Goodbye Mister Crow

Hey Sam,

a while ago, not sure if you remember, we were sitting on our balcony eating dinner and watching the ocean as the sun set. You were most likely eating spaghetti bolognese. It’s your meal of choice and on standby all the time. You love it and we love it because it’s full of hidden veg.

Anyway we were out there eating dinner and enjoying the breeze when a black shape fell out of the tree across the road. It hit the bitumen with an audible thud. It was a crow. As we watched it started convulsing and trembling. It looked as though it was panicking but then it stretched its wing and the fight went out of it. It gave a final shudder, almost a sigh and then it relaxed. It’s wing closed against its body, its head dropped and it died.

It was a startling thing to witness. You started asking what had happened to it…

It’s dead Sam. The crow just died.

We left our dinner and walked across the road to it, holding tightly to your hand even though there were no cars. It was quiet, dusk. We knelt down. The crow had landed at the top of a disabled car space, just above the blue box with the wheelchair in it. There was blood on the bitumen and already ants crawling all over it, making it look like it was moving when it wasn’t. We found two sticks and lifted it up. I was careful not to touch it and warned you away as well, as though the sickness could somehow pass to us if we came in contact with it.

We put it down at the base of one of the big pine trees that grow in the strip of park before the beach, right next to where I taught you to ride your bike. It was the same tree the bird had presumably dropped out of.

We placed the sticks next to it, framing it. It had the beautiful shape that birds seem to possess when they die. Body arched back towards the head, wings pressed to its sides, legs and beak sharp spikes coming out of the curve of it. I think I took a photo but I can’t find it now. We decided we should have some kind of ceremony. One of us spoke, or maybe all of us did, I can’t remember, but I do remember feeling honoured and somehow responsible because we had been witness to the bird’s last moments.

When we got back inside your questions started in earnest.

Where is the crow?

It’s dead, its molecules will go back into the earth.

I remember feeling I wanted to sit with the enormity of the experience, meditate upon the idea of death but you wanted me to explain something I had never really pondered in any detail.

Will I die?

Sam. Sammy. You knew and understood what we had just been witness to. You started to wail.

I don’t want to die

I don’t want to die.

Over and over, distraught. Tears and snot covering your face and your Mum and I holding you, trying to comfort you about something for which we had no answers. We talked about energy. Your Einstein book. How we’re all made of atoms and those atoms, that energy, doesn’t disappear, it goes out into the world, into other things. That crow still lives in other form.

I don’t want to die.

And suddenly it was over, purged from you. You stopped crying, stopped grieving.

Like the crow, you lifted a wing, shuddered and then let go.

As for me, I was still unsettled by the suddenness of our conversation and its topic. I wasn’t prepared, no-one had told me there would be an exam on the transient and existential nature of our lives that day. Or that we would have to not only understand the subject but explain it to a 4 year old. I kept thinking, if I had a bit more time I could have prepared something, then I would have really nailed that conversation.

As it turned out you were fine. The next day you asked if your great grandmother was going to die soon. I said yes, waiting for the meltdown, but you just accepted the fact and we talked about atoms.

Is she going to be atoms too?

Yes Sam, her atoms will go out into the world, like the crows.

You accepted the theory easily, without existential drama. You’d already done the work.

In Indian mysticism there is a tradition to sit at cremation sites and watch the bodies being burned. It’s meant to give the observer an understanding of the true nature of our lives, that we are not the physical body, it is only something we inhabit in passing, something that is bound for death as soon as it is born.

The bodies never really burn all the way through. There are so many cremations in a day, bodies stacked up waiting for the torch, that the process is often left unfinished. The smouldering remains are shovelled off into the sacred waters of the river, where they will bob and float downstream until they reach the ocean or are pulled apart by fish and birds. Heads are often left completely intact, features seared from faces, skin split open and peeling, skulls showing. The river takes it all, ash, bone, charred flesh. Remnants of people who occupied a life on this planet. Like you and me.

I won’t always be around for you. I’m 52, late to the party because it took me a long time to locate your Mum in this world. I’m a delayed Dad contemplating your future as I drift into what is commonly known as my Autumn years, like a leaf going from green to yellow to red.

There is a point in life that your gaze seems to travel from where you’ve been and starts to eye off where you’re going, but it seems to me its better to stay focussed on where you are. And that is here, with you.

So I promise, even as I fall from the tree, I will attempt to blaze brightly for you.

Love,

Ragnar.