(August 2012)
I house-sat for Jeanne C. and the birds early this month so she could take her first long vacation since Jim died nearly three years ago.
Tuesday, the morning she left for Grand Marais, a large painted steer skull she bought years ago in Taos came crashing down from the wall, shattering the bones and also damaging a Tiffany-style lamp she had given her mother in art school (1968). This worried the birds (Babe, the blue and gold macaw and Sweet Pea, the Amazon parrot).
I arrived at the house after work on Tuesday. I greeted the birds, opened their cages and cleaned their food dishes. They seemed happy to see me, so I scrounged veggies from the fridge and had a little wine.
Photos of Jim were everywhere. Baby Jim, young Jim, middle-aged Jim, retired Jim, Jim with cancer. I’m not one to have many photos about, but Jeanne’s house is full of memorabilia of her family and Jim’s family. Most of the photos were of the two of them together, and they always looked joyful. It really shook me up.
I had to work the next day, so I tried to get the birds back into their cages around seven that evening. They would have none of it. Jeanne called and I put her on speaker phone. She managed to coax Sweetie into his cage but Babe slept on top of his cage all night.
I climbed the stairs to Jeanne’s pretty blue room and got ready for bed. I left the light on in the hall and in the bathroom. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and tossed and ended up sleeping about an hour. (It was a mistake to be reading “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.”)
I got up about four because was not sure how long it would take me to get through the list of morning chores, which included feeding and watering the parrots, cleaning their cages, watering outdoor potted plants and feeding the outdoor birds. I showered, went downstairs and quietly started making bird breakfast. I let Sweetie out of his cage. It took about an hour and a half for the chores but I figured on Thursday I could manage everything in an hour.
Wednesday evening I was able to get the birds in their cages at bedtime. I was really tired and figured I would sleep soundly. I went upstairs to inspect Jim’s room while it was still daylight, thinking that would calm me. Jeanne has removed his bed and repainted the room white. Unlike the rest of the house, it is furnished very sparsely with a simple wooden desk, dresser and low chest. A Navajo blanket is neatly folded on the chest. His urn, very beautiful, sits on top of the high dresser. A photo of him as a boy is on the desk and a lovely rug covers the wooden floor. It feels like a sacred space.
I loved Jim, what was my unease? I left lights on again but only managed to sleep about four hours. I went downstairs at five.
As the sun rose, I began opening the blinds. I pulled the cord on one near Jeanne’s desk and the bracket broke in two, causing the blind to fall to the floor. I pulled on the next one and the cord snapped. A little sad, I walked back into the kitchen, switched on the light over the sink and the bulb blew.
Jeanne and I talked that evening. She found nothing supernatural in the blown bulb or the tumbling blinds. I told her I would be working from her house the next day, Friday, so she called her handyman John to come over to repair the window treatments.
Later, I walked past Jim’s room and saw a large egg-shaped orb flash quickly in the space where the urn sat. I’d never seen an orb before. I went back downstairs and watched the Olympics for a while. The last event I saw was BMX, which I had no idea was even an Olympic sport. I thought to myself that Cullan could have been in the Olympics because he had been a national champion several times. That was a painful thought; it made me think of how his father had abandoned him. I turned off the TV and went up to bed.
I woke up in the middle of the night with a heart-pounding nightmare. I never have nightmares. In the dream, fathers are teaching their very small boys, even babies, extremely dangerous sports. Children are decapitated and savagely injured. Blood spurts everywhere. The fathers laugh, unconcerned for the pain and death they are inflicting on their sons.
So I went downstairs to sleep on the couch by the birds, for comfort.
Friday morning’s light was very welcome. I worked in peace at Jeanne’s desk. John came and tinkered with the blinds but only one could be repaired that day, so in the evening I had to cover the other window with cardboard.
I had been noticing that the birds, especially Babe, would cry out whenever I went upstairs. He didn’t seem to mind if I went outside, into the kitchen or down the basement. I couldn’t discern exactly what he was saying.
Then Jeanne phoned again. She told me that Babe calls out “Mom! Mom!” when she goes upstairs because that is “where all the bad things happened when Jim was sick.” Things like EMTs running up the stairs and Jim falling out of bed.
Suddenly it all made sense to me. I didn’t even try to sleep upstairs anymore. I figured I was feeling the pain of Jim’s last days, or maybe just the fear of the big blue bird. I slept on the couch with the birdies the next two nights and felt much better for it.