Mourning Doves

I love to watch the birds at our feeder. They're all so different, each with its own vibe, personality, style. Carolina chickadees are quick; they dart in, grab a seed, and off they go. Chipping sparrows are brave. They get up close and personal and hardly ever fly away or startle. House finches show up in groups, noisy and gregarious, hopping all over. 

Mourning doves are often the biggest birds at our feeder. They camp out on the ground under the feeder usually...lazily taking the leavings of other birds. When they get startled and fly away, their wings make a silly little whistling sound, which honestly makes them seem a bit ridiculous but in a good, goofy way. 

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Mourning doves get their name from their haunting call. I used to mistake it for an owl when I would hear it, but now, it's unmistakable to me. Their gentle coo coo is a sound I hear often, and true to their name, it honestly does strike a note of melancholy, even sadness. 

Sadness is a part of life. It's unavoidable, and everyone gets sad sometimes. Sadness is close kin to grief, and so it's no wonder that mourning doves were named after the sad sound they make, because their call does sound like mourning, as though they are grieving some insurmountable loss. 

Grief is a strange bird. We like to think that it's easy to define; we like to put it in "stages" and pretend there's a rhyme or reason to it. We like to think these things, because when we're in the midst of grief, we want nothing more than to feel not alone in the grief, to feel like the grief is not the only thing we will ever experience again. 

But in the throes of grief, you do feel alone. You do feel as though you will never feel anything but grief again. For awhile, some of us even avoid loving. Because loving will inevitably lead to grief. 

The bravest thing we do every day is love. We put our hearts out there and decide to invest our time, attention, and emotion into a soul who could crush all of that with one gesture, one choice, and we say, "yes, I know you could hurt me. I know losing you one day will hurt me, but I choose to love you anyway."

Two months ago today, we said goodbye to my sweet cat of 13 years, Kisa Bean. Kisa was my comfort animal. She was a strong antidote to my anxiety and could often help me through impending panic attacks just by being in my lap and purring or finding me when I was lost and hurting.

The grief I feel today is no less than what I felt two months ago when we first said goodbye. Her absence is so keenly felt in our house. Her energy was soothing and impactful. She's the third cat we've lost in that many years. We have four other furry family members in our house right now. Every time I look at them I feel like I'm looking at my heart on the outside of my body. 

One of the things I hate most about the way we perceive grief is that society (some people?) want us to put a limit on it. "Oh, you're not over that yet?" What??? As if there's a statute of limitations on how much you loved someone. As if you can ever be "over" loving. One of my favorite quotes about grief is one I heard recently on WandaVision. 

As Wanda and Vision are discussing loss and human emotion, Vision asks Wanda, "But what is grief if not love persevering?" What is it indeed? And what a beautiful way to look at something that is unavoidable in life if we open our hearts to love. Words are one of my favorite ways to process and heal, and I will continue to process and heal from the grief of losing Kisa (and those other important souls I've lost in life), equipped with this quote and the knowledge that grief is just another beautiful, painful version of love. 

How has grief touched your life?