Where the Birds Go
And she said, “do you see the birds?” And there were no birds. “They’re flying.”
“Auntie, that’s the gazebo.” I told her, looking out the sliding glass door that used to have us and our family picnics beyond it.
My aunt had been on morphine. A week before the last visit we had together — this visit I’m talking about now — I found my uncle, her husband, crying alone in the living room of the split-level house they had together across the city from where I grew up. She had been sick for quite some time, but no one ever really said with what. I remember she had fallen the year before and this was something I blamed and resented my cousin for. Actually, he’s my second cousin. Or my cousin once removed. I don’t know the difference and don’t trust anyone who tells me the actual order of cousins. He is my cousin’s son, which would be my aunt’s grandson. More or less a “fuck up”, he moved to Alaska to stay with her. She was done raising her own children by decades at the time he showed up on her doorstep with a bad attitude and a hand that only seemed to be asking for money. Anyway, she fell down the staircase of that split-level because she was going down them to do his laundry. And I know — I know it’s asinine and unfair for me to blame this on him but that was the beginning. She was never the same.
A week before this last visit, I find my uncle. I had read on Facebook a few days earlier that my aunt was in the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital on the military base. As a civilian and a family member who learns of the dwindling health of her aunt via the internet, I was not allowed to visit the hospital. We all waited. I was close with my aunt, especially in her last months and I didn’t know they were her last months because no one ever really said they were.
And this was a few days later. I assumed she was still in the hospital. My brother, my sister, and I stacked in a car and decided to go for a drive. I don’t remember what car it was. I have four siblings, and these are the two I get along with the best, though our ages are staggering. We are on a drive around our city, which is Anchorage, and it is in the last few days of summer and the leaves make the air smell moldy but sweet and when we drive past my aunt and uncle’s split-level house, there are cars in the driveway. We think she is home. We think that cars in the driveway mean good health and that she’s okay and that she will live. And we park and we go up to the door and we knock and turn the doorknob and enter before anyone responds. The door drags on the plastic covering that is on the carpeted staircase and I walk up the stairs. At this point, it’s all muscle memory. I know this house like my own. And I walk up the stairs to stop at the top, and I find my uncle. And he is crying.
My uncle is short in stature, but strong. He was once a police man. He was once a sailor. He has a tattoo of a panther on his arm. He retired from a job at Alaska’s North Slope shortly before my aunt got sick. With the tattooed arm, he would set her curlers in the morning. He was devoted. He was the father of six grown children that he provided for. And he was crying.
“Uncle?”
The tv buzzed with a show he was not watching, though he was staring at.
“Is Auntie home?” my brother asks.
My brother is behind me. He is older than I am by seven years. My younger sister is two steps below him on the staircase. We are staggered. We are concerned. Our eyes don’t leave our uncle, but flash glances of “oh, fuck” to each other in my mind.
“She’s not coming home.”
The intensive care unit. She is in the intensive care unit of that same military hospital. And my uncle starts to really cry. I mean, crying with noise. Crying the type of tears that knock the wind out of you. Crying the type of tears you only shed for your spouse, tapped from a reservoir of grief you never wanted to visit. His wife will die. He will set no more curlers.
And we — my brother, my sister, and myself — are still standing staggered on the stairs. There are no words to be said and no one speaks. I don’t remember hearing anything but my heartbeat in my ears. There is a type of silence that exists sometimes, and it allows you to hear your heartbeat in your ears. After a race, during the SAT, and when you’re told your aunt is going to die.
But she did come home. And she lived a week longer. And during that week, she got bedsores and peed through a tube and her legs were so swollen they looked like balloons. And she wore blue sweatpants that I’ve never forgotten the hue of. And before I visited her for what would be the last time, I bought a hot chocolate. I can’t go into a situation empty handed. I fidget, I touch my face, I pull at my hair.
And she said, “do you see the birds?” And there were no birds.
My aunt died a few days later. A day after my dad’s birthday. He had gone over to share cake with her. She couldn’t eat it, he said, but she looked spritely. Maybe a few more years. Maybe some more time. It is said that people rally before their deaths; perhaps to help others more than their own selves — to bridge the gap between life and death and let loved ones know that it will be okay.
When I got the phone call, I walked into my mom’s room and put on her bathrobe. Grief is a foreign friend, one I had not too many visits from in my young life. I didn’t know what to do. I put on my mom’s bathrobe, crawled into bed, and wept.
There was no funeral. No closure for so many.
And I never did forgive my cousin. And my uncle never put away the curlers.
But once, on the anniversary of her death, I went on a drive with my mom to Anchorage’s port. An ugly place to others, it has served as a sanctuary to me. A cold September morning, the last of the salmon run through the creek that runs adjacent to the port. Two bald eagles perched high above the waters. In my thousands of trips to that port, I had never seen a bald eagle. And there were two.
I looked at my mom. And she knew.
And I said, “Do you see the birds?” And then they were gone.
