Mourning and Mourning Doves

For weeks now, the predominant notes floating through the dense morning air at Sandhill have been those of the mourning dove. Often they have been the only sound coming from the branch, an aria written in a minor key. On other days, they have been joined by a chorus of wrens or a choir of mockingbirds, but the predominant melody greeting me in these waning days of winter has been their haunting coo-coo-coo.

I missed them when I had to be in the big city for a couple of days last week. There was business that needed attention and I stayed with some friends from law school who are also excellent hoteliers and bird lovers.

We were sitting at the kitchen counter catching up and about to start supper when my phone rang and a quick glance at the Caller ID confirmed that it was the call that I had been both expecting and dreading. A man who called me family (though we shared no DNA or legal ties), a man with whom I had spent hours talking to death everything from sharecropping to Sunday School to SEC football, a man who had sat with me while I cried over a broken heart, was gone.

“I know ... I know ... I’m so sorry ... I love you ... I know ... I know,” I cooed to the bereft voice on the phone.

I did not sleep well that night. Behind eyelids that would not stay closed, memories flickered like old black and white movies – that time he spent the better part of a Saturday dragging me and his wife to every hardware store in two counties looking for a very specific pine straw rake, the weekend he had me standing in knee-high water helping him build a dock, the night he piloted the pontoon boat through an unexpected storm – , all of which became more elaborate stories with every retelling.

When I finally slept, a series of fitful dreams kept me close to the surface of consciousness. I would remember only two, in each of which I was carrying a pottery vessel which, as I tripped over something invisible, went crashing to the floor, shattering into ugly irregular shards. I got up the next morning uneasy and unsure.

Death does that. Every single death does that. It undermines foundations and fertilizes doubt. It instigates insecurity and makes uncertainty the only currency. It is like navigating back roads by GPS and suddenly losing service, leaving you with no choice but to keep moving forward but with no idea how to get where you are going.

It was nearly midday and still far too cold when I stood at an upstairs window and looked out at my friends’ small, city-appropriate backyard. Dotted with bird feeders of various sorts, tended with great attention and much more avian knowledge than I have, it looks like something out of Southern Living. A shaft of sunlight fell on the ground beneath a shepherd’s hook and glinted off chunks of something that had clearly given way to gravity and ended up in pieces, pieces that looked strangely like the pottery in my dreams.

“Something’s broken!” I pointed through the window, holding in a gasp.

“Just ice,” my friend explained. “The water for the birds froze last night and I turned it out. It will have melted before long.”

I sighed with relief. Nothing was broken; it was just changing form. Or, as the Roman poet Ovid wrote, “All things change; nothing perishes.”

Three days later I was back at home, rising early to drive across the state to honor my friend, to share with his family, to remember his smile. Grieving, but grateful. And as I stepped outside, the call of the mourning dove bid me Godspeed.

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