By Elisa Penha

Editor: Alloe Mak

cw: discussion of death 

I had a pet bird once. He was called Jonathan. 

He was a small wild bird: a rescue. My mother’s at-the-time boyfriend worked in animal rescue and made sure it would be alright for us to keep him. I guess my mother agreed because she and him must have conferred secretly where he told her there was no way this bird was going to live for very long, and it would be but a small inconvenience to her to let my sister and I house the bird for a little while. 

Jonathan was small, pink, wrinkly, and naked when we took him in. Violently malnourished. He sat in the cut-out bottom of a Tim Hortons coffee cup that we’d filled with grass while my mother and her boyfriend ran to the local pet store to get him bird food and a cage. I observed him on the kitchen table, my head tilted and my hands gentle—I’d washed my hands before I did anything close to handling him, but even then I was nervous. I was thirteen when we got Jonathan. Before then, the only pet I’d had before was a couple of fish in the third grade, and I really wasn’t as much of an “animal person” as the average child. I’d never wanted a dog. I didn’t care for the zoo. My least favourite Tinker Bell fairy was Fawn because I could never relate to her love of creatures. And so, there was me, ambivalent towards animals at best, however understanding enough that my animal-loving sister was too young to be Jonathan’s primary carer, coming to terms with the fact that this was my bird. 

“Hello Jonathan,” I said to him. 

He said nothing back on account of being a bird. 

We set up Jonathan’s cage in my bedroom on a small lifted table behind my bed. I cared for him quite diligently. He’d perch on my finger and sometimes try to jump and fly. Though he still had no feathers, so this proved difficult, but I’d always catch him. I’d clean the cage every two nights—birds shit like mad. I’d feed him. And my mother’s aforementioned animal-rescue-boyfriend would stop by sometimes to check on his health as well as bearing little birdie medicines for me to plop into his beak. I’d talk to Jonathan most evenings in my room. He was a good listener even though he chirped loudly and without pause. That was alright: I understood. I talk too much. Who was I to judge? 

I don’t know if I loved Jonathan. He didn’t make me a bird enthusiast or anything. Almost everybody I know with pets loves their pets without end, but I don’t think I ever felt the same. I think I only loved the act of caring for him. I liked having something to raise. Sometimes, I’m startled by my own maternal instinct. Or at least what I’ve been taught maternal instinct is: putting every ounce of myself aside in order to bring up something else. In the throes of my childhood depression, taking care of Jonathan was easier than willing myself to shower, or brush my teeth, or eat. Jonathan was a good scapegoat for my executive dysfunction. I could simulate everything I should be doing for myself with him. I could watch him learn to fly while I was barely standing. 

Jonathan died sometime past midnight on the sixth of September in 2019. 

I heard him chirping very late that night. I was already laying in bed with the lights out, and he was singing. For whatever reason, on this night, I didn’t get out of bed to check in on him despite still being awake, doing nothing safe for staring at my ceiling. I’d always gotten up before. Up until then, every single night, if Jonathan began to chirp, I’d wake (I am a distressingly light sleeper) and go look in on him. I don’t know why I didn’t get out of bed on that night. I just don’t know. It was a night just like every other. There was nothing different about it, I wasn’t even particularly tired or too lazy to stand and shine my flashlight on him. 

He died sometime in the middle of the night. I slept for however many hours with a dead bird two palms length away from my head. 

Jonathan was not singing when I woke up. I went to tell him good morning and he was limp on the floor of his cage. Dead birds look a lot like toy figurines of birds. I had a couple of those. I had to throw them out afterward because they made me flinch to touch. 

I walked very calmly up the stairs and I woke my mother. 

“Jonathan died,” I told her. 

Everybody else was crying and I couldn’t stand it. Not because I’m averse to displays of vulnerability—I’ve cried for matters less than death—but because I was uncomfortable with the fact that I could not will myself to cry alongside them. I am eerily stoic in the immediate aftermath of death, and I have been this way for my whole life. I’ve been told I look insensitive, standing expressionlessly when the news of death is delivered, but I don’t believe that’s up to anyone to tell me. I don’t know why I am this way and I don’t think I need to know: it’s just a matter of difference. 

My mother doesn’t understand most of me, but I think she understands this. Years later, she woke me at four in the morning to tell me my aunt—her sister—had died. My father had come over and I could hear him bawling with my sister, but my mother wasn’t crying, and I wasn’t either. She sat next to me on my bed and we just stayed there: not touching or making an effort to comfort one another. She asked if I could help her with the laundry. I did. 

I have come face to face with the bodies of the dead twice: once an animal and once a human. Both times, my reaction was to get on with my life with admittedly jarring quickness to outside onlookers. I relieved my bedroom of Jonathan’s cage that same day and picked up all the stray wood chips from the floor. I vacuumed. I sat in bed with a book. It was like he’d never been there at all. In the human case, after the ambulance took off, taking their shock blanket away with them, I unlatched my bike from its rack and went to the convenience store to buy myself a popsicle and a KitKat bar. 

I have been called “emotionless,” which is strange, since I am the most emotional person that I know. How can you do that? people ask me, entirely appalled. Did X even matter to you? Did you even love that bird or your friend or your aunt? Do you love anyone? 

I don’t know how I can do that, is the truth. Death just doesn’t register that way with me—at least not as fast as people would like it to. The tears do come. Eventually. But this is much belated: when, months after, I find an extra pot of bird food in the kitchen cabinet, or I make the unconscious and too habitual mistake of opening my phone to text my dead friend. But death doesn’t make my math homework due tomorrow go away. It doesn’t change the fact that I like to bike and it’s the middle of July, or that my floor is covered in birdseed and I might as well clean it now since there isn’t a bird anymore. They’re going to be dead forever: I can mourn them later. I guess it’s that sort of rationale that makes me seem so detached and so rude. I don’t mean to be. I don’t want to be the sort of person who comes across as callous or purposefully aloof, but isn’t being disingenuous so much worse? Why do you want to see my misery? Why do you want me wailing? Will you dry my tears or do you only want to watch me suffer so you can nod in satisfaction at the profoundness of my hurt? 

“It’s like you didn’t even care!” somebody yelled at me, after the death of a friend of mine.    

 As if all my actions while these dead people and animals were living were now made desolate by the absence of my sobbing. 

I sat straight-faced watching a Zoom funeral for my aunt in the middle of the pandemic. My mother and grandmother got into a fight because my mother got up halfway through to wash the dishes. I don’t think she and I had ever been more alike and I think she knew that. 

If I allow myself to put my life on pause post-mortem, who knows what it will take for me to press play again? What’s stopping me from laying in the grass and tossing dirt over myself to stay in solemn silence forever? Would you finally believe I loved them? It’s not insensitivity: it’s a survival tactic. Grief is a survival tactic in every form it takes. You have to let yourself feel your feelings, I am told, but in cases of death, for me, that doesn’t mean crying. I am moving on with my life just to prove that I still can: I can still do everything that I used to do, but now with the knowledge of how my aunt’s cell phone number will never pick up, or with the lingering feeling of a dead bird on the back of the knuckle I used to nudge it on that September morning. 

I think that if you measure your grief by putting buckets under your leaky eyes to collect the spillage, you are wonderful, and this is good. I also think that you can fill those buckets by taking a walk after getting the news or watching your favourite film two hundred times and be just as wonderful. I think we talk a lot about what the dead deserve from us and not enough of what we deserve for still being here. 

I miss Jonathan a lot sometimes. I hope I was good to him.  

I was being picked up from my boyfriend’s house last winter when I found out my hamster died. 

“Joey died,” my mother said, very flatly, when I closed the car door.  

“Oh,” I told her. And then after some beats, “Can we get McDonald’s on the drive back?”