Sifting Through the Past

This post is not really about birding. It is about sifting through decades of greetings cards sent mainly for Christmas, birthdays and a wedding anniversary of many years ago. Many of the cards have birds on them, reflecting my interest in birding.

Around the time of my last birthday I decided to rearrange a closet in our home office. I pulled out garbage bags full of newspaper clippings and a box filled with cards. I don't know why I kept any of this for so long. I tried once before to shred the cards but seeing ones from people no longer alive stopped me. It was like they were dying again. So I put the box back in the closet.

Moose holiday card sent from New Hampshire.
(Margo D. Beller)

This time I'm trying a different way. I am tossing cards that have no personal or otherwise identifying messages into a trash bag and shredding the envelopes, basically anything with personal information.

It is taking a long time. As I do it I think of how we used to communicate with each other. Friends and relatives would go to a store, pick a card with the receiver in mind, and put it in the mail. Many of these cards are funny. Some are sentimental. I found a couple sent in different years from a former landlady and a former boss, both no longer alive.  All these cards are full of love in some way or another.

Some cards I am keeping, such as birthday and Valentine cards from my husband, or some cards from departed friends as a way of remembering them.

As I work I see old cards from people who have moved away. I see old cards from people now no longer talking to me. I see old cards from people I don't hear from all year except at Christmas. I see old cards from people who now are using e-card companies or sending messages to my Facebook feed. I have cards that included pictures of my friends' children, who are now grown adults. Few send Christmas letters telling me what they are up to anymore. 

Everyone seems to be busier than when they were younger. Sending a message over email or text or Facebook is much easier, takes much less time, is cheaper and avoids the United States Postal Service, which is always overwhelmed at holiday time.

Holiday letters saying what the sender or his/her family has been up to have long been a thing of the past. I stopped doing that some time ago because except for certain illnesses I didn't have much to say. I don't have the most interesting life, and people already know about my adventures in birding from this blog. I now send out many fewer Season's Greetings cards than I used to. Some people who used to send me cards have stopped doing so, cutting me from their mailing list.

Greeting cards have become an endangered species.

I am slowly making my way to the bottom of the box and I'll have a lot of envelopes to shred. The garbage bag is filling. This task is taking much longer than expected and I will have to continue tomorrow. In a way I am glad to be getting less paper from people. As I get older I know I should start de-cluttering decades of stuff in my house. This one closet is a small start. Next will be decades of clippings from my years in journalism. 

Birthday card (Margo D. Beller)

As I dump these cards I am saddened to think of those who are gone, either through death or something my husband or I may have said, or who use the internet because it is easy to do and takes only a microsecond of their time. I miss the care and effort people put into their cards. 

The human element.

We are in a dehumanizing world. Every day we see things in the news that batters our psyches. In this techno-centric world, getting a holiday card is a physical reminder of connections between us and our friends and family. I miss my departed friends and relatives. I miss those family and friends who do not live close to us. Nowadays I'm glad just to get electronic birthday greetings. 

But it's just not the same.

Passages

Many of my friends, now in their 50s and 60s, are starting to come to terms with mortality. Their parents are ill or they are infirm or are frail. My friends worry about their parents. Lately they've been dying.

Unfortunately, I am an old hand at this stuff. My father died 20 years ago, my mother 33 and a number of grandparents and other relatives in between.

It has been a long time since I've had to attend a funeral. The other week it was my mother's brother, who was in his early 90s and had been in a locked ward with dementia for the past several years after six years on his own following his wife's death.

The rabbi spoke. The cantor sang. My cousins remembered their father and their children either spoke of their grandfather or sang a song of comfort. Some friends of my cousins were there, one of my uncle's cousins who took the train up from Washington, two relatives through my late aunt, MH and me.

As I sat and listened to the heart-felt words I noticed to my right a large reproduction of an Audubon print of a snowy egret - dark bill, yellow feet. A lovely portrait. Then I looked ahead of me. A small effigy of a bald eagle, talons bared as tho' about to grab a fish from a pond. When I had the chance I looked and realized there were Audubon prints all around the room - flycatchers, wrens, owls.

It almost made me laugh out loud.

At my house the joke is I can't go anywhere without birding. I somehow found a chattering goldfinch on top of a traffic light in the middle of downtown Chicago one summer trip. I watch a commercial and I notice the birds, not the product. I sit at a garden party and follow the flight of a pileated woodpecker overhead in the middle of a converation.

At my uncle's grave, I heard a distant flock of geese. (At my aunt's burial, a redtailed hawk had been up in a nearby tree.)

It was sad attending the small funeral.

But I couldn't help thinking of another recent death, that of my old friend Steve. We had all been young together, friends for over 30 years, had a lot of good, wild times. Lots of stories.

Then he had gone silent, mad at something we allegedly did, refusing to tell intermediaries what that was.

To hell with him, I said. Then, five years later, he suddenly died.

We heard of his passing long after his funeral. He was buried in the family plot in a cemetery at the far end of Cape Cod, one of my favorite birding areas. He died in December, not long after his 56th birthday.

Knowing me, I'd have found a bird somewhere, maybe while at his grave - presuming I'd have seen or heard it through my sobbing. I don't know how much I would've been comforted. This death was too close to home, a reminder of my own mortality, and MH's.

Losing parents is hard. Losing contemporaries, I've learned, is harder.

You can say an old, demented man who has passed on is "at peace." Many people said this of my uncle after his funeral.

But what of a young man who was very much alive, already at peace with his life and with a woman who loved him?

Doesn't seem fair.

RIP, Old Friend

I found out today that an old friend died last week.

No, that’s a double misnomer.

He was not old. He only turned 56 at the beginning of December, eight weeks before I reach that age.

And while we knew him for well over 30 years, in the last five we’d become estranged. Not as much a friend. He blamed us for something but we don’t know what. “They should know what they did,” he told a well-meaning mutual friend when she asked why he’d gone silent.

So with the distance the shock was muted. A heart attack, very sudden.

We found out in a roundabout way because of the rupture. Not even his longtime girlfriend - a friend we’d introduced to him and so we lost both - contacted us. She contacted someone who contacted someone who contacted us. These other people, who knew our old friend through Facebook, were very shocked by the suddenness.

My husband, in turn, contacted other people and told them via Facebook. In the old days we would have taken turns on the phone.

As to the death itself, MH and I, however, were not surprised. Saddened, but not surprised. Our friend was a heavy smoker and had been for most of his life. The birth of his only child during his short marriage didn’t end the smoking, and neither did the woman with him when he died.

You never know what will happen, do you? My uncle is in his 90s but is silent with dementia. My father died at 73 with a sharp mind but a body incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease. MH’s parents are active in mind and body while almost at 80. My mother died at 60 of cancer. MH is a former smoker but heavier than he should be. He is the age now our old friend was when he died.



Tufted titmice - or titmouses, as our
late friend called them.


He was a complicated man who took his resentments to the grave. But there are a lot of funny stories we remember, many memories, many good times. Maybe it was some of those times our friend didn’t want to remember and he held it against us that we continued to laugh at some of his exploits.

Those memories became tinged with sadness when our friend stopped talking to us. Now that sadness has deepened.

What horrified me more than our friend dying was the thought of my finding MH on the kitchen floor one ordinary morning. Or him finding me. As the shootings in Newtown, Conn. - ironically, the news came out the day our old friend died - showed us, life is very precious and very easy to end.

You try to exercise and eat right, drink in moderation and not smoke and hope you are doing the right thing, that there isn’t a time bomb in you that will kill you. Our friend smoked and we heard something about heart problems earlier in the year, maybe a malfunctioning valve.

I doubt that stopped him smoking either. Smoking is one of our legal drugs. (So is alcohol. Cigarette ads are no longer broadcast on television but you can still see plenty of ads for liquor and beer.) We know it can kill. But our old friend did not want to stop. We have other friends who refuse to stop, too. They knew our late friend and MH notified them of his passing. Will it inspire them to perhaps cut back? I don’t know. That’s out of our control.

So is finding out what caused the rupture in the first place. We used our mutual friend as a go-between to send our condolences and she passed along our friend’s girlfriend’s thanks. Maybe there will be future communications. I hope so. But if there are I won’t ask her because at this point it really doesn’t matter.

The last time we saw the two of them we were in their house on Cape Cod for a few days. She had him smoke outside - did he resent that? - and we sat with him at one point. He pointed out the tufted titmice he insisted on calling titmouses. He was getting interested in the birds around him and was looking forward to the hummingbirds coming to the flowers of some vines his girlfriend had planted.

I hope he got to see them.


Rest in peace, Steven Mark Perry.