Feather By Feather: On Life, Death, and Birding

Feather By Feather: On Life, Death, and Birding

A few days after my brother died, I sat in the living room of a dead house and made eye contact with a bird.  It’d been raining that day: the world outside had been coated in a wet, pewter varnish, muted and hollow. My mother and I sat on the couch in a stunned stillness, each cradling a mug of chamomile tea we weren’t really drinking. Everyone who’d come to the funeral had left the night before. Now it was just us, trying to make sense of the q…