When grief is quite literally the thing with feathers
Thoughts on the transfiguration of the hardest yet inevitable part of being human
“Can we go and see the Great Hornbill?” my then-boyfriend Rob asked me in 2010, bouncing about in his seat as we sat on the plane to Malaysia. We had been together for a year, and by now I was used to expecting the unexpected from this Kiwi man who was a ball of contradictions of punk rock and skinheads and gardening and helping old ladies on our street. Was he referring to a band? A friend of his with a nickname that no doubt had some terrible story attached to it?
When I continued to look at him blankly, he said: THE GREAT HORNBILL, jabbing his finger at a picture in one of his nature books. Reader, it was this:
“Sure, okay,” I said, waving him away while I continued with my inflight movie. I knew birdwatching was something he loved, and the lore among his friends, was about how Rob made them trawl the soggy English marshlands to look for something called a Bittern. At the time, I had zero interest in birds – back then, I would have been hard pressed to tell the difference between a pigeon and a seagull.
That trip was the turning point of something special – it was where Rob proposed to me after making me hike up the side of a mountain. On the way, he’d stopped the car several times to scan the skyline looking for birds. When we’d reached the top of it, I was sweaty and irritated. He called me over to look at something he’d seen moving in the trees. I’d yelled NO I DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT ANYMORE F**KING BIRDS while grumpily limping over, only to see him waiting for me on bended knee holding a teardrop diamond ring.
Afterwards, we saw a flock of hornbills majestically cutting across the expanse of the valley with the light soft and turning towards dusk, and I felt that line so clearly radiating from me to the great beyond, connected to all that life out there, that it made me understand Rob. I wondered if that elevation of the soul, that most of us feel when we are near bodies of water, the jagged slow beauty of mountains, and the lances of light piercing clouds, is what gave him a sense of peace in a life that dealt him a hard hand.
Over the years, birdwatching was pressed into me because it was an extension of him. He would walk in St James Park when baby owls had hatched, and whenever we went on holiday, he’d always be watching the horizon and the trees. Even though I hadn’t wanted to know at first, he taught me to look for kingfishers sitting on a line, to observe the part of a tree ‘for the shape that doesn’t belong’, and to listen and be curious. Outside my parents flat in India, he pointed out parakeets and Brahminy kites that we had previously been oblivious to their existence.
But then Rob died, and we were forced to make sense of our loss, and what it meant to navigate the world without him.
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