Grief and Other Winged Things

I saw a dead bird this weekend. Actually, two dead birds. Two dead cardinals if you want to be specific which, apparently, I do; one male, one female. 

It was Saturday and my beautiful wife wanted to do something normal married couples do: go couch shopping at a furniture store in the suburbs. 

The reason for the new couch: Our dog Tree is geriatric. She’s aging fast due to diabetes and with that comes incontinence. Enough to have ruined our entire couch all the way through one afternoon when we were out of the house. (a post elaborating on this beloved creature is forthcoming).

As we were walking into the big box store she said, “I didn’t want you to see them because I knew it would upset you but there are two beautiful birds laying dead on the pavement and I feel like I need to move them to the dirt.” She knows how I feel about birds. She can’t forget the time we were road tripping across the American West together and as I drove around a bend in a canyon, two white birds flew around the corner, directly into my windshield. I cried so hard I had to pull over.

There’s more.

My childhood family nickname was Little Bird. I can’t remember the last time my mom called me anything but. It’s a tenderness I relish each time she says it. More than once as a child I found an abandoned fledgeling and nursed it back to health in a shoebox crib with a mattress made out of a washcloth and a syringe as its bottle. The shoebox went from crib to coffin one of those times and I cried crocodile tears while burying it in the back yard with a garden spade. The year my dad was dying of cancer he told my sons and I that when he was gone he would send a flock of “Papa’s bird friends,” anytime he wanted to let all of us know he loved us. Since he died I have lost track how many hundreds of times “Papa’s bird friends” have visited me. Growing up, my favorite hymn was “His Eye is on the Sparrow.”

Why should I feel discouraged?

Why should the shadows come?

Why should my heart be lonely

And long for heav’n and home,

When Jesus is my portion?

My constant Friend is He:

His eye is on the sparrow,

And I know He watches me;

No matter what I did or didn’t believe about God or how God felt about me, I kept coming back to the idea that God knew every sparrow that fell. That maybe, just maybe, I was worth as much as one of those known creatures.

So the birds matter to me. 

Which is why it was so jarring when I started seeing dead birds at work about a year ago. Every day I would try and take a walk outside the building, catch my breath, contort my spirit around the stuff that took up residence in my mind, stuff I cannot talk about here. Things were getting untenable and the clock was ticking on my nervous system standing up to it all.

Then I saw my first - a starling. Laid to rest on the sidewalk just outside the building. She was covered in dozens of silvery white hearts in the midst of  iridescent green feathers. A week or two later I saw another dead starling. Then another. Then I did something that felt strange yet imperative: I started photographing them. Then making art out of them, surrounding their photographs with flowers and colors and memorial fanfare. Then there was a finch. Then one, two, three baby ducklings drowned in the water feature outside of the corporate structure. It seemed these beautiful creatures were dying in droves and no one cared or barely noticed. I felt like they needed a witness. So I did what I’m prone to do: I became the witness I wish I had. And one small, winged grief at a time, I collected enough strength to leave the walls of that place.

I forgot all about the dead birds, those colorful tender bodies, until today. And it came crashing back to me. I had to wonder why? What does it all mean? What did the cardinals mean? The Starlings? The finches? The Bluebird? So I asked Google, “what does it mean if you find a dead bird?” and the first answer someone had given was, “it means a bird died.” In other words, sometimes birds just die. 

It’s been a week of winged grief. A dear soul from our writing workshop, Allegra Dalton, was on her way to get her hair done last week when she was hit by a bus. I still can’t believe it when I type it. After suffering multiple fatal injuries, she passed away. A couple of nights later I found myself in our weekly Writing Workshop, unintentionally sitting in the exact same place Allegra had sat in one week earlier, writing words to share with the group, just like she had done the week before. Allegra was a gorgeous spirit, such a beloved member of our small and precious community and I am going to miss her. I am going to miss the guaranteed hug and earnest concern she always had waiting for me. The way she listened and celebrated, mourned and shared vulnerably. Her death is senseless. 

And maybe that’s the truth of all of it. My dad’s death in his mid-50’s was senseless. It’s senseless that he won’t pick up the phone if I call his number right now, that he isn’t one of the humans walking around on planet Earth right now, that I didn’t get to introduce him to my youngest son this side of the veil. It’s senseless that Allegra won’t ever sit in Writing Workshop with us again - clicking her knitting needles and nodding along with dinner plate eyes as she listened intently to someone else’s story.

It’s senseless. 

This is where I resist the urge that came prepackaged with my religious indoctrination: to tie it all up with a little “all things happen for a reason” bow. Because sometimes things just happen, sans reason. Sometimes a shop window reflects the sky on a crisp October day. Sometimes the last thing you hear from your dad is his tired throat, humming the melody of his favorite hymn. Sometimes a woman uses a crosswalk but a bus keeps driving. Sometimes you find a dead bird because a bird died. 

So I won’t try and make sense of that which is senseless. Only this:

I hope they all went out singing. 

- A. Story