Deb Werrlein
My dead father-in-law came to visit me on my transcontinental bicycle trip. I was riding westward through central Kentucky and had just told my husband, Steve, I could not get home for the funeral. I didn’t let myself cry until we hung up.
It’s not a tragedy to die at 84, but that doesn’t mean Bob’s passing didn’t break our hearts. A spry and energetic cellular biologist and naturalist, he suspended travel during his wife’s ill health, then again during COVID after Ann passed. His cancer emerged after vaccines restored our freedom to move. He asked for time to take one final trip. He wanted to see the birds of Brazil’s Pantanal and—dream of dreams—see a jaguar. But cancer is a greedy motherfucker.
Bob knew the name of every plant, tree, insect, and mammal. On walks, he stopped often to point out the shape of a leaf or recite the Latin name for a tree, showing us the beaver-resistant Juglans nigra that flourishes along the creek near his home. He scolded me for eating too many plump, Rubus idaeus, telling me to leave the sweet red berries for the birds. He’d hush us while he imitated a bird’s distress call to attract chickadees and warblers. Steve and I rolled our eyes. But when middle age combined with a healthy dose of pandemic boredom, we discovered we also thought plants and birds were interesting. By then, Bob had little time left.
The last time I saw him, Bob was birding from his dimly lit living room. The couch didn’t face the window, so he dragged an uncomfortable rickety kitchen chair into the middle of the room. From there, he looked out over his yard with its many feeders. I stopped putting away breakfast dishes to watch him watching. The picture window framed the expanse of outside, broken only by his small body, which had withered to little more than bones under a too-big suit of skin slung between the angular points of his shoulders, hips, and knees. He seemed almost bird-like himself. Against this decay, the fire of his will and intellect burned so defiant I thought it might consume him like he was brittle tinder. I shuffled the silverware I still held, suddenly struck by the constancy of the birds. They’d been there before him, and they’d be there after him. Bob the axis on which those two worlds turned.
After I slid the knives and forks into their drawer, I sat with Bob. I’d come to say goodbye in a final visit before I departed for the 3-month bike trip I’d planned for 35 years. My dream. As he and I watched the birds flit in and out from his feeders to his gargantuan maple—blue jays, cardinals, nuthatches, the surprise of a rose-breasted grosbeak—I thought what a cruel twist for me to embark on my adventure just as the frailty of illness tethered him to home. He asked a few questions: Would I camp? How would I carry my belongings? He said he wished he were me. Wished he could go.
Then we turned back to the feeders, which attracted almost every woodpecker type: the hairy, red belly, flicker, sapsucker, downy. And the pileated. For years, Bob climbed a twelve-foot aluminum ladder to fill the suet feeder nailed to the maple’s trunk way up in the green. It had to be that high, he said, to attract the pileated. A pair came and demolished the suet while we watched—as they did every day. We raised our binoculars in salute.
The birds had always been Bob’s friends, but they served a greater purpose after Ann died. The pandemic kept us from grieving together, leaving Bob alone with his one-acre yard, its squirrels, and the birds he faithfully fed with hundreds of pounds of feed each month—black royal, thistle, millet, mealworms, shelled and unshelled peanuts, suet straight from the butcher. Without Ann to care for, the birds became his purpose, Meanwhile, we worried no one would know if Bob fell while filling the suet feeder. He scoffed at us, and despite his eighty-plus years, continued to hoist the ladder over his shoulder, carry it to the tree, climb twelve feet with the suet, then descend and return the ladder to the garage. Every day. “Please bring your phone,” we said.
As the cancer progressed, Bob prioritized his activities to save precious energy. He didn’t stop filling the feeder, of course, he just stopped putting the ladder away. “I leave it there!” he said, as if he should have thought of this a decade ago. Eventually, a neighbor—not a young man himself—took over the job of climbing. And on this weekend of my last visit, Steve did the honors. Bob watched from his chair, the cancer shrinking his world along with his body.
The only woodpecker that had never come to the feeder was the redheaded. Although their numbers are diminished, redheaded woodpeckers aren’t rare in the wild. But it’s rare to see one at a backyard feeder. A few years earlier, Bob’s local birding buddy saw a redheaded at his feeder and called Bob to share the news. Bob celebrated the spectacle, saying he was envious and encouraged.
Years before that, he’d joked they had a different woodpecker on the property: my mother-in-law. Before she became ill, Ann belonged to a women’s group called the Red Hat Society. Women in this international organization meet up with close friends wearing purple outfits and red hats to celebrate aging. Always ready for a laugh, Ann went out for lunch with her fellow Red Hats in the obligatory attire. Bob poked fun that “red hat” was a nickname for a woodpecker. They giggled about a print called “Red Hat Society” they bought at a craft show. The artist shared their idea of a joke because, rather than featuring red-hatted women, the drawing depicted a collage of red-headed birds, including the prominently featured redheaded woodpecker. Ann displayed the print on her dresser.
I eventually abandoned my seat next to Bob and wandered around the house straightening unread copies of Smithsonian and National Geographic and trying to act normal. I’d be leaving in an hour and dreaded it. How do you say goodbye to someone you’ll likely never see again? I didn’t know, so I took the dog out while Steve stayed with Bob, who sat in his chair with his binoculars, a silhouette amid dust-filled rays of pale morning sun.
I shuffled along the driveway with our yellow lab, waiting for him to poop or pee, unable to process how these ordinary aspects of life carry on at such times. Then Steve called to me in an urgent whisper that meant I should hurry, be quiet, and expect to see something cool. And there it was on the platform feeder, two weeks before Bob’s death: the redheaded woodpecker. Bob perched on his chair looking out. The bird perched on the feeder looking in. Bob wordlessly handed me the binoculars as the woodpecker flitted off the feeder into the maple. I marveled at how its brilliant red head popped under magnification, giving it an otherworldly quality. The bird rested on a branch for a moment, letting me get a good look, then it flew away, flashing its white wing patches before disappearing into the trees on the far end of the property. I lowered the binoculars and looked at Bob. Would I ever see this bird again?
“Well,” said Bob. How about that!”
I tried everything to get home for the funeral. But no amount of planning, thinking, or reasonable quantity of money can overcome the limits of rural America when you’re on a bike and lack the luxury of time. Steve and I had known this could happen, but the reality surprised me.
Steve was stoic on the phone—he didn’t want me to feel bad, but I was wrecked. After I hung up, I coasted down one hill and pedaled up the next, crying. Then a bird flew over my head in an undulating swoop, swoop, before landing on a telephone pole up ahead. I knew it was a woodpecker by the way it flew—a thing Bob taught me to notice. I wiped my tears and realized the bird had a brilliant metallic red head. As I registered this information, another swooped in. A pair of redheaded woodpeckers! “What the heck?!” I stopped pedaling and drifted along the narrow country road, hoping to get a better look. At first, they flitted from pole to pole away from me, so I rolled along behind. When they finally held still, I squeezed my brakes and pulled up alongside them. Then I did a disappointing 21st-century thing: I slipped my phone out of my pocket for a picture. But the universe wasn’t having any of that. I swiped up, swiped down, tapped incessantly, swiped up again, but my phone would not wake up—I got nothing but black, black, black. Finally, I gave up, understanding my mistake.
When the redheadeds swooped to the next pole, I didn’t follow. Instead, I stayed in the moment and let the event unfold. As the birds circled the pole in a dance of skittering and pecking, I observed the stark contrast between their impressive red heads, black wings, and bright white breasts—as if they wore crisp white-breasted tuxedos. When one finally flew off, I couldn’t tell if it was the male or female because Bob hadn’t had a chance to teach me that. As it darted over the road, I decided to try my phone again. It came back to life this time, so I took a picture of the second bird when it followed. And they were gone.
It’s hard to see a bird on a telephone pole and not feel like it’s some kind of messenger. Had Bob come to say goodbye? I imagined he arrived to tell me all the things I needed to know: that the funeral didn’t matter because he was traveling with me—like he wanted—that Anne had come too, they were together now, and everything was okay. These thoughts flooded through me as I stared at my photo of the second bird, its red head thrust into the wind, its wing upturned at me as it made for the wild woods across the street. “Goodbye, goodbye!” I said it out loud.
Then I clipped my bike shoes into my pedals and rode away. Were these birds the embodiment of my in-laws or just a representation of them? Bob would have scoffed at a literal interpretation, but it doesn’t matter because this is the story of how my dead father-in-law visited me on my bike trip. And in a story, everything is a representation.
If we follow that thread, as I did, then the red-headed woodpecker on Bob’s bird feeder must have been Anne, the red hat. In this story—that is telling itself to me—she came to the feeder to show Bob she was waiting for him, that he would not be alone when he crossed to the other side of the window, that they would fly off into a great expanse of spectacular wilderness together. Maybe there would even be jaguars.
I turned this over and over in my head for the next 30 miles of up and down Kentucky hills. That last morning, I had looked through the window with pain and nostalgia, imagining Bob looking longingly at the world of his pre-cancer days, the world he could no longer engage. But maybe he wasn’t looking back at all. Maybe time bent and undulated around him, like the flight of a woodpecker, and he gazed momentarily into his future—into an extension of the natural world he knew so well. In this world without linear rules or Latin labels, he could see Ann, the red hat he named so many years earlier, waiting for him beyond the pane.
As I pedaled, I replaced my story’s image of Bob in his kitchen chair staring wistfully at the yard and the birds he loved with that of him gazing into an ineffable future he was ready to join. I was struck by the confounding but comforting idea they were the same.
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Deb is a freelance writer and editor working in Fairfax, VA. Her flash essays have appeared in Brevity, The Sun, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and others. Her longer work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in a variety of journals and venues, including the Los Angeles Review, Creative Nonfiction, Lit Hub, and Mount Hope. More
at debwerrlein.com.