christy tending / 1st place editors' choice prize in essays

An Ornithology of Grief

Cardinal.

The males are too ostentatious, trite, and showy. Seven states have the cardinal as their state bird. Not to be cruel, but enough is enough. There are other birds. Except: The females are exquisite. They may not be the electric red so beloved by state government committees. But: they have an air-brushed quality to them, their only flash of red is on their beaks, like a bold lip on a Parisian minimalist. 

My mother has died, and I am standing at the glass doors counting birds in her backyard. When the female cardinal approaches the porch, my heart leaps. I love her, I say, to no one who can hear me. 

Her care workers, who cared for her when her body was alive, have gone home. The hospice worker with the death certificate paperwork is not arriving for another half hour. The person who would have cared about seeing the female cardinal take seed from the porch has died, and I am alone in her house with her, waiting. The morning after the winter solstice seems almost cliche. I did not ask for the veil to be this thin, I think.

So I sip coffee and wait. I count birds.

My mother is the one who taught me all their names, what they liked to eat, and often their calls. She left seed out for the birds for years, and I think about the ripple effect to come. 

How will her birds get through the winter? The cardinals dive into the holly bushes, carefully evading the barbs. Inside the tree’s sharp defenses, I imagine their warm nest.

Blue Jay.

That morning, I sense three modes of being: sadness, grief, and loss. I notice and count. The blue jays appear lit from within. Their blue is out of place on such a low-lit day. Or perhaps, I only notice their color in contrast. I keep the lights dim, either in reverence or within a fog of inattention.

They have a particular yell for getting your attention. They line up along the roofline, to the side of the porch, like evacuation planes coming in for a landing. Resting just long enough to pick up a peanut—their haul—and leaving as quickly they arrived, making for the pine trees beyond the fence to the left.

My mother left peanuts just for the jays for years, and if any other creature tried to take one—groundhog, raccoon—my mother was incensed. Offended at their audacity. Those are for the blue jays, with their perfect manners and aerial formation, one at a time.

Sadness is the feeling: the emotion that comes without waiting for me to get out of the way.

Yesterday’s was a different kind of sadness. Today’s is one of finality. Grief is the way I move through it: the process for digesting the impermanence that marks our humanity. I can see myself as I move gingerly, as though I’ve been in a car accident. Every movement is tender, intentional. Loss looks like this: filling out forms and more forms. Name of the patient, date of birth, date of death, my name, phone number, relationship. 

I keep myself from chuckling at the last one. Complicated, I want to quip. Because are mothers and daughters ever simple? 

Others’ reactions move across my field of awareness. I hold each with compassion before letting their reactions go, careful not to compound my own, cautious about taking on anyone else’s grief in addition to my own: like trying to hold water from a flowing tap. I witness myself as a child: confused, uncertain. I have become her future self, my own ancestor. I call her sweetheart. I tell her I’m sorry. The jays’ calls pierce the moment, calling me back.

Crow.

Guardian of the liminal space. They are so plentiful they risk being taken for granted. This morning, they are in full force over the woods behind the house: each is a slick, blue-black stilettos of a bird.

There is so much waiting. For the hospice nurse, who helps me fill out the information for the death certificate, who teaches me to dispose of all the narcotics in the house. I say a silent thank you to each dose as it is destroyed, for making her crossing that much easier. 

I keep waiting for someone else to be in charge.

There is a loneliness in holding the answers, waiting for people whose names I did not bother to learn—I’m sorry—to take my mother’s body to the funeral home. While I wait, I take my first shower in days. I sit in the quiet house, forgetting to eat, but not forgetting to drink coffee. I don’t have to be quiet because she’s resting anymore; the house simply is quiet.

I try to meditate a little and after 20 years of sitting in silence, I find that it does not make death easier in that it is less sad. It’s not. Instead, it is easier in that I have more access to compassion for myself. There is nothing to hide or to judge.

Eventually, the people arrive. They take her body. I fill out their forms, and tell them that I’ll just be a few minutes behind them. My hair is wet, and it is December, but there is nothing to do except microwave my coffee again and put shoes on.

The crows are a raucous warning. Their overlapping cries are evidence: there is a fox nearby and they are trying to warn their kin. Stay in your nests. I look in the direction of the den by the back fence that’s been used for generations of kits. I see nothing, but know that a fox is near.

Great Blue Heron.

When we were in Maryland at Thanksgiving, my little family and I took a walk by the canal. My mother stayed behind at the house and slept in her armchair. I had made noises about needing to let my child burn off some energy, knowing she wouldn’t join us. Under flat, low clouds, we walked along the towpath, digging lumps of quartz crystal out of the dirt near Swains Lock. My son spots crows, buzzards, sparrows. We watch the river to our left with its muffled roar.

Sometimes, Grandma and I would see Great Blue Herons here, I tell him. I remember a summer walk when we saw one glide across the water as it landed. I remember the clouds of mosquitoes, the heron’s yellow spindly legs, stalking frogs in the cool of the canal.

Moments later, a pair of herons fly overhead, landing in the shallows of the same canal. The shallow water is covered in maple leaves. They are always surprisingly large, regal and severe. I cannot imagine what they are looking for, but I crouch down to watch them. I place one arm around my son, who shivers. I hold the cold, muddy quartz tightly in my pocket. I have called them here. 

I did not know she’d be gone in a month. Now, it’s my job to pass on the birds’ names. I am the omen I am searching for.

Red-winged Blackbird.

They always showed up in the early spring, with their “Screee!” call which always seemed a less dignified one than they deserved. Their bright red and yellow shoulders were the most elegant thing I could imagine as a child. They loved the creeks and wetlands near my house growing up, and once: a pair decided to make their nest in a tree in our front yard. They darted in and out of it, torn between showing off and obfuscation.

Memory within grief is slippery, and I can’t remember exactly when I called my father. But somehow, in the days on either side of my mother’s death, I kept thinking about the old house, when we’d all lived together. I kept thinking about the red-winged blackbirds and their fashionable wings. I called him because I wanted to know the type of tree that the red-winged blackbirds nested in that season. 

I called him because I could. The tree was a blue spruce.

House Finch, House Sparrow, House Wren.

Ordinary names, and yet each one feels like a miracle. There was a time in my mid-twenties, after I decided not to go to law school, that my mother asked me what I wanted from my life. It might have been an accusation, but I took it as a question.

I was sitting in her kitchen drinking coffee watching the birds at the feeders. I thought to myself, I want a place where I can drink coffee and watch the birds. Not exactly a high career ambition, but at the moment, I longed for the ordinary. 

Years later, I stood at my own dining room window in California, with a toddler in one arm and a cup of coffee in the other hand, watching an Anna’s Hummingbird in her nest. I laughed at this ordinary moment, this inside joke with myself. I told my son to be careful what he wished for and he gave me a wet kiss.

At the funeral home, I am given menus of options. My mother, in her life, was full of clarity about her death. Simple cremation, nothing extra. No funeral, no obituary, no death notice in the alumnae magazine. It’s possible I shouldn’t even be telling you this.

So when presented with my options, I choose the lowest tier possible. The funeral director is kind, truly, when I say that if I did anything more than the minimum my mother would come back from the dead and kill me. I’m sure he’d seen this before. What I meant was that no ornamentation in death would change things. 

The names for the things I choose are ordinary—simple cremation, basic pine box—belying contents of extraordinary meaning.

Red-tailed Hawk.

Once in Japan, I saw a cyclone, a helix, of hawks circling in a column above the Inland Sea. They are messengers with keen sight. The hawk will never let you fool yourself: ignore the signs at your own peril. In Maryland, there are six species of hawk. 

After I am done at the funeral home, I call my husband back in California. As soon as I heard his voice, I cry for the first time all day. I don’t know where to go. My intuition, usually reliable, says nothing, gives no direction. I mimic a hawk’s gliding flight path and drive around for a while.  I spot a Red-tailed Hawk, the same kind we have in California; the same kind I saw all the time after my friend Jen died. Sitting on power lines, loping lazily in the gray sky, their copper tails are unmistakable.

The day before my mother died, I took a nap. I’d gotten in late the night before and was jet lagged and exhausted from anticipatory grief. In my dream that day, she died. I awoke, shocked to find her still breathing. In the weeks after her death, I kept having dreams in which she was alive: I’d made a mistake. 

Sometimes, in my dreams, a hawk perches on my headboard, her only message is to remember the truth.

Chickadee, Goldfinch, White-throated Sparrow.

My grandmother, my father’s mother, had birdfeeders, too. I can picture standing at the window over her kitchen sink, looking out over the chain running from the house to the first tree: leaden with feeders. Each featured a different feed, to attract all kinds of birds. And so her backyard was always raucous. Their songs overlapped, not quite harmonizing.

Each of their names are mementos to hold onto. Each has a particular call my mother could have imitated for you, which is on the tip of my tongue, yet out of reach. For some reason, I am thinking about the forsythia and the dogwoods in the spring, the crepe myrtles in summer: the electric colors that I missed as a child and only appreciated as an adult, belonging to seasons in a hometown where I may never return.

The last time I left, nothing was in bloom. Everything was still bare and gray and turned-inward. As I write this, they would be tending to their hatchlings. Everything would be in bloom.

Mourning Dove.

Did your parents also have one of those bird clocks in the kitchen? The one that marked the hours with birdsong so you knew what time it was without looking? Breakfast was always at Mourning Dove sharp. At 7am, we would turn on the Today Show and watch the news before school while eating our yogurt or toast. When the battery in the clock would run low, her call resembled a self-parody, mocking her sadness.

But I always associated her—the dove—with the green of spring, one voice among the chorus. Perhaps because I was finally outside long enough to really hear her after a long, impossible winter. She remembers her grief through song, but greets spring with enthusiasm. 

Somehow, on this visit, the dove—the real dove, in the pear trees by the driveway—is awake as I leave for the airport in the dark, just a day after my mother has died. It is long before Mourning Dove o’clock.

I do not remember ever having slept in the house without my mother. I turn out the lights in the house. I lock the door until I can come back from California to deal with its contents. Dove’s heaving sobs hit me between the shoulder blades, but maybe I have mistaken her for the wind. Maybe those sobs are mine.

I have promised my son I would be home for Christmas.

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Christy Tending (she/they) is the author of High Priestess of the Apocalypse (ELJ Editions) and Sobriety Through the Major Arcana (kith books). Their work has been published in Longreads, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, and received a notable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. They are the recipient of a residency at Yaddo. They live in Oakland, California with their family. You can learn more about their work at www.christytending.com.