The Mirage of the Yellow Bird

It was an awful day last November when I checked my Email and learned some horrible news--a friend's child had fallen down the stairs in their house and was being rushed to the emergency room. I decided to continue from my home office to a business meeting before going to the hospital to be with the family, but I was in shock. I shuffled like a zombie out to the car and felt "zoned out" as I started it and backed into the alley behind our house. I had a sense of dread; my body was inexplicably exhausted.

I pulled forward slowly and a bright yellow bird landed on the mirror of my car. I couldn't tell what it was: a canary, parakeet--I don't know anything about birds, but it struck me as terribly out of place and unique. The bird surprised me out of my stupor, but was so out of place that it felt that it could possibly be just my imagination. This accident felt like a dream to me: I wished it to be a dream. I couldn't cling to that thought and accept the reality that the yellow bird was there.

I'll never be able to explain exactly how, but seeing the yellow bird on my window made me certain that the little girl had died. There was no question in my mind: I swallowed hard against the lump that rose in my throat. Later, I felt guilty about the thoughts that went through my mind at the time: Detachment, sadness, a renewed thankfulness for my kids' health and safety, grief for the parents. My mind flashed to the last time I saw her. The guilt came from the egocentricity of these thoughts--I certainly had empathy for them and would do anything to help them, but fifty people rallied around them: fifty people who seemed better equipped to help them and who seemed closer to the family than we were. There was nothing for us to do but assimilate this tragedy as a part of our lives, which, although necessary, felt selfish.

The yellow bird sat on my mirror for perhaps a second as the car sat in the alley, then abruptly flew to the telephone line along the street that runs perpendicular from our pretty, tree-lined drive. The Texas sun in November appears to be the same washed-out color of boiled corn, but it seemed particularly bright that day. The yellow bird sat and watched me drive away to my appointment.

I was on edge for the next two hours as I was on the road and in meetings, until I could get word of the condition of the child. Time went slowly and everything felt odd and out of place. I ran into an old friend whom I hadn't seen in two years--She seemd to detect that I was out of it, and I cut our conversation short. I had a tough task to perform, and I asked the customer if I could come back another day.

By the time Fran called to tell me that the little girl had died, the bird seemed unreal to me. Fran was reading the Email as she called, and even after she read it to me, she re-read it very slowly--and said "I just can't believe she's gone. I can clearly see that little girl in my mind."

But I wasn't shocked. I had already known it with certainty.

I nearly always reject stories about some kind of death sign--"When Aunt Enda died we had a raccoon knock over the trash can...come to think of it, she always was the one who took out the trash--maybe that was her reminding us to keep the faith." I'm a tough sell on that idea--it feels so much like a coping mechanism--part deliciously tempting urban legend, part trite storytelling, generously laced with over-sentimental wishful thinking.

Whatever my head believed, I started a haunting, secret dialog with myself in which the bird became a symbol of the death of this girl. Two weeks later, long after the funeral, I glimpsed the bird again briefly in the alley behind our house--my mind went to that terrible day. The brightness, the symbol of flight as freedom from the bounds of the earth, a metaphor for being out of place, just like a child has no business being killed at 10 months old.

It took me a month before I mentioned the bird to anyone else.

Even then, I had seen it half a dozen times, always by myself. Eventually, however, I managed to carry my daughter, Kaitlyn, out to the driveway and we watched the bird together on the telephone wire for several minutes before it flew off. I was pretty sure that Kaitlyn saw it, too, because I asked her to point at the yellow bird and she lifted her little finger and said "There it is!" Whew. Hallucination ruled out.

It didn't occur to me that the symbol took an ironic meaning due to the fact that I had found myself in the hospital for several days with Kaitlyn at a young age. Maybe it should have been a reminder to be thankful that she was now very healthy, but it didn't occur to me until much later. After all, this was just a stray bird escaped from someone's cage, right?

Finally, I mentioned my visions and thougths to Fran. She gave me one of those patented Fran looks that makes me feel like documentation is somehow, somewhere, being entered into a file. I felt the ostracized loneliness that must be experienced by people who have glimpsed Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.

It took another month before she saw the yellow bird--she identified it as a parakeet. When we got hit with freezing temperatures for a week, Fran told me that the bird could probably not have survived such harsh temperatures, since parakeets usually live in more temperate climates. But the bird did make it.

We kept seeing the parakeet, sometimes sitting on our window, sometimes chasing other birds around our yard, and recently coming to the bird feeder that hangs outside our kitchen window. I can't explain how something as simple as a wild, yellow parakeet always makes me stop remember death, yet somehow makes me happy. Living metaphor, mere reminder, or a transplanted spirit, it is forever linked to that day.