In your personal diary a chapter has ended . . A new chapter is beginning, drawing its substance from the pages that went before. A life has ended; living goes on . . . The person who has been part of your life is gone forever . . . it is final, irrevocable. Part of you has died. Grief is unbearable, heartache, sorrow, loneliness. Because you loved, grief walks by your side. (Earl Grollman)
Although the calendar is into double digit days of April, it is snowing AGAIN. What we longed for in December doesn’t look so good when we want to be about the business of planting flowers. But more importantly, even though it’s snowing, the hummers are back! I saw my first hummingbird of the season, a very woebegone, snow-speckled, bedraggled hummer, and hurried to warm up some sugar water for its feeder; I hope it will return.
What its presence took me back to was a hot day in July fifteen years ago. My husband died unexpectedly on a bright, mid-summer morning in 2003. That afternoon as I sat on my porch, vaguely aware of the hummingbirds buzzing and diving amidst the flower garden, I registered somewhere in my numb consciousness that they seemed unusually numerous and aggressive. I was alone; family and friends from other parts of the country, shocked and grief-stricken by the suddenness of his death, had yet to arrive.
What I was most aware of as I sat there among the hummingbirds and flowers, was that in a single instant that morning, one future had closed forever, and another had begun to unfold. The disbelief, the shock, the despair, and the awareness that life as I’d know it was over, was overwhelming.
What followed, as all who have suffered a deep loss know too well, were weeks and months and years ravaged by the pain of grief. Some time later during those years, I would read of a hummingbird harassing and “sort of chasing a golden eagle — a screaming-freakin’-eagle, vs. a badass bird the size and weight of a Dum Dum lollipop.” And I would be reminded of that day in July when the hummingbirds dived and buzzed and whistled in a fantastic aerial display.
Much later, I checked out hummingbird legends, and learned that according to an Aztec myth, the earth goddess Coatlicue once picked up a bundle of hummingbird feathers that had fallen from the sky. Storing them near her bosom, she became with child, angering her other 400 children, who conspired to kill her. But the moment they did, a fully grown, heavily armed Huitzilopochti sprang from her wound and started cutting off heads. Huitzilopochti was the god of war, depicted as a warrior with hummingbird feathers on his helmet. Aztecs believed warriors cut down in battle would be reincarnated as hummingbirds, fierce courageous birds with the strongest of spirits.
Some time after my husband’s death, I found a letter among his things that urged me, should he die before I, to grieve as I needed to, and then to get on with my life, to carry the hope and optimism with which he had lived his life into the future: to, in essence, he said, be a warrior of the spirit. To be like those hummingbirds, I thought, who, ounce for ounce, are probably fiercer than any other creature on earth.
Could I really do that, I wondered? Could I let the gift of the hummingbirds on that terrible July day call my attention to a way of being that would draw me out of the despair and despondency that I seemed unable to shake? Could I move forward with my life, accepting at last that in every ending there is a new beginning? Could I call on every “warrior” fiber of my being to find the courage to go on?
In the face of overwhelming grief, each of us does have to find a way of keeping on. Obviously how we each find the courage to do that is as multifaceted as an individual personality, with each of us drawing resources from our unique wellspring. As perhaps you’ll remember from previous writing, one of the things that had always fostered my own capacity to keep on keeping on had been snippets from literature, stories, quotes, songs, and bits of poetry. I had clung to these as a lifeline during that long, dark time of grieving. Clinging to the light left by others’ words who had walked the same path before enabled me to find enough warrior spirit to go on.
Since that time, so many years ago now, I have lost two parents, also suddenly, and three beloved friends. Each death shook my foundations, but none more so than that initial terrible loss that taught me so much about what dying — and living — are all about. What I learned is beautifully expressed in the following excerpt from A Song by Shaibh Glaz Al-Qusabi. Perhaps it is what the hummingbirds came to teach me on that July day so long ago.
— we die — we sail into the end without pausing to say good-bye; our dreams, hopes, loves come to an end like footprints in the sand chewed by the desert.
— we live — we live each instant to its deepest core, collect its treasures, trifle with its secrets, love ourselves within its ecstasy.
Of death and life I shall a sad, sad, happy, sad Song sing . . .