Something's not quite right in Ainsley's room. My six-year-old grandchild sleeps on a narrow bed beneath the outspread wings of a giant bird of prey.
A 10-year-old boy made that bird. He carefully cut out and glued together the life-sized feathers and wings of the osprey, each piece reproducing the bird's true colours the model kit had been lovingly made by a Scottish ornithologist.
The boy who made the bird should be 30 now, but he died at 17, never becoming the ornithologist he said he wanted to be. He had been saying that since he was 6, when he was already drawing impressive sketches of eagles, sparrows and blue jays. One summer there was a nest of ospreys near our cabin. Alex wrote in his diary beside his sketch that "they were the best part of his holiday."
Now the girl-child sleeps under the wings of a bird made by an uncle she never met. My son. Recently, I offered to remove it, but Ainsley said she liked it. I also offered to remove the pencil sketch of the boy-child done by one of his babysitters. It still hangs on the wall beside what was once his bed.
"No, I like it," Ainsley said.
But I am used to having an absent son after 10-plus years, and think the reminders of the dead don't belong in what is now my visiting granddaughter's room. It is a room cluttered with stuffed animals, a doll's house and half-clothed Barbies. I think Ainsley just says she likes the bird and the boy's portrait because she knows it will please Gramma. Ainsley calls the room hers and says it was nice of Uncle Alex to leave her some of his things.
A year passed after Alex's death before I made any changes to this room. When I was alone in the house, and missing him terribly, I'd retreat to his room for solace. I'd feel his presence in the scratched-up and cluttered desk, his comic-book hero posters. I'd even play some of his favourite music on his ghetto blaster Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, R.E.M., the Black Crowes. Black Crowes was the name of an animated film Alex made shortly before he died. It ended with a crow falling splat! Did the boy who always wanted to fly like the birds have a hunch he would die from a fall?
I would lie on his bed, watching the osprey turn gently in the breeze from an open window, asking myself other unanswerable "What if?" questions. After the first anniversary of Alex's death, when a year of marking his absence from Christmas, Easter, Halloween, birthdays and summer holidays had finally convinced me he would never return, I gave away his clothes and gave some of his hanging bird models to his cousins and friends. But I couldn't bear to part with the osprey.
Alex was a kayaker and had named his first boat Osprey. We pierced that kayak and let it go in the river after scattering Alex's ashes on the rushing water. First, we loaded the kayak with flowers, part of the excess of beauty and colour that friends had sent to comfort us. As the kayak sank, it released its cargo of roses, carnations and lilies. Eagles and seabirds circled lower and lower to see what kind of exotic fishes were floating here. "What's this? What's this?" they screeched. Alex's special Valkyries.
A native shaman had come to the river with us to bless the ashes. First he blessed the kayak, brushing it with cedar boughs after painting an ochre eye on the bottom. Later, when he came to our home to cleanse the house, he paused with a raised branch a few inches from the bird over Alex's bed. "Did you know that Sukyo, my native name, means osprey?"
The life-sized cardboard bird is hard to dust, and at one point it lost the trout it was carrying. But still it hovers, in a room now transformed to accommodate a girl grandchild whose preference in all things is pink.
What to do with the dead? There are more of them than us. I remember reading that in a book written by a father grieving the death of his son. Nicholas Wolterstorff realized after his son died that he already loved many among the dead: Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare.
Reading that, I too realized I loved (and felt I knew) more dead people than live ones. Besides my son and my parents, there were Chaucer, Blake, Swift, Austen, even Tennyson. "If death were seen/ at first as death,/ Love had not been " I reread Tennyson's words after the death of Alex, and they rang true for me.
The dead teach us how to love. And the pain we feel after they're gone immeasurable as it is assures us of the depth of our love. They also teach us how to love the living. Shakespeare's words about loving that well which thou must leave ere long, remind me of the strength of my love for those I still have.
A few weeks after Alex's death, when I finally ventured out into the neighbourhood, parents of his friends, cashiers at the local grocery store, people I hardly knew would stop me to say that because of my loss they now hug their children more often.
Maybe Ainsley, with the instinctive wisdom of a child, knows she isn't sleeping under the wings of death, but under the wings of love.
Cathy Sosnowsky lives in West Vancouver, B.C.