The Last Survivor Is Gone

January 14, 2011

Chica died today.

Seven years to the day after Heidi died; I found her tiny parrot dead on the floor of the cage, back in the one place she never seemed to go.

Seven years. Exactly. Too strange to be coincidence.

Like with Heidi, I thought somehow we could help Chica become healthy again. For thirteen years, we never had a problem with Chica other than one time nicking a new feather and freaking out over the blood that seemed to pour out. The vet’s cure? Pull the feather out. Oh, and one time she got caught in a toy. Thankfully, I was home or she might have thrashed herself to death out of terror. She started feather picking because of that stress, but a full spectrum light and a cage so jammed with toys she could barely move seemed to help her out of that.

 We never saw her sick even for a day. She hung on the sides of her cage and bounced up and down looking for head “scritches” and shredding her tail feathers in the process. Her gentle disposition allowed me to “share” her with the children that came through our home. Expectancy and uncertainty fought in their eyes as they stretched out a finger trying not to snatch it back. I loved watching those eyes widen with delight as the colorful bird stepped up onto their hands, and turned her head sideways to look at them.

Heidi took great joy in her pets. They comforted her when human friends were often few. Becoming severely handicapped in childhood tends to chase away most of one’s peers. Differences can seems frightening for children and teens. But animals don’t care about those. If you love them and tend them, they love you back. Thankfully, most of the pets Heidi had in the last several years, survived, all except for the first parakeet, Mango. He died a couple of months before Heidi.

She tried to cultivate and accepting attitude towards his death, but she took it hard. A sense of foreboding came over me about Heidi when he died, and I wondered if she thought the same.

Then a few weeks after Heidi died, two of her three remaining little friends followed.

Tamiel, her eighteen-year-old chinchilla went home with our niece, Chrissy. But he wasn’t well. I suspect he had been sick for a good two years. He exhibited signs that I now know indicate a fatal GI disorder in chinchillas. At the time, Heidi’s illness overwhelmed us and slight behavioral changes in a pet barely registered. We did not know that like birds, chinchillas tend to hide their illness. Three weeks and many vet visits after Chrissy took him home, Tamiel died in her arms. I really think the Lord may have kept Tamiel alive just for Heidi.

Three weeks after Tamiel’s death, the second parakeet, Battie, died. That left Heidi’s much loved green-cheeked conure, Chica. Like Heidi, Chica loved everyone. For years, having her chirp and bounce in our house was like having just a little bit of Heidi still here.

Then as summer turned to fall, Mike noticed Chica fluffed up and shivering. But that passed. Although I did not know enough about birds to get her to a vet, I felt alarmed, yet suspected the same overactive imagination that warned me Heidi was sicker than I thought was back at it again. Unfortunately, once again, it was right. But I doubt we could have saved Chica. Like Heidi.

For weeks, through holidays, trips home for my youngest brother’s wedding and Christmas, we nursed Chica. Back and forth to the vet’s, and the bills mounted. We shook and measured and syringed medicine down her tiny throat. We cooked up mash and painstakingly hand fed her when she was too weak to eat. I found she liked pancakes. So three times a day I cooked a mini pancake for her. We sliced apples thin and bought blueberry muffins. Anything to get her to eat. And we carried her around the house, tucked under the edge of a sweatshirt or held her in our hands under the warmth of a light.

It seemed like she was getting stronger.

The last night, she did not want to go to bed. Mike held her forever that night. I took her out again at around 1 AM and carried her. When I put her back, she climbed right to the top of the cage and bounced up and down, her head feathered all ruffled up forward towards me. “Chica,” I laughed. “Silly bird. It’s late. Go to bed.”

I left a night light on for her. Covered up poor Reepicheep so he could get some sleep, and went to bed. Mike said she was asleep in her hut when he got up.

When I checked on her, I couldn’t find her, and panicked. Not in her hut. Not on a perch. Could she be jammed in something?

Then back, in the far left corner of the cage, a place she never went, I saw a small bundle of feathers. I reached in and lifted her out, the tears for Heidi I had tried to hold back flooding out. Seven years, to the day, almost to the hour…

Rewrite of Jagged Edges Prologue

Jagged Edges:

 Patricia Hammell Kashtock

Prologue

Jagged edges of the building, black glass and steel, push into the courtyard below. The sun, glinting off their angles, no longer seems to mock; but neither does it comfort. A woman stands contained within one of its edges, alone. Her sea-green eyes flicker with distant summers when ripples of water bubbled over her feet, making them sink into the warm sand.

Those days slip away from her memory and disappear. An angry ocean blots them out. The waves rise higher and higher. Then crash down.

Crushing, destroying, then calmly receding, the water drags all she once held dear off into its depths.

She stares over the edge. Crystalline images begin to dance on the speckled grass in the courtyard below her. Ponies jump and play dodge with barefoot children while puppies frisk between sun-kissed legs.

Her daughter turns a cartwheel among giant-sized daisies – then looks up. With eyes crackling and hair flying, she waves two-handed to her mother who stands at the window. Head thrown back, she laughs and spins with all the unbounded exuberance of seven going on eight. Suddenly she stops and leaps sideways to tag another scampering child.

Then, like soap bubbles bursting on the sidewalk, the children splinter off into nothingness.     

Slowly the images shift.

A different child dances there – the child of summers long gone. She speeds through complex steps, never faltering, never stumbling. Light sparks outward from the same-green eyes and gives strength to her steps. That joy will die too soon.

But for the moment, love enfolds the child’s dreams. The earth, moon, and stars are her tender playmates while two strong arms keep all her fears at bay.

Then suddenly, those arms are yanked away as a cannibalistic mass devours her mother’s brain.

Puppies and ponies and bare feet on the grass vanish in the cold wind.

The mother closes her eyes. Her shoulders slump as if they had lost the will to stand. For a moment, she rests her forehead in her hand; elbow supported by the other arm braced across her stomach. She tightens her mouth and tries to resist those things that seem all too well known… then waits in the darkness that sometimes seems better than sight.

But the darkness cannot hold us. Slowly my eyelids open. Standing up straight, I turn my head back towards the child cocooned within the white sheets, no longer able to turn cartwheels on the lawn below. I stare. Lifelines intrude into my daughter and emerge out again. And I think:

 It wasn’t all so long ago…



Out of the Ashes - June 05, 2010

Families move on. Much like time, even great loss cannot force them to stand still. Often the wake from the loss surges forward and carries them to paces they do not want to go. Perhaps less frequently, it merely becomes a challenge one needs to tame.

But at no time, does it ever just go away.

Sometimes I wish it would. Then guilt pushes up through the choppy surface. And stares.

Yet to avoid celebrating new milestones in the wake of grief is to refuse the gifts from the Creator’s hand. While I am grateful that our initial heartbreak is a few years passed, I cringe thinking of a friend’ whose celebration comes while throes of unknowing grip her family.

Two families. Two weddings on the same day. One family where the loss of a child creates a persistent drone in the under currents. The other family living the nightmare of a son they cannot find.

We have moved on in a sort of a way, although often I feel tethered to something submerged just enough I cannot see its form. But I feel its weight as we drag it behind.

For the other family, at this point there is no place to move to because they do not yet know what they will move from – or whether they will have to move at all. Hope gives strength. But it can also be the knife that keeps the wound raw. Then again, when finality has torched one’s dreams, the acrid taste of the ashes left behind never quite goes away.

As I look and listen to our daughter-in-law to be, feelings of pride and tenderness fill my heart. Yet sorrow also resides there.

Mike will never walk his daughter down the aisle and place her hand into the hand of the young man God has chosen for her, knowing their Creator will watch over their life together. I will never joyously plan alongside of my daughter for that transitioning day when she steps into her new life.

We will never know the assurance of frequent time together a married daughter commonly retains. It seems that sons leave more firmly than daughters do.

And so I look forward with a mixture of pride and joy, and a sense of loss.