Page 132 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

Cardinals at the Crossroads

Sara Wright

Three days before All Hallows, the night my father called to tell me about his cancer, I found a

decapitated heron at the edge of the stream. Four days later, on the morning my father died, I

dreamed he had turned into a beaver. The next day at dawn, a pure white dove flew down to the

ground outside my window and pecked at the birdseed I’d scattered, only to vanish at sunset like a

ghostly apparition. That night during a phone conversation with my uncle, we exchanged dove stories

in disbelief; he had just bitten into some pasta and pulled a tiny white stone dove from his mouth. The

next morning, the sight of two cardinals at my feeding place stunned me; in thirty five years of bird

feeding, they had never come before. The male’s brilliant vermillion color seemed to bleed into the

white snow, reflecting my fiery loss in a visceral way. The next day, these birds disappeared as

mysteriously as they had come. Surely something was at work here, but I had no idea what.

Unfortunately, at the time of his death, my

father and I had never managed to repair our

fragile father-­‐daughter relationship. As a result,

my loss was tinged with a child’s fierce longing

to be loved; I felt that I had been orphaned by

Chaos. Everything felt disordered; there was no

funeral for a man who desperately needed

approval, no acknowledgment or respect for a

life lived in decency, albeit explosively and

without much awareness. His only two

grandchildren and his wife, my mother, would

not attend the Memorial service that my uncle and I were planning, a fact that, frankly, horrified me.

Two months later, on the day of the service, I entered a church so staggeringly beautiful that my

breath caught in my throat. The marbled floor and altar provided a back drop for hundreds of

magnificent deep scarlet poinsettias and a shining crimson altar cloth. Even the stained windows bled