The Day of the Starling

Image by ArtTower from Pixabay

Things became serious, raw, when the family stopped to pray at the end of a late lunch in the Boettger family main room, table cluttered with emptied paper plates and red, plastic ice cream bowls, idle chatter and joke-making brought to a hush. It wasn’t that things weren’t serious before, just that, now, you could see reality for what it really was.

We’d gathered as a family at the farmhouse of Bob and Nadeen Boettger–Grandpa and Grandma–in Arlington, Nebraska, to celebrate the 4th of July together. We’ve had many such gatherings in years past. But the deeper reason we were gathered this time was to say goodbye to Grandma.

My grandmother sat perched in her wheelchair at the head of the table, a degenerating brain and body racked with injury and grace. Parkinson’s disease is a disorder of the nervous system. It causes nerve cells in the brain to break down and die, resulting in the slowing and stiffening of body and mind over time. Everything slows down: movement, speech, and mental cognition alike. Feet begin to drag, words are slurred and labored, mental acuity is dulled.

In the last years of her life, when she would speak, you would need to lean in close to hear the carefully chosen, quiet, and few words. You’d have to allow time for the words to come out. And not just time, but space, too. When you are close to the end, each word becomes a world to make room for.

Grandma’s increased decline paired with the logistical difficulties of large family gatherings had given us cause to organize one last formal get-together. Around the table were Grandpa and Grandma’s four daughters with their husbands and children, and at the time of the gathering, two great-grandchildren. Grandma would not actually pass away until almost a year and a half later on Thanksgiving of 2019. She died peacefully in the presence of her oldest daughter, my aunt Cindy, who sang “Amazing Grace” and “Jesus Loves Me” to her in the quiet stillness of the farmhouse near midnight.

Time is subject to dilation. Gathered around the table that day in Nebraska, it was as if a camera lens had zoomed in on the moment, aperture set for prolonged exposure, capturing the blurry edges and movements in one still shot. A gentle current of air flowed from an old floor fan pointed and whirring towards the table. The fan was that turquoise color that you only see on appliances from the 70’s.

I was trying so hard to soak it in, to remember, to be an honorable witness to time and to Grandma. Love is in the details. I wanted to remember the exact words that were said, what Grandpa might say in the prayer which would bisect time into distinct entities: before the prayer, and after the prayer. The prayer would be the naming of an ending of this particular configuration of people and place, and the beginning of something else less graspable. Family units provide you with a steadfast post to lean on growing up, something immovable. The immovable post was being moved.

   —–

Grandma’s movement and cognition had slowed significantly, but she knew what was happening. After the prayer, as we began to busy ourselves with cleaning up the table, began saying goodbyes, her eyes welled up with moisture.

“Growing up, I didn’t see my mom cry much, but the last three times I’ve said goodbye she’s cried,” my mom reflected amid her own welling tears when we were pulling away from the farm that day, the gravel clinking in the car’s wheel wells as we rolled down County Road 24.

Grief is a closed door, but it opens up others. It expands you, opens you, gracefully, forcefully. The week Grandma died, I was sitting on the couch with my mom during Thanksgiving break at my brother’s house in Utah. My mom, Nadeen’s second oldest daughter, was reflecting on her own last moments with her mother in Nebraska when she’d been there the previous week. I was feeling the familiar pang of escapism, a resistance to engaging, but I was pulled in anyway–a broken and tender hug from my mom like none I’d ever received before.

We all try to escape. Grandma would reach and reach, reaching to escape the degenerating nerves, muscle, and bone, to grasp the world again. At the cleaning of lunch after Grandpa’s prayer, the world to be grasped was a neglected butterknife on the table before her, her fingers outstretched, leaning forward in her wheelchair. “Let me get that for you, Grandma,” someone said.

Grandpa would consume himself with frantic industry. He’d huff around the house, bang folding chairs down the basement stairway, take out the garbage, push grandma’s wheelchair around a little too forcefully. He’d patrol the metaphorical perimeters of his household, beating back the brushfire of time as it began to encircle him and his wife of fifty-seven years. There was an unending sense of urgency, it seemed, a desperation. If there was a thing to do, it must be done now before it’s too late. There was no time, it seemed, no space.

—–

There was a bird a few years before—a starling. I blasted it out of the sky at the Boettger farm with one of Grandpa’s shotguns, examined it beneath one of the towering trees in the backyard.

Starlings are largely considered pests. They eat crops, spread disease, chase off other wildlife, and propagate madly with no natural predators to keep them in check. In wintertime, they gather in the thousands, weighing down power lines and filling out trees as if they were leaves.They’re the birds you see flying in those huge, hypnotic, pulsing flocks, shifting into shapes and patterns like a series of Rorschach inkblots reflecting back to you the dark, hidden depths of your subconscious mind.

Starlings are not native to North America. On a cold March morning in 1890, a wealthy New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin opened a crate of sixty or so of the birds in Central Park. He’d had them shipped from Europe, wanting to bring culture to New York City by introducing every bird ever mentioned in Shakespearean literature. It was a 19th century Pandora’s Box. There are now over 200 million of them across America.

Grandpa is a bird lover, but he’s also a shrewd midwestern farmer. Starlings were on the naughty list, and Grandpa deemed them acceptable target practice for his tribe of young, suburban grandkids with itchy trigger-fingers ready to shoot at anything that moved. You had to get Grandpa’s blessing before just running around the property with a gun. Other naughty-listers included rabbits, sparrows, and pigeons. God forbid you take a shot at a robin or cardinal.

I didn’t particularly enjoy these farmyard hunting parties all that much, though I’d join in every once in a while. I’d tell myself, This doesn’t bother me. I rarely hit or killed anything.

On the day of the starling, I found myself hunting solo, the rest of the party chasing down a rogue rabbit on another part of the property. This doesn’t bother me, I’d think between missed shots at starlings in flight between various trees and perches. This doesn’t bother me, I kept saying to myself, until finally, miraculously, a shot connected, an unlikely intersection of high-velocity vectors, and a small, dark, shape tumbled down from sky to lawn.

—–

Before lunch, before the prayer and goodbyes, we had spent the morning in the Boettger living room looking at old photos, family history, names of each family member recorded genealogically on the front pages of Grandma’s Bible. Grandpa was eager both to help our research, and at the same time, to not be too hurt by the possibility of our disinterest. He dredged up boxes of photos and documents from the murky depths of the basement.

I was an embodiment of the divided self. On the one hand, I could feel the gravity of our time together and wanted to absorb the history in the shared company of family. On the other hand, perhaps the stronger impulse, I wanted to tune out, to escape. I wanted to nudge the photo albums off to the side and watch the FIFA World Cup game that had just started on the living room television.

—–

I leaned over the still form of the fallen starling. There was a sour feeling in my stomach as the digestive acids dissolved my claims of This doesn’t bother me into a pulpy nothing. A small bit of blood from where the shot penetrated the birds chest oozed thick and miasmic through its dark feathers like an oil spill. Up close, what I thought were black feathers were revealed as iridescent shades of emerald and plum. I avoided getting too close.

But can you just leave a dead bird in the yard like that? Can you leave death laying around? There was no good place to rest the shotgun while I looked for a stick. I found one, more twig than stick, from a nearby tree. The twig-stick was too short and too thin. I prodded at the limp body, black and purple like a rotting plum, to make sure it didn’t avenge itself at my expense. I began to flick it toward the trees of the windbreak where I could hide it in the tangled pine branches and overgrown grass. Its wings unfolded slightly like the whorl of a galaxy with each flick and fling. The feathers brushed together, light and crisp—I could feel this through the stick. I could feel the bird’s silent weight.

Physicists say that space is configured in such a way that, theoretically, if you were to travel far enough and long enough in one direction, you’d eventually end up right back where you started. Space essentially bends back on itself.

The physicists also have something to say about time. For one, time is relative–the closer you get to traveling at the speed of light, the more time slows down. From the reference frame of lightspeed, time ceases to exist. I do not pretend to understand the physics of this.

The distance between the bird’s original resting place and the tangled trees of the windbreak where I hoped to dispose of it was vast. As I traversed the yard, flicking the small, dark body along faster and faster, it felt as if space was bending back on itself, like time was slowing down. It felt as if the fabric of space-time would simply take me back to the dead bird’s resting place over and over again, locked in a timeless, distanceless eternity. How did I get caught up in such a thing? I wanted out. I should have stayed inside. But you can’t just leave death out in the yard.

—–

I wish I could tell it right. I wish I could remember the details, get the facts straight. I wish I could absorb the stories properly and share the right kinds of memories. I want the t.v. turned off, the photo albums open. I want the shotgun to collect dust on its shelf in the garage. I want to put the blood-mottled bird-pest back up in the sky. But the starling knew its death was coming, foretold of it through the shifting, pulsing flight patterns of its winter flock.

There is both comfort and curse in the idea that however far you go, you’ll eventually end up right back where you started. There is both comfort and curse in the fact that from the perspective of light, birth and death are the same moment. Jesus called himself the light of the world. Maybe it wasn’t a metaphor, but a metaphysical claim. Jesus, as light, sees the world in its timeless moment. Sees Nadeen Boettger’s life in Nebraska, sees her grieving husband and daughters. Sees the guilty grandson prodding at the limp body of a starling with a stick. It’s all tied together, it all exists in the same moment. In fact, it’s all there is, and the it that is is infinite.

It is mostly mystery. There is much we don’t know. But I do know that before Grandma died, my aunt Cindy sang “Jesus Loves Me” to her.

“We ask for your wisdom, Father,” is one of the things Grandpa said in that final prayer together, his voice wavering slightly. I remember that now.