Did the song of a blackbird bring comfort to my dying friend?
*****
“A blackbird’s song can’t stop disease, but it can offer comfort.”
So believes Rachel Clarke, the author of Your Life In My Hands: A Junior Doctor’s Story and a physician with the National Health Service. A month ago, the New York Times published her opinion piece, “In Life’s Last Moments, Open a Window.”
For a decade, Rachel has worked in an overstretched, underfunded health service “in which too few doctors and nurses labor with two few resources, struggling to deliver good care.” Burnout is rampant, so much so “that it threatens to stifle the kindness and compassion that should be the bedrock of medicine.”
But then Mother Nature steps in; rather, dying patients step into Mother Nature; patients like Diane Finch with terminal breast cancer that had run its course and medicine could no longer arrest it. Diane’s first instinct was to document her every thought and feeling on her computer before they were lost forever. Then one day, as she was frantically typing, she heard a bird singing through her open window:
Somehow, when I listened to the song of a blackbird in the garden, I found it incredibly calming. It seemed to allay that fear that everything was going to disappear, to be lost forever, because I thought, ‘Well, there will be other blackbirds. Their songs will be pretty similar and it will all be fine.’ And in the same way, there were other people before me with my diagnosis. Other people will have died in the same way I will die. And it’s natural. It’s a natural progression. Cancer is part of nature too, and that is something I have to accept, and learn to live and die with.
I set aside Rachel’s article and kept returning to it. I was fascinated by the power of Diane’s blackbird, but didn’t really know why . . . until I looked right under my nose at words I had written on a Post-it and affixed to my writing stand decades ago:
It was the fifth stanza of Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:”
This is not to say that I haven’t learned to appreciate, even prefer, silence.
Kathy was larger than life — and she would hate that I resorted to that cliche. But she did own the room. She was the first beloved I ever lost to death.
A link to different blackbird songs and calls:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Brewers_Blackbird/sounds
I have always loved birds for their beauty and their song. Diane Finch’s words are very comforting. I hope towards the end of Kathy’s life that she was comforted by Wallace Stevens’ poetry. I, too, do not know what I prefer – inflection or innuendo. I think I’ll just enjoy the beauty and the song of birds and leave it at that. A very nice post, Sharie, and a lovely tribute to Kathy.
Thank you, Merrie Lee. Our sister, Karen, always loved birds, too. I can’t remember if our mother did, though she had a deep affection for hummingbirds. I know we had some bird feeders in the backyard. I have three, plus two birdbaths. It’s like checking into the Ritz when birds come my way.
I think this is a beautiful tribute to October 3. And blackbirds. And life. Makes me mindful to listen to the in-between. And thankful for your writing. Kathy singing still.
Uh-oh, Bird. I think I see a poem:
OCTOBER 3 by Bird
Let’s pay tribute.
To blackbirds. And life.
Be mindful.
Listen to the in-between.
Kathy singing still.
In my mother’s words, “beautiful, simply beautiful.”
For me there are no adequate words. We need the song, the inflection and the innuendo after last week. We need to sustain ourselves through a dying of a different kind as well.
Ah, Agnes! Your mother! So grateful to see her words here.
And you are right, Charlotte, about sustaining ourselves through a “dying of a different kind.” I hadn’t thought of last week as a death, but good Lord, it certainly was one, wasn’t it? Particularly for survivors of sexual assault.
Kathy Mitchell would be so pissed about last week. She would be all inflection. No innuendo.
What a lovely tribute to your friend Kathy, to October 3, and to Life! I loved Diane Finch’s approach to her death and hope I will remember, when my time comes, to both record and to listen–a way of saying “I matter, I really do, and all that I’m thinking and feeling matters.” And at the same time to say, “It’s not just all about me. Life will go on, around my living and my dying and beyond my living and my dying. How do I know? Because I hear it.” Thank you for a most thought-filled piece.
Kathy died at age 50? How tragic. I don’t think I ever realized she was so young. She and Gwendolyn both died too young and gave you gifts of poetry. As you pass Kathy’s words along they continue on with us, her wit, her wisdom and her spirit. But, damn, I’d imagine that it sure is hard not to hear the sound of her laughter … though maybe it is there somewhere in the blackbird’s whistle. Maybe that is why we are to pay attention.
At the time, I didn’t think dying at 50 was dying young, Beth. Now I do, of course. And we laughed, laughed, laughed all the time. She had two huge basset hounds named Millie and . . . Flash.
It was Kathy who first introduced me to poetry, and it was Gwendolyn who inundated me with poems I had to read after we befriended each other at a 3-week Natalie Goldberg retreat at Ghost Ranch in 1996. After that retreat, Gwendolyn sent me a large envelope filled with poems with her hand-written commentary on each page. I still have those pages.
When she was 48, Kathy went back to school to get her MFA in poetry and right out of the gate, won first place in a Virginia state-wide poetry competition. She beat out established poets, including Carolyn Forche. I’m pondering posting that poem.
Yes, yes, post Kathy’s poem. How wonderful to have her among us.