Birds & Fish & Grief

When my grandfather died, I was on a dog run. The sun shone crisp & cast shadow over the snow & against its brightness every color-- all three of them in that landscape-- seemed infused with some auratic glow. As we neared a familiar dip by a finger of Upper Panguingue, an owl flew over my team from behind & then proceeded to divebomb Kabob, who was in lead. She did it several times & then flew away to the south. I turned the team around immediately & headed to our cabin, knowing something had shifted. 

When Grandma died, I stood on the bluff over the creek with Ox running through the brush & watched a golden eagle soundlessly parallel the valley floor. 

The night before I married Kristin, I was on a ten mile run with Littlehead & T-Bone, the January sun already set. We lived in McKinley Village at the time, & the trail wove its way to the intertie & then off toward the Yanert, undulating over knolls that prefaced mountains further out. As I crested one of them, an owl came from behind me & landed on a spruce bough overhead, watching us go by. That night, as we lay in bed, the same owl alit on the moose antlers hung above our front door, silhouetted against the cold moon, just outside our octagonal window. 

The day after Willa died, I had another peculiar visit from an owl. & when Buck died, a gyrfalcon showed up to do our training run on the ATV that week, flying overhead as if goading the dogs along. 

The night before I met Kristin, I had a dream of seven white owls circling a willow tree. 

I have found myself host to recurring oddities with birds such that I have come to depend on them for assurance. They tell me there is a threshold & they tell me it has been crossed, or to steel myself for its passage. I wait to hear from them, as if the world is nodding at its own inexorability. Grief permits itself to shapeshift, to imagine at its pith a freedom for those we’ve lost. To suspect that our additions & subtractions remain inextricable from the story of the world that wrought us in the first. At least I’ve always sought out & been affirmed in that link. 

Now that my Dad is gone, I look for it perhaps a little too expectantly. I watch a red-tailed hawk over a parking lot & am receptive to its message. It plays a vector & disappears behind a McDonalds. I see pelicans pestered past over the lake by scoters defending something unseen, & I watch both recede. Ada wants me to tell her the name on another Pokemon card, & I am returned from the querulous mystical to the urgently ordinary again (although perhaps at a later date I can vent here about the profoundly obtuse & impenetrable logic of Pokemon, which remains a mystery more unsolvable than even existential quandaries, I think). I make sandwiches, I clean mashed bananas off of Whitman’s hands, we walk outside & find in flecks of stone imagined dinosaur teeth. I watch cardinals & robins puff against the cold & whistle away into the cedars. The wind blows, Whitman adds another word to his vocabulary, Ada tells us more about the compsognathus. & I begin to think that the absence of my usual threshold bird seems more typical of my Dad’s brand of messaging-- perfunctory, pragmatic, focused on the daily exercises that love assumes in parenting. “Why the fuck would I become an owl?” I hear him say. He would have made an awkward bird. 

What I know he would have me do is focus instead on the welfare of my kids, tell my wife daily how much I love her, pursue the passions of my own that evidenced joy. He wanted us all to dream, & then to do. 

After we watched A River Runs Through It, Dad famously for our family provided his summary thusly: you’re born, you fish, you die. He feigned in that proclamation not to have heard the rest of the story, all of the piercing heartache & the clamoring joy of living, all of the postures that loving can take, all of the landscapes of desire & desires of landscape. But he heard it all & knew a sympathy with the contours of all of that human tenderness. I contacted so many of his friends & business partners after his death, & every single one remarked on the honest, loving heart that beat beneath the gruff exterior. They all knew him for what he really was, & let him go along with the bluster of his pragmatism because they loved him. I love that. 

In the days before he died, Dad told me story after story about the life he led before us, away from us, after we left. Hijinx while lost in rural Germany, details of his air force days, old childhood tales &, as always, how he fell in love with Mom. In all of the stories I was able to just see him for who he was, without peopling the narratives with my brothers & I & everything we had accrued over the years in our portraits of him as a father. He told tales of himself as a man, as Barry, & I felt viscerally the animal movement of the freedoms in which he had revelled. He carried all of that with him, in him, even when his body curtailed his energies & tightened his aperture such that there was just that day, just that pain to manage. 

I never believed him in that summary of Maclean, that swift aside about what life meant. As an inveterate smartass, he had every opportunity to fall back on it at the end, but what I saw & heard instead was all of the rhapsody of life, all of its gut-wrenchingly profound beauty. It was a music precious to the ear. & I think maybe one as intricately revealing as any visitation by a bird could prove. We walked to the threshold with him this time, sharing tenderly every step we could, until we all had to hold back. He was not afraid of dying, he said, just letting us go. 

So I read every word of the dinosaur books again with my smiling daughter. I embrace my wife & tell her how lost in love I am for her. I squeeze Whitman’s hand while he triumphs his way up the stairs. The clouds, canyon-thick days ago, are gossamer & goose down. The cedar waxwings are jittery in the branches, smelling spring. The heart beats. & every day, we are born, & we fish.