The Whiskers on a Berry: An Exclusive Guest Post From Jackie Polzin, Author of Brood

My mother’s parents died three days apart when my mother was forty-nine years old. Throughout the weekend of my grandparents’ funeral, cardinals visited the feeder outside their kitchen window. The cardinal had been my grandma’s favorite bird. My mind toggled expertly between what was there — a cardinal — and what was absent — my grandparents — and all the while worked at making meaning out of both things. No one could have convinced me the cardinal and my grandma were not in cahoots.
We sat eating tomato sandwiches at my grandparents’ kitchen table on one of the coldest days of the year. The sandwiches tasted like nothing. The juice from the tomato ran from my wrist to my elbow inside the sleeve of my old college sweatshirt. A cardinal, my sister said, and then she fell apart. She had been the last to see my grandma awake. I thought I wanted that memory; I imagined my mother did, too.
My loss was not separate from imagining my mother’s loss. What would it feel like to be her? I wondered how she’d be a daughter now. What would happen to that oldest part of her identity? The allegiance, the assumptions, the habits, the lifelong practice couldn’t possibly change overnight. Where would her love for her parents go? In what form might their love return to her?
After years of trying to get pregnant, my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. The loss overwhelmed me, and yet was almost contained. Few of our friends knew we wanted children. Only a handful of people had been told of the pregnancy. We had not yet acquired a baby’s things. There were no memories to get lost in or share.
For three months I had been a mother of sorts. I wanted to cling to that new identity but there wasn’t anything to hold on to, not one day carved up in ritual care. My sorrow was rooted in what hadn’t come to pass and felt no less real for it. My impulse was to love something that wasn’t there. I was surprised that grief, absent its strongholds of memory and vacancy, could persist on the loss of a future I had imagined.
I don’t know how to reconcile this perceived slip of self, but once in a while, in the midst of my own grief, I found myself smack dab in the present moment, something having captured my attention there — the whiskers on a berry, the sound of a cricket with no cricket in sight — and the sense it gave me was a pure form of relief.
This winter I visited my parents on the coldest day of the year. My daughter sat on the floor beside the sliding door, hair aloft in the warm air of the heating vent. Behind her, my mother sat at the kitchen table from where she often watches the birds. On the other side of the glass a woodpecker ate suet from a hanging log. Two blue jays swooped maniacally to pluck peanuts from the picnic table. And the cardinals — there were ten of them.