Sing Your Love Song While You Can
December 13 Narrative Medicine Workshop: Catherine Bush’s “Bird”
In last month’s Narrative Medicine Workshop, we explored a story about hope. This month’s story had hope in it too, but a different kind — a hope weighed down by nostalgia, longing, and an ineffable sense of loss. This story reminds me that, usually, people are very adept optimists. We are biased toward the future, progress, and change. It is rare that we give our ourselves permission to linger in the past, to allow our hearts to be broken by What Could Have Been. The central character in Catherine Bush’s “Bird” gives himself that permission, and opens the door for us to follow:
Somewhere between short story and parable, “Bird” is rich with symbolism that ask us to look under the hood of Bush’s beautiful language and to wonder what these potent images have teach us about loss, memory, and time. The story begins with a bird lying unconscious on a sidewalk and a man “peering closer” at the bird, curious and concerned. Unsure of how to help the bird, the man puts it in a paper bag and asks a waitress in a nearby restaurant what he should do. She gives him the number of a place that cares for dying animals, but she gives him her number as well, remarking how much he reminds her of another man she met briefly, a chance encounter she remembers warmly but with regret. The man, unable to recognize himself in the woman’s story, takes the bird to his car and drives out of the city. The bird wakes and flies around the car, terrified, until finally perching on the rearview mirror and singing a “love song of the life of birds” before falling to the floor, dead. The story ends as the man weeps for all those missed opportunities, “the missing who hover out of reach and tantalize us with the possibility that at any moment our lives might turn out to be entirely different.”
We began our close reading by following the man’s lead and “peering closer” at the bird. One student suggested that the bird, an animal usually associated with flight but in this case fallen and dying, represents all those fleeting moments of possibility that pass us by, lost to us forever. Another student saw the bird in a more literal light as a fragile body, “a small, warm weight” that reminds of us our our small and fleeting warmth. As we explored further, the bird became both metaphor and anti-metaphor, both a symbol of mortality and the mortal body itself.
The mysterious space between the symbolic and the “real” helped us to understand one of the story’s most important themes, nostalgia, in a new light. For example, we noticed that the bird’s perch for its “love song” is a rearview mirror, an apt symbol for nostalgia, backward-gazing with love and longing. But the bird’s nostalgia and the man’s nostalgia are also quite different: while the bird sings of “faraway forests,” “fields of strumming crickets,” and “all the journeys it had made,” the man’s longings are nameless, indefinable and “out of reach.” His nostalgia isn’t for something familiar and cherished, but for the unknown the “missing.” Like the waitress who longs to know what might have happened if she’d approached the man on the subway with the “ravishing smile,” the man longs for a past he has never really known. We wondered: what is “real” when it comes to memory? Do we every truly “know” our pasts?
All these questions led us to that beautiful, enigmatic final line in which the man weeps “for the missing who hover out of reach and tantalize us with the possibility that at any moment our lives might turn out to be entirely different.” Here, we asked ourselves, does this story leave us with a sense of hope or despair? What is lost, and what is redeemed? One student honed in on the verb “hover,” something a bird might do, affirming our earlier assessment of the bird as a symbol for fleeting opportunities. Others focused on the verb “tantalize,” wondering if it suggests a hopeful yearning or a painful torture more in line with the myth of Tantalus, who was punished by the gods to an eternity of thirst and hunger just out of reach of a fruit tree. Still others pointed to the word “possibility,” noting the upward movement of the word toward hope and change. Finally, we returned to our examination of time, noticing that the final words are not stuck in past tense with a life that “might have turned out” to be different; rather, they gesture toward a future where “our lives might [still] turn out to be entirely different,” and where possibility has yet to be revealed.
By the end of the tale, we agreed that hope and grief co-exist equally here, which lead us to an even more profound conclusion: hope and grief are not mutually exclusive. In fact, grief is a prerequisite for hope. And we when we are fully receptive to the heartbreaks we all share — whenever we give each other the grace to be broken, fragmented, and to experience the grief of our brokenness fully — we are restored to our own humanity. As one student pointed out, this is precisely the point Toni Morison was making when she said, “It took some time for me to understand… that I was longing for — and missing — some aspect of myself. And that there are no strangers. They are all versions of ourselves.” Recognizing our shared limitations brings us closer to each other, and to ourselves.
And yet, this kind of conscious connection is a choice. The waitress chose not to reach out to the man with the “ravishing smile” and spent the rest of her life wondering what would have happened “if,” but this regret is the very thing that inspires her to reach out to the man with the bird. Her loss redeems her.
Will the man’s loss redeem him? Even though he could not save the bird’s life, will all those “chance encounters that had not ended as he hoped” inspire him to, in the words of Mary Oliver, change his life? We do not know, but perhaps that is precisely the point. The choice is up to us, the readers, to continue reaching even if (especially if) we know wholeness will always elude our grasp. After all, the dying bird does not sing a mournful song, but a “love song of the life of birds,” a song of gratitude for the world. If any ethic emerges from this story, it is this: sing your love song while you can.
We took this ethic with us to the writing portion of the workshop, free writing for five minutes to the prompt, “Write about a time you peered closer.” Writing in the shadow of Catherine Bush lead to some truly stunning stories, many of which pivoted on chance encounters and failed or fruitful connections. At the end of this workshop, we were reminded about the power of close reading: “peering closer” gives us precious space for curiosity, gratitude, and ethical change. Thank you to all who attended for sharing this precious space with us.
Next 9-Week Course Begins January 25, 2021
If you participated in the workshop, please feel free to share your reflective writing in the comments below! (Remember this is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.) If you didn’t participate in the workshop, but you enjoyed “Bird” and you’d like to reply to the writing prompt, we welcome your writing in the comments as well. Just set a timer for 5 minutes of free writing and post your exercise below without editing. We’d love to see where this story took you!
If you enjoyed this class and you’re ready for more, please join us for a 9-week Narrative Medicine Program designed for healthcare professionals (and all those interested in the intersection of story and pain care) starting on Monday January 25th, 2021. Unlike this live ZOOM call, our program takes place asynchronously, so you can complete assignments at your own pace with weekly “due dates” and discussion boards that keep our classroom collaborative and co-creative.
Each week, we’ll be studying one artwork with corresponding philosophy, discussion, and reflective writing activities that will refine your ability to listen and engage with stories in a clinical setting. Find out more on our website, and join our Facebook Group for an invitation to our next ZOOM workshop!
