant the world.
I’m not at all ashamed to say that as she pulled off her jacket to show the butterfly tattooed on her shoulder, the tears in my eyes matched her own. We keep love in all kinds of places, and even in the best of times it can be as fleeting as a young life lost, as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. Yet on a small island in Bonavista Bay, love is alive, and always has been.
Summers come, butterflies grow, and mothers love their daughters.