About A Bird

My dad passed away & the only way I can write about him is keep it small

I wrote this in my journal a few days after my dad Philip McMahon died. Writing is one way to begin processing this inevitable but epic loss at least a little bit. I read it at his funeral.

Have you ever heard it said that a bird will visit when someone you love dies?

My father passed away peacefully in his sleep on Sunday. Since then, I’ve kept an eye out for that special bird.

I go outside this morning and THERE ARE SO MANY BIRDS. It’s July — the middle of summer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many birds together in one place.

“Dad?” I say. Not to put too much pressure on him. I know he’s tired. He lived nearly ninety six years. The last two and a half were very hard: he lost his wife Lois to Covid (our mother passed away twenty years ago this year and my Dad found love again at the age of 77). His grief over Lois escalated his dementia I think. He didn’t want to be alive anymore, but he was.

He still loved (or felt compelled by his restless nature) to walk. No cane, no walker. No medication. He loved cookies and chocolate, a beer at eleven in the morning (just one) and a vodka and 7 Up in the evening. He still loved women. Men’s interests weren’t for him: sports, manly hobbies. Maybe that’s why my four brothers, his sons, are such sweet, sensitive souls. He did like to drive though, and was impressive on the dance floor.

Anyway, back to the birds. There are so many out here, I think it must be silly to think I’ll get a visitation. Then I notice a bird in one of the raised beds. He’s tidying it up. Purposefully, almost manically. My dad loved order. He lived for order. You’d set a glass down in between sips and find it washed and put away in a cupboard. Try to read the newspaper and if you stepped away for a minute he’d fold it up and put it in the recycling. He saved all my cards and letters — to give back to me so I could dispose of them.

So this bird. It’s tidying up the raised bed, hopping around, head bobbing up and down. I swear the goddamn thing is folding leaves and stacking blades of grass, like laundry to be put away. Organizing pebbles.

Get a grip, I tell myself.

But then, the bird turns towards me. I notice he has a red head.

“Dad!” I say. It has to be him. My father was a redhead. Not a fiery ginger red; more a mellow copper. I see him with red hair almost up to the end when he barely had any, it was so much a part of him. Nothing too showy. Just a flash of mischief.

That red hair set him apart. He never fit in but he seemed to like it that way.

Now the redheaded bird is looking straight at me. He has big eyes.

Like my dad’s eyes, damaged in a car accident when he was a child, and always hidden behind heavy eyeglass lenses but…round and innocent.

The bird’s got a hard beak, but these soft eyes.

“Dad?” I say again. The redheaded bird gives me another look, like he’s making sure I’m alright. Then he nods, and flies away.

photo of me and my Dad by Robert Sietsema, June 1985