Angry Robin

My GP suggested I try writing stuff down.
"I'm writing about birds," I told her, "But that's quite common isn't it?"
She looked at me quizzically and decided, instead, to tell me about how hard talking about death is for doctors.

What she may not know is that all throughout history there has been a link with birds and bereavement.  People who are bereaved suddenly notice birds where none had been before and somehow recognise their departed loved ones in them. 

In a fascinating but alarmingly racist, book Ernest Ingersoll (1932 Birds in legend, fable and folklore) describes incidences where people link birds to death in some way from every country and culture in the world. (It is comforting when you find out you are not mad but just tapping into universal ancient wisdom).

Birds are often seen as omens or harbingers of death but also bringers of wisdom.  We often say, "a little bird told me."
Izzy Judd, wrote, in her memoir about her IVF treatment and the loss of a baby, "We found a pigeon had flown into the window of our conservatory and died.  By the strangest coincidence I'd seen exactly the same thing.......on the day my mother's sister died." Birds flying into the house or down a chimney are seen as a sign of death in almost every culture in the world.

Birds are thought to act as psychopomps (don't you just love that word?) , carrying the spirit of a dead person to the next life or to heaven.  The Romans would release an eagle at the death of an Emperor to carry his soul to heaven and in Japan and China Cranes are believed to carry the souls of those who have achieved mortality to heaven.  (Odd that in our culture storks bring them back).  There are also universal tales of the spirit of a dead loved one arriving in a bird to impart an important message.

I have been wondering why this should be.  What is it about birds that makes us link them to death? Christopher Moreman in his paper 'Relationship between birds and spirits' (2014) argues that "birds embody the quintessential archetype for the transcendence of fear of death and it's resulting selfishness." "A quinti-what? you say." This is why Christopher is an academic and I write blogs.  He defines an archetype as something that is shared by all humans, like the ability to make music,  use language and smile. (I was taught archetypes were developed by Jung to explain his idea of twelve personality types and the collective unconscious but maybe I wasn't listening properly)  He is arguing that all humans fear death and that we have a shared affinity to birds when confronted with it, which stops us "falling into a void of despair at one's impending extinction."

Whilst I agree that we don't like to talk about or think about death, I'm not sure it is always about facing one's own mortality.  My current madness is not, in any way, linked to a thought that I may die even if it does all stem from a lack of communication around death.

I think that bereavement leaves you in a state where you are stuck in your head and that walking, gardening, breathing and looking at nature helps to ground you.  Obviously that doesn't necessarily explain birds but there are an awful lot of them around that we don't normally notice. 

But.....

What if.....

What if it isn't some weird construct developed by all humans to help them cope with dying and bereavement?  What if it's all true?

We can't talk about death because we don't know and we never will.  Nobody will ever develop a mathematical formula to give the definitive answer to the question, "What happens after we die?"  By the time there is any definitive proof, or otherwise, of something next we won't be able to tell anyone.

I was listening to the radio this morning, as they were discussing near death experiences and saying how there is a universal description of a passage or tunnel with light at the end, through which they are guided by other spirits, often loved ones.  There is also an acceptance that once they cross the boarder they can never return to their body.  I thought that if spirits can get into the tunnel to guide the dying then maybe they could get into birds to guide the living through death.

If they can then my Dad chose a robin. 

A few days before Mum died, when my sister and I were out of our depth, alone and frightened she walked the dog down the lane asking for a sign.  A noisy robin appeared on the fence and followed her home.  He popped into the garden at regular intervals, refusing meal worms in favour of lemon drizzle cake.  It was almost as though he was saying, "It's alright.  I'm here."  On Sunday, a bird, that looked like the same robin visited my garden.  He sat on the fence, shouting.  That robin was furious.  All evening he kept up.  We searched the garden in vain for cats and laughed, wondering what could be making him so cross. Then my sister sent me a photo of a baby bird in a shoe box.

If you are ever looking for suggestions of something to give to a person who is grieving after nursing their loved one through a complicated death then probably a very sick baby bird would not be the best choice. That person would do their best.  Amazing carers always do.  They would give it a bath and pick over twenty huge mites off it, grind up meal worms in the coffee grinder, feed it water through a pipette, sit up with it all night, cut a bra in half for it to sleep in, google the best way to care for it and all of those things will feel familiar, along with the impending sense of doom that nothing they do will keep this little bird alive.

The robin was still on my fence, shouting.  I listened more carefully.
"I've always hated that woman," he chirruped.
"I know," I told him, "but I never did understand why before."

The baby swift was taken to a wildlife hospital and the robin has gone back to his own garden, singing sweetly, maintaining a watchful presence and hoping for lemon drizzle cake.