Death & Birds

My friend’s father died this year. I still remember when she got the news, how she had looked up at us from her phone, stricken, her eyes suddenly blurred.

Afterwards, for many months, she told us that he was visiting her in the form of different birds. We used to joke with her when a sparrow landed nearby, and say, “Look M, there’s your father.”

I had never had much experience of death until two weeks ago, when I woke up to find a message from Ṣukru, my friend’s partner, saying, ‘Richard is passed away on Friday. Sorry to inform you My Dear.’

Ṣukru is Turkish, and I knew that that ‘My Dear’ was a translation of the term of endearment that all Turks use with their loved ones – canım, a word made up of two parts – ‘can’, meaning soul, spirit, or ‘essence of life’, and ‘im’, the Turkish possessive. Canım is often translated as ‘dear’ or ‘darling’, but its meaning is perhaps closer to its source, something like ‘my soul’.

Richard and Ṣukru had been together for 15 years, despite living in different countries for much of that time. Ṣukru is a dentist, so could never easily travel for work, and Richard was an English teacher, an adventurer, and a free spirit. But throughout those 15 years, he would return every few months, like a homing pigeon, to Istanbul and Ṣukru’s quiet flat.

They both came from conservative families – Richard’s Catholic and Ṣukru’s Muslim - and so their relationship was lived in the shadows. When last I visited Istanbul, Ṣukru told me that his mother was still putting forward potential wives for his consideration.

“Why don’t you just tell her?” I asked.

But he told me it would be cruel.

Still, for 15 years, Richard was his canım, and when together, you could see the joy shining out of both of them.

Then a few months ago, he came home to find Richard on the bathroom floor, dead from a heart attack.

When I first got the message, denial reared inside of me, blaring a warning. I messaged back: ‘Oh no, Ṣukru.’ And it was literal, I meant that I could not conceive of it.

He wrote: ‘Richard really loved you.’

And then a wave of guilt washed over me. Richard had messaged me recently, out of the blue, to say he was leaving Saudi Arabia to finally buy his dream house in Valencia. Let’s talk soon, he wrote. And I had made a plan to talk with him, in my holidays, but then the holidays had been too busy, and then when next I tried, he had been at dinner. And then it became just one of those many things I would do ‘soon’.

What was I thinking? I said to myself. Who is too busy to talk when they’re on a holiday?

But I had thought I had the luxury of time.

I never knew people could be taken away so suddenly, not deeply, not in the way I actually lived my life out with them.

Richard was only in his mid-forties when he died. He was Irish, always laughing, always making others laugh, and always with a drink. He drank too much, and when we had first met, so had I. We would go out together and drink and talk and drink and talk, until we started to find it difficult to follow the thread of our conversation. But I think Richard never drank in that pained way that some do, to forget; but rather as I had done, to feel completely present, as though the night were an adventure, and we were rushing out into it.

I tuned in to Richard’s funeral online. It was in a Catholic church in Ireland, very traditional, with hymns and Bible verses, and a priest leading the service. Ṣukru, the love of Richard’s life, wasn’t present, and was referred to as Richard’s ‘good friend’. How absurd, I thought tiredly, how strange, that a parent could still need to be kept in such complete ignorance about the life of their child.

I wondered which woman in the church was his mother, but I could only see the backs of the mourners, their bent shoulders, the thin pale stalks of their necks bending to pray, like tired flowers. I had written a letter to Richard’s mother telling her that Richard had been a light for me in a dark time, that he had been a light for everyone he met. Now I wondered - how had he carried that bright light inside him for all those years, alongside such a heavy secret?

In the following days, a bold, black bird began to appear every morning on the railing of my balcony, quite close by to me, and strutted around, now and then flashing me a bit of side-eye.

“Hello,” I said. “You’re very brave!”

And when I spoke, he didn’t fly away, but only turned his head and let out a stream of song.

It wasn’t until days later that I remembered what my friend had said about her father visiting her. I spoke with her again, about death, and birds, and we wondered if perhaps all souls are incarnated as birds before starting the next human life, briefly free to soar. I liked that idea, of Richard flying around the world, visiting all the people who loved him.

Since then, I’ve found myself paying attention to all kinds of birds. I sit on my balcony at dawn and dusk, and watch the crescent-winged birds swoop by in their relentless, reckless circles. I read that this flying pattern is known as murmuration, and I love that, because it does seem as though the air is murmuring with their movement, or even that the world itself is murmuring, as it always is, with birth and death, and light and darkness, joy and loss; our small planet pulsing with it, alone in the vast silence.