Paying Attention
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I bought the hummingbird feeder last January, for Anja’s birthday, and hung it in the little Japanese maple in our patio garden. Hummingbirds come every day to feed and to perch on the tree’s slim branches. I think they’re mostly Anna’s Hummingbirds, bright pinks and greens, soft grey. They chitter at each other, and shoo each other away from the food. They’re noisier birds than I would’ve expected.
This morning, after dropping the kids off at school, after the mad rush for lunches and library books and “do you have your mask?” and before settling in at my desk and Zoom for a long day of marking papers and talking students down off the ledge, I took a moment to refill the feeder. I let the feeder soak before I filled it, my hands warm and still in the sudsy water while I watched out the window for two quiet minutes.
These days, I don’t have a lot of time for Anja, or for grief. E and M demand my attention; they need me all the time. They need to be fed, and hugged, read to and tucked in at night, coaxed out of bed and hurried along in the morning. They need dentist appointments, and birthday presents, and new shoes. Their hair needs to be cut, their nails trimmed. They need me, and my attention, all the time.
Anja doesn’t need me. She requires nothing. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the world I live in doesn’t recognize what she needs, doesn’t acknowledge – and so doesn’t allow space for – the ways I should attend to her. My care is spread thin. Every day I attend to E and M, to their dad, to our parents and the rest of our families, to the fifty or so students I teach each term, and every once in a while, to myself, too. This year, unsurprisingly, everyone needs even more of my attention. Remote school, teaching online, student mental health crises, planning an extended family Christmas on Zoom…Grief and the loss of her once consumed me, but Anja can’t compete anymore against the barrage of other voices clamouring for my attention. My second daughter, my quiet middle child, recedes, neglected, into her silent corner.
My phone buzzes. Work email. I rinse the feeder, fill it with new sugar-water, tromp back out into the garden to rehang it. The hummingbirds come right away, stay humming around the highest branches of the maple until I step away and they swoop in. I watch them jostle for position, marvel again at how much noise these small birds make.
I remember learning shortly after Anja died that in some cultures, hummingbirds are associated with babies who’ve died. I resisted a lot of this kind of symbolism early on, as I resisted many of my experiences with grief and babyloss. I suppose in lots of ways, I’m still resisting easy symbolism, anything that seems pat, uncomplicated, anything that tries to smooth over the real horror and pain of a baby’s death. But I like these birds. And I like the time it takes to unscrew the feeder from its hanger, clean it, fill it and hang it back on the tree. I like seeing the little birds, scrappier than I thought they’d be, flitting in and out of the tree. I like hearing them argue with each other, asserting their presence.
It’s a moment or two of attention and it connects me to Anja. Cleaning the feeder, filling it, hanging it fresh: these are acts of care, acts of love, that I can’t easily perform for her because she’s gone and because the world around me doesn’t recognize the grief I still feel almost nine years after her death. A tiny, fat bird with a vivid pink chest and crown alights on a branch and we regard each other. Hello. A moment passes and he chatters his way off to a tree down the block and I turn back to the busy-ness of the day. My phone’s buzzed again, and there’s work email to answer.