Conspirator
- Brian
- I went out there in search of experience To taste and to touch and to feel as much As a man can before he repents.
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An Early Encounter with the Enemy, 2 of 2
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| Credit: Prem Sichanugrist http://www.flickr.com/photos/sikachu/ CC BY-SA 2.0 |
Recently, there was a storm that moved through OKC during the night. It was not a bad storm, though there were some strong winds; it was nothing like last week's storm that produced the deadly tornado. The afternoon after this storm, I was walking the Queen Bee home after school, and we turned onto our street, she took off running, as she often does, in order to beat me in a race to the house. She was about one yard house ahead of me when I saw her stop (I was walking at this point). She looked down into the tall grass and then turned to me and said, "Daddy, I see a bird."
I walked up next her and stopped. Sure enough, there on the ground was a small bird, not a baby but not big enough to fly either.
"Yeah," I said solemnly. "That bird is dead, Queenie."
"Who killed it?" she asked.
"Well, no one killed it. It must have fallen out of its next during the storm last night." She looked confused, so I continued. "Just because something dies doesn't mean that it's been killed by another thing or person...." I listed a few ways a person can die without being killed, and I remember the last one I listed was old age, but then I faded off, not really knowing what to, not knowing what I should say. I felt like my little girl needed some type of understanding about what she was seeing, but I wasn't providing her anything of value.
"Let's go home and get a snack," I said.
"Yeah!" She said and took off running once again. I was relieved that she so easily moved away from death and on to snacks, seemingly having forgotten the former. But, then roughly two steps passed the dead bird, we both stopped because there was another bird. This one was not dead, but it was obviously damaged in an irreparable way. It twitched on the ground, unable to control itself. I really don't know if the Queen Bee understood what she was seeing. I know that she has encountered death in Disney movie's like Tangled and Up, but seeing these birds, she seem to reach some sort of comprehension that death separates the deceased from the living--it's not simply some plot device in a fairy tale.
I looked up into the tree and say the crude remnants of a nest. A limb higher up the tree had broken off in the storm and collapsed onto the nest below.
"Let's go inside, Queenie."
After she was settled down with a snack and watching an episode of Word Girl, I went back outside to euthanize the the barely-living bird. I've never done anything like that before. I've never had to put down an animal. It impacted me--the whole situation--in a deep way. Not just having to kill a terminally maimed bird, but my failure to talk to the Queen Bee about death in a meaningful way.
She brought up the birds a day or two later with a neighbor who was visiting. I haven't heard her bring it up since then.
What a strange encounter. What a strange experience.
