Bird Strike
I turn 24 in a little more than a month and I am still learning about who I am.
Today, I had a conversation with my old boss at the gas station and for the first time, I felt he was talking to me as an equal and as an adult, compared to the kid who pumped gas and checked oil for him for the better part of three years.
Then I came to my parents house and read in the sun room. Hours later, two bangs interrupted my reading. Looking outside, I found two birds who flew into the windows of the sun room and were laying dazed on the ground.
The thought crossed my mind that this could potentially be the last moments of life for these birds and they could potentially be lying there suffering through those last seconds on Earth. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I used one of my Who Wants to Be a Millionaire lifelines and phoned a friend.
Chris has this amazing way of simplifying a lot of things, boiling something down to its lowest common denominator and then throwing it back at you. So when I presented the situation to him and my desire to do “something”, his response was that I can either sit and watch these birds die or not die OR I could kill them.
That’s where the learning about who I am part comes in. I don’t think I have it in me to kill a bird. It likely doesn’t help that I named them both, Moxy and Chester. And I was extremely relieved to watch one bird at least pull himself up while I was talking to Chris. But in the end, I think it would be hard for me to bring myself to put the bird out of its misery. I’m not really sure if that surprises me or if I’m disappointed in myself, but it’s not really something I’ve thought too much about. When I posed this thought to Chris, he turned it around on me as death would be a favour to a bird in misery, ending it quick as opposed to a torturous happening.
Mortality and giving, taking and holding life is something that intrigues me, but not something I’ve really explored or thought about. The main part that has always intrigued me actually has to do with my mom. She works as a nurse at a nursing home and although I am too afraid to ever bring it up, I’ve always wondered about her views on life and death, namely because of the field and location she finds herself in. I assume that she has a bit of a professional distance that she has to hold herself to, but then she talks about the residents with enough vigour that you can tell she takes an active interest in their lives. So when their eventual and unavoidable passing does come, it has to affect her, which then makes me wonder how she deals with it and how she manages to keep going or even why she keeps doing it. Which brings me back to the thing that Chris said, about helping make the last moments of life as easy and pleasant as possible.
In the end, this isn’t about me figuring out I’m too gentle to kill birds or my old boss viewing me as an adult or Chris’ ability to simplify things. Hell, this isn’t even about birds hitting windows, although I was very relieved that in the end, both Moxy and Chester righted themselves up and flew away. I guess this is about Mom and how I think she’s quietly awesome. Happy Mother’s Day.