Chestnut-backed Chickadee is very dutiful to the nest in our backyard, one that we have followed for years via the bizarre technology of micro-cameras in nest boxes and our large screen TV. Precariously late in the season this time around, she laid two eggs and sat on them for over three weeks, not realizing the eggs were no longer viable. I tried very hard not to associate this failure, our first ever, with the invisible warfare around me. But the experience of her tiny, formidable body in the middle of the night pulsing rhythmically on those two non-viable eggs crescendoed into a menacing dread.

Eventually the internet registered an obituary for my therapist, confirming that she succeeded finally in terminating our sessions for the reason she said, and not because she needed a big excuse to overcome my refusal. She made it 10 months after the day she left me that voice message explaining she needed to end our 10+ year project. When I found the obit, I immediately replayed that voicemail to join the real voice to the disembodied voice in my head that arises when things are emotionally grueling. This time around, I heard what I missed before: she was holding the space for me when she was reckoning with only 10 months of space ahead of her.

I was in London when she called, and had just sat breathless through one of those explosive Italian operas where people cheat and lie for dumb human reasons, and then the most innocent die while the egomaniacal people are guilty too little, too late. So I had a lot to cry about, losing her as a therapist and the world imminently losing a good soul. I drew her a bird that came out faint and shy-looking, with big eyes, and singing, probably a good simulacrum of her. Behind it, I wrote a William Stafford poem and told her she was the coach I always wanted to see down the third base line when I had to go up to bat, bases loaded, two outs, several runs behind, and someone just handed me a bat with a hole in the middle of it. She knew well the type of coaches I mostly had who motivated players through tyranny or perfectionism, like my inner one. I reminded her of the times early on when she had me call her first thing in the morning to let her know if I had faced the specters in the dark night of the soul. We both know she never billed me nonetheless mentioned how those calls were not in the schedule.

She answered back to my bird card on Christmas Eve saying in her midwestern way that my words meant a great deal to her, and added her best wishes as we moved from the darker part of the year into the growing light.

Back to a few days ago, what I could hear most of all in that voicemail, is that she seemed fulfilled to reflect on how much I had grown in those 10 years, and as with the best gifts, the beauty of our work was there not because of anything I particularly did, but as an aleatory result of her long career of studying, listening, and supporting hundreds of people long before I even came along.

I took these tears back to the bridge overlooking the north fork of the Chicago river, a river whose direction was reversed in the industrial age, because that seemed easier than stopping the pollution of it. My therapist and I had many reveries about rivers. My favorite ones being about smashing into the banks, sometimes recklessly, and needing to course-correct. At times, I think she was white knuckling the oars for me more than I was.

Now over this bridge and this river, warblers of twenty-plus species and an endless palette of colors filled the trees along the banks as far as one could see downstream, like bits of popcorn flitting over the water from the greenery and back. And as not often happens, my fellow birders in our exuberant yearly reunion fell silent. I thought of Craig, to take his palpable silence around all the trailbends of the area and summon him here.

I am sorry that I want so badly and try every time to put words to these moments: these fragile, tiny, colorful birds dropping down out of the darkness, somewhere along the middle of their thousand-mile migrations, just where I happen to be. How we greet them, try to still them, what they say to us. And then what we say to each other. Even to those who are no longer here.

When I returned home with a camera heavy with hundreds of blurred warbler photos, my boys’ hands tired of feeding Chicago chickadees, I overcame my dread and turned on our chickadee TV. Oh god, I mumbled as her body was still curled on that nest, breathing heavily. “What is it, mama?” She still doesn’t know.

As the day opened up, she finally moved off the nest to go forage for a snack. And there in her place were 5 more eggs.

“The subject is only the transient addressee of the verb which seizes it. Every subject is in a becoming not only of their own action but in the multiplicity of actions that overflow them.” Interview with Vinciane Despret, Grimté, January 23, 2023.