I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  One Sunday I sat with him alone. Often the words didn’t come easily for him, and I would search for small things that might engage us both. No longer did I expect to learn new family secrets or insights. Still, it was the fall equinox, the day my mother had died in 1975, so I blurted out what came to my mind. “Dad,” I said, “It’s been thirty-four years today since Mom died.” The end of her life was a mystery I still wished I could solve.

  “That was a really awful time for you, wasn’t it, Dad?”

  “You know it,” he said. And no more.

  Even with hospice support, it had taken several years to relieve Dad of the pharmaceuticals that had extended his life without improving its quality. Goodbye to Namenda, Aricept, Metformin. Farewell Finasteride and aspirin. No more cups of crushed bitter pills hidden in ice cream or applesauce or pudding. All banished from his chart, except Seroquel to sleep and suppositories to poop, thus honoring my father’s own wishes.

  In response, ministrokes stepped up their lightning in his brain. I witnessed one myself. Dad stopped suddenly in his walker and said, “Sue, I can’t move.” Then he began to shudder, as if in a seizure. It passed, and he was able to resume stepping back to his room. Other times, strokes would leave him listing far to the left or the right in his chair. Almost always, there’d be a general weakening of muscle tone, and one time, he lost his language. That, for me, was a tragedy.

  All the visual cues were still there—the facial movements that accompany spoken word, spoken thought, thought made audible and then received. He’d try to vocalize and his eyes would widen just slightly at the right place in his “speech” to express . . . what? His brows would lift, and his smile would widen, and he might reach for my hand, but all language had vanished.

  I realized how so often I’d been able to complete a fragment of a sentence he’d begun: “I need to use” or simply “I need” or “I’ve been thinking.” Like a writing prompt I’d use to stimulate my own language, maybe I’d see him twitch at his gray sweatpants and I’d guess. “Want something to eat, Dad?” Yes, or no, he’d say.

  What should be my proper response now, when every word and phrase was garbled and I simply couldn’t understand? Should I pretend I did? That seemed wrong, but I couldn’t keep saying, “I don’t know what you mean, Dad.” Or “What did you say, Dad?” And if he couldn’t verbalize a train of thought, did that mean he wasn’t having one? Did that mean he wasn’t understanding my words either?

  Previously, when Dad’s physical body was immobilized with ministrokes, we’d still been able to admire his expressive vocabulary and his humor. All that was stripped away. When the words were all gone and only a scramble of sound accompanied the language of his long-loved face, that felt unbearable to me. My friend Crystal said: “Of course you are grieving that loss. Language, words, that’s what you had left with him.” And language, words—they were my work.

  A week or so later, on an evening visit, I asked if he was hungry, not expecting a reply.

  “We had a voluminous dinner tonight,” he said.

  I laughed out loud. “Dad’s back,” I grinned at Esmine. “At least for now.”

  Still, the room felt excruciatingly small. Only the caregivers moved and spoke at any length, and the windows remained closed. But those five women covered all of Dad’s waking hours, from seven in the morning until nine at night. They tended him far more than I did now.

  I visited him not as a caregiver but as a daughter. It was hard, especially when Esmine would report: “What he wants is to be with his family.” But what Dad and I could do together and what I could do there now felt too confining. I was so grateful for our staff of helpers. But I didn’t want their jobs.

  Jeff and I drove south to the Florida Snow Ball, as we did each winter, to Gulfport. There, the Casino Ballroom perches on the north shore of Boca Ciega Bay, a water body so urbanized that its tiny swath of sand is highly prized and precious, to both people and shorebirds.

  A really good contradance is the closest I’ve come to flying in a flock of shore-birds. In this kind of dance, you and your partner move with another couple through a series of figures with evocative names like Mad Robin, Box the Gnat, California Twirl, Ocean Wave, and Hey for Four.

  What transforms a contra from a series of rote steps to a transcendent experience is the ability of the group to synchronize. You need a room full of people working together and moving in time to music. When a great caller and a fabulous live band drive the steps into your body memory, that synchrony can happen. It feels to me like being in a company of wild birds.

  From where we whirled on the white maple ballroom floor, I could see assemblages of black skimmers, willets, and several varieties of gull resting on the beach. They were as connected to one another as the dancers inside.

  But unlike the dancers and the Gulfport beachgoers, the birds’ options were severely limited. We humans could twirl in the ballroom or walk along the shore for pleasure, even get in the car and drive away, but those shorebirds required the beach for sleeping, feather care, eating, and nesting. The restive and rare birds— like the black skimmers—were the first to be displaced. Willets and sanderlings will sometimes skip ahead and then double back to the same feeding spot after danger passes, but the shyest species will not. Where else can the birds rest and feed? Human disturbance was—is—rendering the beach almost unusable to its original inhabitants.

  Each time I caught a glimpse of the birds swirling into the air and describe currents in space with their bodies, I knew that something had scared them off the sand. In this urban setting, the birds weren’t moving for the pleasure of flocking in flight: inevitably it was because humans and their dogs walked oblivious, right through the shorebirds’ assemblies. Sometimes I saw people even run and stamp at the rare congregations of birds, just to see them fly, or to take pictures, reducing the living beings to mere spectacle, and I’d want to run outside and scream at them.

  At Snow Ball, we learned a new dance figure: Yearn Left. We stood in a line of couples, holding hands, facing a long row of other pairs. The caller directed us to feel pulled . . . drawn . . . to the couple standing on the left diagonal.

  “Let the emotion of yearning draw you forward to that next couple you will be dancing with,” he explained. “The Yearn is a very simple movement but full of longing.” As we incorporated the figure into a sequence with others we already knew, the caller gradually withdrew his words. Through the microphone came just a whispered hint to remind us of our next move.

  “Sssss . . .” he whispered, when it was time to Circle Right. “Hhhhhh-aaay . . .” for Hey for Four, and then “Y-y-y-ya . . .” and we knew it was time to Yearn. As for the shorebirds, a group mind gradually infused the dance and the dancers with elastic, joyful connection.

  I believe the yearning so many of us feel has to do with all the ways we’ve been cut off from the natural world. We yearn for the Eden that Earth was, for who we were as a species and all that surrounded us. But our yearning has distorted that original understanding, and we take and we take.

  A first step to healing our loneliness is to pay attention to and honor the needs of all of Earth’s life-forms. There they are: right outside the window!

  The requirements of Dad’s care became increasingly subtle, and those caregivers not given to deep patience, or a sense of humor, and the ability to go slowly, weren’t doing so well on their shifts. His intentions and desires were intensely felt but often inscrutable.

  Just as I was learning to anticipate the needs of wild birds, I saw how Esmine would respond to cues and clues that were tiny but true. She’d say: “Okay, Mr. Isleib, it’s time to get into bed, but I’ll need you to help me.” He might say, “I’m just too weak tonight,” but still he’d move at her direction. Esmine never forced Dad and neither did Jill.

  Jill told me that she was glad when her schedule allowed a day spent with him from waking until bedtime. It helped her understand his rhythms, impulses, and moods, she said. She found
that in his grumpy times, she could help him into his wheelchair, and he’d scoot around the room propelled by his feet, always backward; every now and then he’d pull himself forward by gripping the edge of a table, hand over hand. In these ways, he could move about without being lifted or hauled like a sack of grain from one chair to another or to the bed. Jill would play some polka music on the CD player and open a book, and from time to time they would catch each other’s eyes and smile. I still imagine their faces in my mind.

  I’d been with him very little in the weeks since the release of my new book. I stopped in one evening and found him lying flat in his recliner chair. Esmine sat beside him. We raised the back of his chair and talked. Dad hugged me close against his chest.

  Esmine left the room to let us visit. Dad reached for my hands and twined them in his, crossing our wrists. His palms were smooth and warm. Then he began to pull himself up to seated, using the strength of my hands. He’d rise a full six inches, as if doing an abdominal core exercise, and then release back down to his recliner. His movements were snakelike: rhythmic, continuous, unfolding, his hands moving across mine. Sitting up, relaxing back. Crossing and uncrossing his left knee over his right.

  Suddenly, he opened his eyes and stared into mine, fully present, his blue eyes bluer next to his checked flannel shirt.

  “Is it almost over?” he asked.

  “What do you think, Dad?” We talked about how tired he was of that disease.

  “But what will happen next?” he asked. And then: “I really miss my mother and father.”

  “You haven’t seen them in such long time, have you?” I said.

  We sat close for the better part of an hour, his hands winding over mine like moving vines.

  “How do my hands look to you?” I asked.

  “Gnarly!” he said, and we laughed. This dying wasn’t always so serious.

  In the New Leaf Market, young produce workers rotated out week-old pears, which often appeared whole and perfect to my eye. These they replaced with fruit from a just-opened box of the same variety. The box bore a label from Oregon. Each salmon red pear was nestled separately in soft tissue, like breakable eggs might be. I asked if I could choose one from those just arrived, to purchase. The young men, deep in conversation, smiled and waved permission.

  In my father’s room, I sliced one perfect pear into lengthwise quarters on the gray metal hospital table. The pear had a firm, mealy consistency, a heft to its pure fruit sugar. It glistened with the Oregon rainwater its mother tree had pulled from the ground, maybe somewhere on the shoulders of Mount Hood. I scooped out the seeds and the root of the slim black stem and handed a section to my dad. That fresh fruit, so different from the processed industrial food provided by the facility, lit up the taste buds in his mouth. He consumed all four quarters. I cut open a second pear.

  When the fruit was gone, my dad’s fingertips continued to ferry emptiness to his lips. Nothing except the memory of the freshest of pears entered his mouth. That gesture of sacred self-feeding, and the mudra of emptiness enclosed by his thumb and middle forefinger—they touched me.

  CHAPTER 17

  Thin Places

  “What do you see?” I asked my father on short, dim winter’s solstice eve.

  “A bright light glowing,” he said. I could discern no source of illumination save the lamp between us.

  His dreams and visions were what we had left between us. They grew ever more fragmentary in the reporting but sufficed to let me know where his unconscious was taking him.

  “I dreamed . . .” said Dad. His voice strengthened. “I dreamed I was walking down Hamilton Avenue.” That was the street in Glen Rock, New Jersey, where my father had lived with his family as a boy.

  “How old were you in the dream?” I asked.

  “Seventeen,” he said.

  “Who else was there?”

  “My mother and Billy Joe Francis,” he said. Many times during Dad’s last months, he asked me if I remembered Billy Francis. I came to think of Billy as one of Dad’s angels, though I knew only the barest facts about him from Dad and Uncle Don.

  Dad said that Billy was known as Hot Dog Francis because his father ran a local delicatessen. Billy was an only child; he enlisted in the army during World War II at age twenty. Not long after, he died in a Miami hospital, not on a European battlefield, of malaria. He came home in a box just as dead as if a bullet had killed him. Dad wrote a four-page letter of condolence to Billy’s heartbroken parents. Now Billy Joe Francis was at Dad’s side, keeping my father company deep in the wakeful night.

  My father’s room had grown dense with his stasis, with his enforced stillness in chair or bed. His lungs and throat sometimes filled with phlegm, which he would clear by coughing. The pothos plant in the corner had ranged and curled to fill the space between the window and his bed. It presided over a filing cabinet whose only function now was to hold up the plant, his radio, and sometimes, at night, his glasses. I would bring fruit to occupy myself when I visited, slicing apples, a navel orange, a pint of strawberries into a glass bowl.

  “Who’s here in the room with us?” he asked. He’d been reporting visits from his father and mother to our caregivers.

  “No one, Dad, it’s just you and me.”

  But that wasn’t his experience. His eyes startled open wide.

  “Huh?” He leaned forward in his chair, uncrossed his knees, and stared into the empty corner of the room. His bare shins protruded from the soft gray of his sweatpants.

  “Oh, okay,” he said, confidently, nodding his head. “Yes.”

  He turned back to me with a report.

  “That was your grandma,” he said. “Didn’t you see her standing at the door? She was waving at me, but I wasn’t completely sure what I was supposed to do. Do you think she was telling me to stay or to come with her?”

  Candace McKibben, a dear friend and hospice minister, had told me what Dad was experiencing weren’t hallucinations but “thin places,” life moments when a person senses a connection with something far beyond the ordinary realms.

  “The dying are most often visited by their mothers,” she confirmed. How much sense it made that the woman whose body was our gateway into the physical world might be once again present as we take our final breaths.

  Near the end of the nesting season, I experienced another kind of a thin place, on the spoil island. I had made my way around the tiny landscape with my spotting scope over my shoulder and binoculars around my neck, moving slowly, keeping count of all the birds I saw. On earlier visits, I’d seen pairs of oystercatchers slipping around like shadows, so I looked for them in particular. Just as soon as my eyes keyed in on the shape of a large ebony bird sitting on the sand, it startled away. How fearsome I was to that parent bird, with my spiderlike tripod and upright slow-moving body. Imagine if the only way we could protect our newly born was to draw the predator away with our own bodies and our own voices, implying, There’s no nest, no chicks, no eggs, keep your eye on me, let me draw you far away from what I am trying to bring into the world.

  I fixed in my mind where I first spotted the bird and advanced carefully over the sand to a place triangulated between a broken bit of plastic bucket and a certain white morning glory blossom.

  And there they were: two eggs marbled brown and black, as fragile and unlikely as snowflakes on the sand. An extra high tide could so easily wash them away. A crow or a large gull could devour them. Or if all went well, this line of oystercatchers might continue another generation.

  Away I went, on around the island. Eventually, I found three nests, and in the last of them, I witnessed life crossing between the worlds.

  It was the tip of the bill of an oystercatcher chick meeting the salt air for the very first time. At first, I thought the hole meant that the egg must be damaged. Had ants punctured it, or was the eggshell thinned and then fractured by the weight of the parents’ bodies? But no: there at the center of the hole, a tiny bill, a new rare life, was entering our w
orld.

  I allowed myself only the barest moment to ascertain what I saw, for the adults were circling wide, silent arcs out over the water and back. I needed to leave the eggs under the protection of their own parents, even though my instinct was to kneel down and stay. Kneel down and pray. Though I wasn’t welcome to watch, I knew the full hatch of that chick, its first tumble onto the sand, would be as miraculous and sacred as the birth of any other species on Earth. I paddled away from the island, awash in gratitude and awe.

  In the end, my father’s death was a similar crossing. A final virus commandeered Dad’s lungs, and with it the illness that would end his life. Those last few days, although his body labored, my dad didn’t appear to be in pain. A nurse gave me possession of the liquid morphine to administer as I felt it was needed. We sang to him, stroked his face and his hands. As he took one last breath, his lids flew open, and one last glance of his gray eyes swept our faces. I saw his body ensouled, and then I saw his corpse, spirit gone. Like an eggshell, his physical frame was left behind for us to oil, and wrap in cloth, and bury in the ground. His soul, like the dark chick, had fled. I stepped from the room to call David. His grandpa, my father, was dead.

  Priceless: the nest and eggs of an American oystercatcher. Photo by the author.

  Some days later, on a quiet stretch of Gulf beach, I curled on the sand as if a bird in an egg. I laid my head on my notebook and covered my binoculars with my shirt. There were no sounds except the crumble of small waves on the strand. Their comings and goings, their rhythmic whooshing called to mind a womb, interior waters, first home. It was the shush of oneness before birth, and perhaps after death as well. In between, and for now, I’d found my own thin place.

  CHAPTER 18

  Saving the World

  “How would you like me to inscribe your book?” I asked the woman across the long folding table. “Is it a gift for someone else, or for you personally?” I had just delivered a talk about advocacy, and now it was time to sell and sign books.