Dead Birds and Funerals

The two little J sisters walked hand-in-hand into our backyard on a bright sunny summer morning. They were maybe six and four years old, pretty little girls with long blond hair and wide blue eyes in matching floral sundresses. They lived around the corner and across the street. I was surprised to see them.

Earlier that morning, we’d heard the news. The neighbors were still rattled. In the middle of the night, Mrs. J woke to the sound of her husband hiccuping. She didn’t think much of it. She tried to wake him. But he just kept hiccuping. She shook him. His hiccups grew louder but he was otherwise unresponsive. Frightened, she phoned her brother-in-law who lived a few blocks away for help. He arrived minutes later and called an ambulance. By then the whole family was awake and crying. It was too late.

“Our dad died last night,” the older of the two little girls announced. She said it the way kids said we got a new puppy, or my birthday is tomorrow, an innocent boast or special announcement.

“You shouldn’t brag,” my ten-year-old self scolded. “Dead means he’s never coming back. Ever!"

She burst into tears, turned and ran, dragging her little sister with her. I realized then that they were too young to understand what they were saying and that I was an awful human being for forcing them to see the cruel truth of this world. We lived. We died. We existed. We ceased to exist.

These were abstract concepts to me too, untested and unverified, except for an incident the summer before when a bird flew into the garage window and broke its neck. My friend Karen and I found it limp in the side yard. She refused to touch it so I cradled the bird in my palms. Its soft feather body lolled about, still warm against the skin of my hands.

I insisted on a funeral. We needed to dig a grave but all we could find in the garage was an aluminum snow shovel that did nothing to the hard summer dirt. I grabbed a big spoon from the kitchen. It was slow. Karen, whose parents grew up on farms and were the only neighbors on our spanking new suburban block to plant a vegetable garden, said what we needed was a trowel. As she ran next door to get one, I yelled at her to get a shoebox, too. Karen's mom was the type to save boxes for just this sort of thing.

While Karen was off cajoling for an avian casket, I searched for the perfect birch tree twig. I snapped it in half. I held one piece horizontally over the other to shape a holy cross and attempted to tie it in place with one of the long blades of grass that grew closest to the cyclone fence where the mower couldn’t reach. The grass was supple but not quite long enough to form a knot that held.

Karen returned with a shoebox big enough for an eagle. Our tiny dead wren looked absolutely lost and forlorn in it. I ran inside to steal a roll of toilet paper to line the box but my mom said the bird didn’t need a soft bed because it was dead.

We started digging. It turned out a shoebox required a much bigger hole than we’d anticipated. We took turns. My two little brothers got in on the action, too. What we finally managed to dig was not quite large enough so we angled the box. We threw all the dug dirt back over it. Even so, a cardboard corner poked out. I stuck the tiny twig cross upright into the mound of dirt but it came undone so we settled on pressing the pieces flat into the earth and surrounding them with tiny white flowers plucked from the bush by the clothesline.

Since the bird was in my backyard, a Catholic funeral was in order. I recited two Hail Marys and said a few Latin phrases meaning God be with you and with your spirit which impressed the Lutheran Karen who could only sing Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so which sounded like a baby song in comparison. Our ritual was impressively solemn. I actually felt sad. We all sniffled. Tears, real and pretend, were wiped from eyes.

Later that day, we decided to dig up the box to see if the bird was still dead. It was. We reburied it and repeated the funeral rite, though the second time I said a single Hail Mary and, to be honest, rushed through the words.