IT'S OK, I'M A BIRD PERSON

Dealing with death from behind a stroller

Yesterday at the Children’s Garden a friend’s kid found a dead bird. There was some hustling and wrangling before I could peel off from my twins, find the friend’s also-fast kid, and track the top of his racing head along the butterfly garden path to the expired creature. It was dead, see, and that’s awesome.

Recently one of my two remaining pets died. She was a rescue, a sweet-tempered conure, never robust, always odd, usually cuddly. She would lay her one-ounce head on my neck like a light reminder from another world. She had somehow come to the end of her body while I was busy tending toddlers. I had not noticed.

I took her to the vet thinking it was an un-expelled egg stressing her and making her weak, and that with some TLC she’d be able to come home. When I handed her off to the kindly vet tech, both of my toddlers suddenly began to wail.

There I was, chattering cheerfully at two inconsolable kids, pushing a broke-ass hand-me-down double stroller past the equine enclosure, half-desperately peddling what would turn out to be lies. “Baby’s just going to the doctor. We will come get her when she feels better. Look at that horsie!” Another vet tech came to clip a lead on the horse and take him away, too.

We went to the playground to wait for Baby the Bird’s diagnosis. Twin A sauntered to the sandbox on the southern side of the park while Twin B sprinted towards the maintenance building on the north side, where all the tractors are kept. Clearly, I’d have to go after B since he was closing in on heavy machinery, but A was all alone in the huge sand-box area…

That’s, of course, when the vet called. I tucked my phone against my shoulder while I hauled on the stroller to try to get it to turn towards Spartacus, who was beginning his tractor tour in earnest. “She’s scary skinny, and probably wouldn’t survive treatment,” the vet said.

Thump. I hadn’t done death-and-dying work in a few months, so being recalled to the role of Death Personnel felt abrupt, like being wakened from sleep.

I did the necessary stalling, questioning, probing, for a while, in order to make room for that feeling, the wash of end-game recognition that would allow me to do the next things I’d have to do. It spread through my body, hazily connecting my muddy feet to the cloudy sky, while I stood on the wood-chips Twin A was enjoying as an appetizer.

Along the way in the past decades, I have become practiced at attending to death. (More recently, I’ve done it while my very living babies assert their right to embody the chaos of living.) In one particular genre, the bodies of birds, I have found not only tolerance and functionality, but appreciation, and a kind of solace.

My favorite part of being a field-trip leader for Cornell’s Spring Field Ornithology course was the opportunity each year to help behind the scenes with the Night at the Museum. This was an event during which participants could come to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology itself, where we under-instructors laid out all the locally common “skins” (stuffed birds) in the collection for the students, so they could practice their new identification skills.

The selection process for Night at the Museum required entering the skins collection room, which is about half a football field in size and arranged by eight-foot tall filing-type cabinets filled with over 42,000 skins and the weird, dusty-sweet smell of arsenic. I helped comb through hundreds of four-inch tall drawers, often up on a high, rolling ladder, to find the right phylogenetic ballpark, pull out the one drawer that contained the sought species, and select the best-looking, least-fragile ones among these individuals for people to get to experience up close.

Ironically, the process of “reading” and raiding the three-dimensional library catalogue of dead avifauna almost always made me feel acutely alive. I got to be in a room where thousands of specimens were kept, where even members of extinct species—literally irreplaceable historical artifacts like the Passenger Pigeon—were installed for safekeeping and to aid in human learning. Every individual bore a tiny tag on its tarsus that listed the date and location of its death and named its collector and preparer.

I became familiar with certain preparers as more skilled, more careful and attentive to their subjects than others— you can tell because the feathers lie correctly, the feet appear calm, and the shaping makes the specimen look more robust than it actually is. Some are so old their tags were calligraphed from an ink well, and their preparers are some of the most famous names in ornithology. Someone trusted me to handle these pieces of evidence that our planet has harbored dazzling, gobsmackingly gorgeous variety. How could I not feel… vital in such a role?

So it’s come slowly, over time, whatever this role is that I play at the museum, the Children’s Garden, and on the phone with veterinarians. In truth, years of working to return to the world after miscarrying my first baby seasoned me far more for this job than any Night at the Museum ever could, but a) grief and fascination are related processes, both having to do with identity, and b) where smaller packages of meaning are available— a bird’s wing, a bird’s eye, a bird moving, a bird holding very still — spending time with these images and experiences tends to be a more compassionate and tolerable way forward when working to comprehend death than staring our own and our loved ones’ demises in the face.

In any case, it seems I’m largely done with completely crumpling under the weight of mortality. What does it take to get there? Everything. How does it feel? Very, very hard. Also… not bad at all.

When I approached the small group that had gathered around the fascinatingly dead Rock Pigeon at the Children’s Garden, breast-up on the butterfly garden path, a staff member was hovering and darting, starting and abandoning sentences. She paced, spilling keywords like “gloves?” “shovel,” “container—”

I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” and reached down.

She said, “No, don’t touch it—” as though I were putting myself at some terrible risk.

I said, “It’s OK, I’m a bird person.”

I’m not sure what exactly this phrase was meant to convey about my qualifications for dealing with corpses in public spaces, but in combination with knowing which anatomy was best suited to the lifting and gentle lofting of the unfortunate pigeon to the reassuring darkness under the cattails on the other side of the fence, it seemed to placate both the staff member and the buzzing children who had congregated.

What I meant, I suppose, is many things. “It’s OK, I’m a bird person,” means I’m not scared. It means I want to touch this because it is remarkable. It means birds are fragile and strong, like us, and it means here, let me do something about a thing no one can do anything about. It means, maybe, I am alive.

I panicked a bit over what to tell my children about Baby the Bird after I’d slowly, finally given the vet the green light to end her life. I had promised my kids our housemate was just going to the doctor. So I polled people who’d been around kids lately: I asked the nanny what to do; I texted with my husband, who sent an article about pre-schoolers and death (which pointed out they’re generally pretty cool with it since they usually don’t have any baggage yet); I asked a poet friend, the one whose kid found the dead bird at the Children’s Garden, what approach he and his wife had taken with their kid, and, no surprise, he offered the most tightly worded version of what we were all searching for. But I still had to decide exactly what would come out of my mouth.

When my daughter said, “Baby is at doctor,” with great seriousness, pointing to an empty cage, I had to correct her.

I said, “Baby is dead. That means her body doesn’t work anymore. We love her.”

Whenever I can, nowadays, I keep things as simple as possible. It hardly seems fair to fear the dead. It’s not their fault they’ve done what everyone must do. Baby is dead. That means her body doesn’t work anymore. We love her, I repeat, when my children ask what has happened.

These are three short, simple statements, but I’m glad each time I come home to land, there at the end.