I often start and end my day in my mother’s garden. She died almost three years ago, of stomach cancer. The garden was sacred to her. While she was alive, I saw it as just a place to read on a lounge chair or duck out to for a smoke when I came back home to visit. Since her death, I’ve found myself drawn there. I feel closer to her when I am in the garden. I cannot claim to know the names of all the plants, shrubs and bushes, but I do my best to take care of them. It feels like taking care of her, as I had tried to do, right up to her last breath.
Last spring, I came to know one of the birds. I watched the bird decide where to build her nest. After some deliberation, she chose a bush tucked in one of the corners of the garden’s brick wall. She gathered twigs and sticks of varying size, as well as any debris deemed suitable for building a home. Not to criticize, but it was not the best looking nest I had ever seen. Its exterior looked like the yard of a hoarder, a place that would unravel a homeowners’ association president. And yet, it was also a miracle.
We are all in a constant state of grief, even though we don’t always admit it. Grief comes with any change. Our friends, our lovers, our jobs, our health: Nothing is ever as it was the year, or the moment, before.
Through the branches, I watched the bird lay her eggs. I watched as she incubated them. It brought me comfort and curiosity, even hope. I felt the anticipation of the new, of something to look forward to. I made sure to respect her space. I never got too close. She tolerated my presence. When she made her way to the serving bowl of water I had put out, I would turn away as she fluttered her wings to bathe. There’s very little privacy in an open floor plan.
When her babies broke free of their speckled, Tiffany blue shells, all three survived. I watched them while their mother went in search of food. In her absence, I sprinkled breadcrumbs nearby, hoping to ease her task. It’s in my nature to want to help. The bread remained untouched. She was a country, not a city, bird. She wanted the best worms and insects for her babies. She wanted to feed them organic food. Processed breadcrumbs would not do.
Tiny, fragile and disheveled, the nestlings used all their strength to stick their heads up. They positioned their still-forming beaks toward the sky, awaiting nourishment. Did they know the food came from their mother? Were they familiar with her scent, the sound of her beating heart? Were they too young to learn the difference between want and need, as my mother had taught me early on? Still, the baby birds were never disappointed. They were fed and sheltered. They grew stronger. They began to test their wings.
One morning, I pushed aside the branches to find the nest was empty. I smiled, then felt a pang of grief. Only the mother’s cries endured.
For around five days, the mother remained nearby, crying out for her newborns. It was a sound of distress or, at least, that’s what it sounded like to me. I do not speak bird. But to say she was singing seems presumptuous.
In the almost three years since my mother’s death, nothing has changed in her home. Her clothes still hang in her closet. Her bathroom remains untouched, everything meticulously in place. Her purse is in the same spot, on a stool at the kitchen island. Her tennis bag is nearby, ready for the matches she used to play three times a week. The Mardi Gras decorations, the last evidence of her seasonal décor, still reside on the fireplace mantel.
My mother would have wanted us to box everything up and donate it to charity, but my father hasn’t done so. Perhaps he likes the remnants of familiarity, or perhaps, even now, after what was 55 years of marriage, he doesn’t see it as his job. Home décor is not his purview. I don’t speak bird, and my father and I don’t speak the same language either. We are united only in our lack of understanding of each other. My mother is no longer here to interpret between us. We grieve in different ways, for different reasons. Our grief is individual.
My father rarely goes into my mother’s garden. It is my refuge. Like grief, it is constantly changing; it is born of change. As the mother bird calls out for her fledglings, I wish I could call out to my mother. Who should I call now when my plane lands? Who will have relief and joy in their voice, knowing I have arrived safely? My doctor says to me, firm yet gentle, “I’m going to need you to update your emergency contact.” She is no longer sitting at the kitchen table, under the hair dryer, rollers in her hair and a book in hand. We no longer quietly occupy the kitchen together. I long for the hum of that hair dryer. I was once tethered. Now my grief is ambient.
It seemed like such a short time, from building the nest to laying the eggs, to incubating, to hatching, to moving on. I had retreated from New York City to my Louisiana hometown to be at my mother’s side, as we moved swiftly from diagnosis to doctor appointments, to surgeries, to hospice care. I was alone with her for that last exhale. Even in grief things change moment by moment.
I did not need to speak the same language to understand the mother bird’s cries last spring. She was signaling that she was still there, should her children need to return. Just as my mother had always done with me. We are born, we are nourished and then we leave, and we are left. We miss the sound of the people we love. It is often the first thing we lose. We call for them to return. They are forever a part of our life, if no longer in it.
There is grief even in birth. That’s what the mother bird taught me. Only a mother can know those early days with her child, and with them the loss of who she was before. Then, the child, if it survives, departs. The mother bird’s constant call became a part of my healing. It extended far beyond the moments I sat in the garden. When I see birds that resemble her — grayish wings, with whitish stomachs and elongated tails — I wonder if they are hers. Living and dying are the only things we know are certain. The solace of nature’s pulse is heard in that rhythm of birth, and growth, and moving on.
The temperature drops; a cool breeze blows through. The bush sheds its leaves and holds its naked branches to the sky. The empty nest becomes more visible, exposed, each day. I could let it remain, but I know I will remove it. Nature and time will fill the void again, in new ways. I know I will remove it. But not today.
Brian Keith Jackson is the author of the novels “The View From Here,” “Walking Through Mirrors,” and “The Queen of Harlem.” He is at work on an essay collection, “Untitled: It Shall Not Be Named.”
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