The geese make a shape. What happens if they break from it? When does it save them? “How are you?” asks my colleague, my almost-friend, and they cross the sky through the large, rectangular window, crying, while something heavy falls in the room. She smiles at my face, brows knit in concern. Once we had tea and discussed books. Who will give me what I need? I might ask.

A migratory songbird flies south in the winter to swarms of insects and warmer nights.[i] She leaves in need and returns out of habit. Why go back to that place when she knows it will only get cold again? What in her body calls her back? You and I have moved to a house whose scaffolding doesn’t hold spores that spread inside us. We have started having sex again. As if he might return from a long trip, we kept Wyatt’s baby clothes. Put them in the basement.

Using their almond-size brains, migrating songbirds fly thousands of miles to where they need to be, navigating by the sun, the stars, and the magnetic field. The sky tells them what home is, and they hurdle their bodies towards it. The new house has a porch where you have placed my mother’s antique rocking chair. My parents carted it across state lines to give it to me before his birth. In the morning, I rock on the porch and listen to them calling.

The verb to mourn, between 1,600 and 2,000 years old, can be traced back to the Old English murnan, “to feel or express sorrow, grief or regret; bemoan, long after.” Why doesn’t the etymology include the word threshold? Walking with Kim through the new neighborhood, I see a petrified cocoon trembling in the wind. “It seems like you’re not all there,” she says. If the etymology embedded the notion of transformation, might there be more, some ritual to cup its hands and catch us?

 “I’m moving on,” I lie.  

When shelter or food is scarce, animals go elsewhere to save themselves. People once assumed that migratory birds dug into the cold ground for winter. There are, in fact, a few species of arctic songbirds that do things like hibernation. Common redpolls live in some of the coldest places in the world: Iceland, Russia, Alaska. They drink and bathe in the snow. Some nights they’ll burrow into it and sleep like wolves. When black-capped chickadees hibernate in trees, they turn their bodies over to hypothermia and nearly die. When the tiny bird closes her eyes, she’s taken over by the cold. Her heart slows, and she lives off what little stores of fat she’s accomplished for herself. The tree contains her, and I understand this faith: I will stay here even if it kills me.

In trauma, the body returns to memory, repeatedly, as if cycling back might eventually catalyze healing. Though Wyatt is the one who died, sometimes I think it’s me. For days, the ache in my calf persists, a dull plea. I explain to you that this blood clot will go straight to my heart. You work your hands into the flesh, kneading, and in your silence, your furrowed brow, I see what you do not say: Wyatt was the one with the bad heart, not you.

After you leave, I drive to Holy Emmanuel to check into the emergency room. An articulate forty-year-old white woman makes a plausible diagnosis: Yes, blood clots do run in my family. Good thing my insurance requires no deductible. I sit in the anonymous blue gown and feel at peace. There was a big car accident, and multiple people are taken up rescuing the injured or dead. At this moment, I like to wait in a hospital watching others address the problem. Everyone is so single-minded. When the sonographer arrives, he hooks me up to the ultrasound so the doctor can see and interpret what is happening inside me. The machine begins to beep, my insides float on the screen, and the room lights up with Wyatt, who I associate with ultrasounds. Tears spring to my eyes. I don’t understand what it means, I would tell the surgeon, looking at another picture I couldn’t translate of his heart.

Between great, breathy sobs, I explain to the baffled sonographer the general details of my story: a son born with heart defects who died nine days later. Decisions made about his life without our consent. “I just needed to remember that he was real,” I confess through another long exhale.

The actions of “crying, clinging, and searching” after a loved one dies are products of the attachment written into our cells.[ii] John Bowlby was a pioneer of attachment theory, the notion that infants will bond to their mothers for physical connection rather than because their mothers provide milk for them. Bowlby’s insights were a step in the direction of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief model, giving Western society a clearer vision of prolonged grief, which before then had been attributed to weakness, imbalanced humors, demonic influence, gender, poor moral fiber, phrenology, sexual frustration, and more.

 “What is that smell?” I ask you. 

 “What?”

 “That rotting smell.” 

 “I don’t smell it.” 

Attuned to decay, I smell nasty things that others don’t. It’s a problem that I’m in the backyard searching for corpses. I would rather see beetles gushing from inside the meat cavity than cook beans and rice for my family. Do you understand? I have to deal with this. 

Zugunruhe is the German word for migratory restlessness, the mood taking over before a songbird must fly to a different climate. People who cage migrating birds notice how they jitter in spring and fall, fluttering back and forth between bars of a cage. The birds won’t stop until sunrise, when their wild brothers and sisters finally land in a field of grain.

Every time I go down into the basement to wash clothes, those boxes pulse like a welt. His ashes, the sympathy cards, all the best baby clothes. I rifle through them in search of missing things or throw things that have no place in the house down the stairs. Our shit floats all over the floor: camping gear, loose photos, extra bedding, old toys, empty frames. In fear of falling, we tiptoe around it. You have tried to organize, and I undo your work: Nothing contains what it claims to contain; boxes are open, their guts halfway out. How do things come to both belong and not belong?

The image comes to me over and over, a memory I invented of a hospital-gloved stranger touching Wyatt before sliding him into an incinerator. I don’t want to think it. I push it away, and it comes back. The hospital wanted to manage his body for us. It was a “free service.” No one considered how the disappearance of his physical form after he died would confuse us. He is already gone, you might say; or the body is an empty container: not him. But how can you determine what isn’t him?

There is a popular American folktale about a little Dutch boy who sees a leak in the village dike and stays up all night, saving his people with his finger in a hole. He’s cold. Hungry. Wolves are hungry, too. A story of courage and sacrifice, until one considers the premise. Dikes don’t erode in finger-sized holes. When a dike is weak, whole sections will slough off at once.

When I wail, a younger self animates my body, taking me back in time. She wraps sound around an animal feeling, a low emergency. I always hide when I cry this way. Though it seems to be a call for help, I don’t want people to hear the sounds coming out of me. If I believed in God, there would be someone to witness it. Or to blame.  

In a version of our story, a medical assistant recommends we care for his body ourselves. A ritual for closure, she says, and the nurses and medical assistants chime in. A good idea. No one consults the surgeons or hospital administration. We take Wyatt home, light the candles and burn herbs from the yard until the whole house wells up in smoke. We swab his eyes, his throat. Between those fingers. We sing in our broken family voice: family, friends, community. What moves our throats to open and make sound? Is it like birds, whose song, so often compared to angels’, originates from courtship and survival?

Writing to you is not like shoving my finger into a crack, nor is it a flooding after an edifice breaks. Just this. The memories sutured into my body loosen as I pursue the emotions that made them.

[i] All references to songbird migration come from Songbird Journeys by Miyoko Chu.

[ii] The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying

Wendy Noonan’s nonfiction has recently appeared in DIAGRAM and is also featured in Meridian as one of two finalists for their 2020 Editors’ Prize. In 2019, she was a finalist in PRISM international’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, and her essay “Weeping Woman” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020. Wendy’s poetry has appeared in many journals, most notably Crazyhorse, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poor Claudia, Muzzle Magazine, and 2River View. She teaches writing at Pacific Northwest College of Art and is a writing consultant at Portland State University.