A Proper Goodbye

Or how to bury a bird

EDIT: The previous (UNEDITED) version was accidentally sent out too early (Me? I am a boomer). Please disregard! OR don’t. And laugh laugh laugh at how bad my spelling, grammar and ideas are. Ok bye!

---

Everything felt still, in a dumb, stereotypical time stands still type of way. Which is funny, considering I had no real emotional connection to the small bird that lay dying in my hand. This was not planned. I don’t go around looking for birds to rescue. You will not catch me on your TikTok scroll offering the crispy edges of my pancake to woodland creatures at brunch. Most importantly, the inevitable onslaught of bird flu looms constantly in my anxiety’s peripheral. Second to shark attack and “electrocuted by vibrator in shower”. Second, I carry with me the eternal emotional scar of finding an injured baby bird in the carport of our beach house when I was 6 years old. My cousins and I had been playing tag and stumbled upon it in between knuckle punching each other ‘IT!” and “OUT!” It had fallen out of the nest its parents had built in the rafters. Its small body lay crumpled on the ground. We circled it, crouched with our hands planted on our knees. We teetered on the heels of our bare feet, leaning in close to see the rise and fall of the small, slick, feathered chest.

“Don’t touch it!!” my mom yelled from the hammock, throwing her People Magazine to the floor and rushing over. “If you touch it, the parents will ABANDON it and it’ll DIE”. At this point, I had 2-6 hamsters die and a guinea named Peaches seize and croak in my arms, so I felt as acquainted with mortality as a 6-year-old can be. I nodded my head at my younger cousins. To be dead was to end, to leave, to never be seen or felt again. But this little guy was just a baby, and he was alone in a way I had never been. I couldn’t fathom the warm, comforting touch of another suddenly warranting abandonment. I wanted so badly to pick it up and put it back where it belonged. I wanted to give it the same feeling I got when I crawled into my mom’s lap after falling and scraping my knee.

“Why don’t you all go catch little fish and throw them in a bucket?” she said, ushering us to the splintered dock behind her.

There’s a world in which my mom scooped it up and into the trash, or gently pushed it with a broom out into the yard. Either way, I think she knew it was on the edge of death. Too young and brittle to survive alone. I circled back right before dinner to find the carport bare and grey, no sign of the bird of its brief presence in sight.

This fated morning on my porch, I was simply doing what I do on all my free mornings- sip coffee until my head hurts and scour horoscope apps to find one that tells me that true love and waterfalls of wealth are headed my way. I was sitting for a good 15 minutes before I realized Jeff’s sniff was focused on one specific spot, just beyond the table where I couldn’t see. This is strange, considering his role in our little morning ritual is shoving his Lego-shaped head into my crotch until I pry the half-eaten soccer ball from his mouth and throw it across the floor so he can skid, catch, and barely miss the grill. “Whatta ya got, Jeff?” I yelled over. He was jerking up away from something, which alerted my brain that that something must be alive. If it were dead or just an old hot dog, he would have swallowed it whole like he did the half-eaten rotisserie chicken on our walk last week.

“Oh fuck!” I yelled when I saw the small twitching sparrow on the rug. “Oh fuck shit fuck!”

There are people who handle this sort of high-stakes thing with much more finesse and far fewer expletives. People who see a sick bird and know exactly what to do. Calm people. Centered people. People who do yoga and aren’t creeped out by Tony Robbins. But not me. I tear up at people walking their dogs on the street, falling to my knees in ecstasy as it pulls its owner towards me for a pet, and if I’m lucky, a cascade of slobbery kisses. In 8th grade, I spat on a teenage boy because he called my friend a slut when we were vacationing at the beach. When he turned around to retaliate, I threw my water bottle at him as hard as I could and yelled at my friends to “RUN!”. Emotion shoots out of me like backyard fireworks, exploding a few feet into the air, then plummeting back onto the ground in a sad cloud of smoke.

I shoved Jeff out of the way and continued with “oh no no no” and more “fuck shit fuck fuck fuck!s” hoping that this complete mental breakdown would somehow shock the bird back into flight, and I wouldn’t have to worry about next steps. But the bird continued to struggle. I went against all my instincts and fear of a second pandemic and picked it up. And now here we are, Bird in my gloved (I’m not an IDIOT) palm, Jeff sitting at my side the same way he does during dinner.

“Shhhh. It’s ok. Shhhh shhhh it’s ok,” I cooed, stroking its side with my other gloved (I’VE SEEN CONTAGION) hand. Its eyes slowly shut, the way that Jeff’s do when he’s falling asleep with a ball in his mouth, or a child trying to stay awake past bedtime. You fight so hard to stay here, and then you surrender.

God, we’re all so similar, I thought to myself.

I tried to put it in the shoe-box nest I had quickly assembled with tissue paper and dry dirt from the dead potted plant I can’t seem to throw away, but its head kicked back and forth in discomfort. I waited for it to settle the way it did in my palm, but all it did was wiggle its way to the bottom of the box.

I whispered more fucks and shits as I placed it back in my hand. It quickly relaxed. Its legs stopped kicking, and the rapid rise and fall of its chest slowed to a languid cadence. I could feel its heartbeat against my palm. I didn’t quite know what to do. I had work later, and a run planned, not to mention chores I had planned to avoid but now seemed impossible to ignore. I couldn’t sit cross-legged on my porch serenading a bird all day. Not trying to elicit a wellness check from my neighbors who were undoubtedly already worried by the amount of Law and Order SVU I watch and the volume at which I binge it. I looked around my porch to see if any of its bird friends had come to check on it. I was expecting a tiny flock of birds to land on the railing, a real “we’ve got it from here, sister” moment, but nothing. Bird was alone. I was its only witness. So I kept sitting and singing until its eyes blinked to a close.

Unsure if it had died, I sat for a moment waiting for it to start moving again. The other, very alive and seemingly unbothered bird chirped around us in a way that sings “life goes on, doesn’t it?”. Jeff, finally accepting he wasn’t gonna get a treat in the form of a barely living, slowly breathing creature, curled his body and huffed on the couch next to me.

Bird was dead, maybe, and I zoomed out on my life Google Earth style to see an emotionally unstable woman crouched on her bad knees like a bridgetroll, holding a dead bird in her bright yellow “time to bleach the murder scene” gloved hands. I felt the same way I felt when we put my dog Mags to sleep on my mom’s front porch four summers ago. After the doctor administered the last shot to slow Magnolia’s heart, I held her head in my lap as her breathing stopped.

“Would you like a moment alone with her?” the nurse asked, and I nodded my head yes. Everyone cleared the porch and stood in the kitchen while I said goodbye. It’s funny to imagine them now, gathered around the kitchen island, making small talk about Shitts Creek and my mom offering them handfuls of loose nuts from the pantry. The modern jazz that I asked David to turn down as we all sat around Mags on the porch undoubtedly at full volume inside.

I thought I’d welcome this moment alone with Mags as a final goodbye between the two of us. But it wasn’t the two of us. She was gone, and that feeling was more apparent than anything else. It was just me, a dead body and the sounds of bird song and the gay men’s volleyball league playing a game in the park below us. The moment was over, and it was time to transition into the next one.

I stood up slowly to not to disturb Bird in case it was in fact still still alive. The only thing that can make this situation worse is if pulls a fast one on me and suddenly shoots out of my hand and into my eye socket, blinding me upon impact. Images of me explaining my partial blindness to a date flashed before my eyes. “I tried to lead a bird to death, but it retaliated and claimed my sight”. Me lying and telling another, more charming date, that it was from jousting. Us dating for three years, then getting married. I turn to him on our wedding night and whisper, “I lied about the jousting. I interfered with nature and got what I deserved”.

I gently laid Bird down in a flower bed. I hoped that if it were to wake, the first things it would see would be flowers.

On my run, I thought about Bird. At lunch, I asked Hilary the probability that I was to return home to an empty flower bed, perhaps a penny or bedazzled acorn in its place. A talisman left as a thank you, the way that crows do.

“It could have just been stunned”, she offered generously. “Sometimes they do that, they freeze up if they hit a window or something”.

“Now you’re OLD!” her son Lucien yelled, wrapping his arms around my neck. We had been playing this game where he blew bubbles in his water cup until his cheeks turned red, and then he’d embrace me, which then meant I was no longer young, I was OLD, in a disgusting way.

“Yah, maybe it just hit something,” I said, one eye closed in atrophy, hands hovering by the side of my head in an arthritic curl, my voice sounding more like a vengeful witch than anything else.

“ 90% of the time that’s the cas-,” she said.

“Momma now YOU’RE OLD,” Lucien interrupted.

She hunched her back and cocked her head to the side. “I’m sure you’ll get back and it’ll be gone”. She closed both her eyes in a squint and continued with a crackly high high-pitched voice, “We helped a bird last week that was stunned, didn’t we, Lucien?”

“Yep!” he said, spitting water all over himself and me. “A red-winged blackbird!”

I opened the door to my back porch slowly. I think I already knew it was dead. There would be no empty flower bed. Its small, stiff body lay curled around a new bulb emerging from the soil.

What do you do with a dead bird? It felt like it was my responsibility to dispose of it. When we moved Mag’s body to the vet’s van, I insisted on being one of the two people to carry her. That felt more symbolic to me than the moment alone on the porch. I couldn’t just watch her body be carried out the back door. I wanted to be the last one touching her. Less for the sake of a final goodbye and more for the sake of ritual. Whether she was being blended into different energy forms that help fuel the ecosystem that helps fuel us, or hovering above me in some sort of cartoon dog heaven, I wanted her to know that I would see to her until the end.

I decided on a semi-burial for Bird. I dropped its body in a brown bed of soil and flowers and took it to the woods to bury it. We parked by Jeff’s favorite walking trail along the river. It was sunset, and I congratulated myself on such kismet timing for a send-off for this bird.

I thought about all the send-offs we gave to my childhood pets. My dad digging the hole in the backyard, and me wearing all black as my mom helped lower gerbil number 82 into its final resting place. I thought about how, at my grandmother’s funeral, my dad took my older brother with him to see her in the funeral home one last time before the funeral, and how my brother didn’t know what to do when our dad cried and said goodbye. I thought about my dad in his memory care unit and how each time my siblings and I leave, we wonder if it’s the last time. How, after that many plane trips back home wondering you slowly let go of needing things to be “special”. How you just take life as it is, assigning magic and wonder to things as hard or silly as eating McDonald’s in a parking lot because no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get your dad in the car to come back to the Airbnb for Thanksgiving dinner. Or how we spent all three days this past summer visiting him, watching and rewatching The Comeback 2004 Boston Red Sox doc series. I thought about the other people living their last days in his unit with him and how little attention is paid to people in their final chapter of life. I thought about ritual and why we run away from it. How we skip over it so often to avoid the pain of grief. I thought that when my dad dies, I hope we don’t move too fast. I hope we take our time with each step, and that he and we get the sendoff we deserve. I hope I follow him to the van, I hope I go a far as I can.

Jeff sprinted into the water. I stood on the edge with the bag in my hand, waiting for him to get out, and decided, well, here is a better spot than any. I took a deep breath, trying to be in the moment. Pay attention to the things around you, I thought, don’t rush it. The reflection of golden hour on the water fractured apart by Jeff’s big dumb head and happy paws. The sounds of kids playing soccer in the park right behind us.

I placed the bag in the long prairie flowers and smiled, ignoring the condom and flaming hot Cheeto bag. There were flowers. That’s what mattered. Jeff emerged from the water and took his spot next to me as I continued to let myself relax. I closed my eyes again and let my senses spread out in front of me.

The smell of someone grilling, the splattering of little water drops as Jeff shook off next to me, kids laughing, the high school row team sprinting through the water below us, and the…steady sound of a stream…wait….hose? Wait. I abruptly turned around to see a man peeing two feet directly above the spot where I had laid Bird to rest. His back was to me, so he was unable to see my mouth agape. His pee snaked its way towards Bird’s burial, and before I could say something, the bottom of the bag browned with moisture. He turned to me and gave an unbothered “Oh, hey” to which I responded “…Hello, sir”. Then, we both walked in opposite directions. Me, out of the woods and back to the car. Him, I can only assume to another funeral to unknowingly interrupt with another, more disturbing bodily function.

I sat in the car for a moment, a little shocked at how much of this had taken up my day and how abruptly it had ended. Piss, what a bookend.

I looked in the rearview mirror at Jeff’s big, dopey head. His whole pit mix skull was hanging out the window, panting. Drool was dropping down the glass, covering old drool stains from all the other nature walks before. He was smiling in the way we think dogs smile. Mouth wide and tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. Face relaxed, turned up towards the light, and aglow from golden hour. His eyes slowly came to a close as cars zipped by and children zig-zagged past us on scooters. He stayed like that for a while, eyes shut and turned to the sun, reveling in the end of another day.