This year started with a blight of blindness striking our 20-odd African lovebirds. I first found two eyes shut on the floor of the cage, the next day, it was five and soon, it was every second bird with eyes squeezed shut.
We separated the worst-afflicted from the worse and took them to the doctor’s; her receptionist asked us, do they have names. We said Birdy and for the next month, they were all Birdy as my mother held them in her palm and I injected powdered tablets mixed in water, vitamin drops and coconut water three times a day.
I wonder if you have seen a lovebird up close and nudged its beak with the fat of your thumb gently lifting it to insert a needle in; I wonder if you’ve ever been bitten by such a bird. Don’t go by their size, these birds can be as feisty as you and I.
Once in a yellow cage, our sick bay as we called it, we had as many as 13 green and pink lovebirds. They were so alike we had to use a black permanent marker to tell them apart. We learnt them this way. Number three was a sweetie, number one a biter and number four, that bird was a Houdini in feathers. After a while, we couldn’t imagine thinking them the same, they were each so unique.
In front of our house, lies an abandoned plot where weeds reign. This is where the birds passed are flung; my mother doesn’t believe in gently laying them down; she throws them violently over the wall, at least in death they soar a moment before they fall. That plot is filled with sunflowers now.
It’s not fair that birds get sick, that they convulse and die contorted, that they get cancer, that they go blind. When my aunt died, it was as if death itself was in the room. It was horribly sad and tragic but I could accept it and almost understand it as a way of the world.
This was a year when animals taught me more about death than the family members and friends I have lost in the years before. I tried to hold a golden koi into feeling better. I tried to resuscitate a dying duckling by thrusting it into a bowl of cold water. I tried to force my dog dying of a heart attack to stay with me and not leave just yet. I’m not ready, I cried as I held his bear of a face. I wasn’t when the light went out and his eyes became glass. I don’t think I’ll ever be.
The year is close to done and so much has changed from how it started.
Almost all the birds are dead; we could coax them to stay only for so long. Once so determined to nurse them to life, we now make their deaths more comfortable. We’ve learnt, I’ve learnt that only so much that you can do. It’s a strange paradox we can’t save no matter how much we will it but we can kill even if our intention was completely the opposite. It feels so simple, a primary school lesson almost but it took the birds dying for me to learn it. I tried to save them to save myself.
Even with my dog when his tongue turned blue and he gasped standing too uncomfortable to sit, I preened at the chance to play nurse. After three hours of rubbing him down with a wet towel, feeding him coconut water and rice water, I was tired and reading a book, while his tongue got bluer and he gasped even louder. Death was in the room, a part of me knew it true but I kept pretending I couldn’t see them. He looked up at me, chocolate brown eyes shimmering, my bear. I imagine he was telling me it’s time. It’s only after he died that I finally understood just how much I love him. I grieved each bird, but with him, I feel it still, gnawing at my bones; my love for him is so vast it splashes as I write this, brimming full in me. I hope it never dissipates. If he hadn’t died would I have known the extent or rather the limitlessness of it; I’m not sure.
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