Cardinal Virtues

My mother’s final act of generosity was to die on the threshold of spring. It was a favorite time of year for Mom. She’d start the work of digging in her gardens, cleaning out the vegetal detritus of winter. She taught me to marvel at the first green shoots pushing up through the leafy duff, reaching for light and warmth. It’s a good time of year, soil thawing, world softening, light growing, birds returning.

A singing cardinal roused me out of bed today, a March morning in Maine, one day past the tenth anniversary of Mom’s death. I walked out into the fields behind my house, looking for a tiny flash of red in the upper branches of the still-bare trees. I could hear him but couldn’t see him. How strange it seems that this brilliantly bright red bird is so difficult to spot, even as it sings and sings its multi-melodies, welcoming the day, uplifting. There’s the reverberant chip chip, the rising too-wha too-wha, and the accelerating piu-piu-piu that reminds me of video game laser blasters. Even so, the singer somehow remains mysteriously hidden from my eyes, unless I slow down, circle the area of sound, and remain as still as possible. Once I finally find him, I wonder how I didn’t see him sooner, scarlet flash bright-lit by the rising sun.

Today I heard his concert overhead but was too impatient to wait and search. I wanted to walk, needed motion, so I left my feathery friend’s concert behind me, fading into the distance.

When my mother was dying, she announced that she was going to come back as a cardinal. Mom made pronouncements that way. I envied her boldness. There is no doubt in my mind that she meant a male cardinal – brilliant, bold red, a beautiful singer, independent, and very hard to pin down. Mom always wished she’d been a boy. In her day, athleticism, stubbornness, and tough leadership were not praiseworthy qualities for young ladies. Her secret aspirations included becoming a doctor, or maybe a psychiatrist. She was drawn to help social outsiders, those who were bullied or crippled by fear, anxiety, shyness. That was me, for a time. Mom was a star at lifting people up, building on their strengths, which made her a great mom, but early motherhood ended her dreams for other professions. She toed the line of 1950s societal expectation, or maybe she simply loved the power of leading a household with five children.

Her first child, my older brother, was born when she was twenty-two, a year and a half after marrying Dad. Two years later she had Katy, two more and she had me. She started talking about a teaching job as a nature instructor when I was in second grade, then she was surprised with twins, so the die was cast. She was a mom, all in.

The five of us circled in and out of Mom and Dad’s condo when she was sent home on hospice care, age eighty, two cancers running rampant in her tiny, mighty body. We set up a hospital bed in her little ground floor library since the stairs had become difficult. A few of us got a birdfeeder set up outside the window. There had always been birdfeeders. Mom delighted in watching them, even the feisty squirrels and their gluttonous raids. It felt like one small thing we could do to help.

Mom was accustomed to being in charge – in our home, on the altar guild, at the Rusticus Garden Club, on the Nature Conservancy board. She habitually rose to top leadership. Her weakness was delegating. She liked taking care of things herself, and she hated imposing on anyone. Once she knew that “fighting” the cancer was no longer a winnable path (and Mom was a fighter all the way; she fought with everything she had), she wanted out, on her own terms.

“I think you’ll all try to stop me,” she said, slightly muddled by the hospice-provided morphine.

“What? No, Mom. We support you,” we said, assuming she was talking about smoking a cigarette, or stopping some medication. 

The next morning she made herself clear. “Let’s do this before I lose my nerve,” she said.

“Do what?” we asked.

“We talked about this! I want to be done. I’m going out to the garage and turning on the gas.”

We were stunned dumb for several heartbeats. We even considered letting her have her way, so forceful was her will, but on further reflection we realized all the things that could go wrong.

We were able to talk Mom out of killing herself only by using the argument of possible legal harm for her family. With a heavy sigh, she agreed to VSED, voluntary stopping of eating and drinking, to hasten her death.

The next morning she was sagging more than usual, leaning over the kitchen counter.

“I thought I’d be dead today, and I’m kind of disappointed,” she said. 

I think she’d hoped to die overnight by sheer force of will.

During those final days, Mom rallied, and I fell in love again. Infused with the spirit of my child self, I sat with my Mom and chattered like a baby bird, held her hand, sang the old songs, accommodated her requests. She patted me on the back, offered smiles, laid out a plan for her funeral: “Make it around three o’ clock. Then you won’t have to feed anyone lunch.” She recounted the daily animal activity outside her window. “A raccoon came right up to the deck!” She began Dad’s retraining regimen. “Don’t make Robin clear those dishes. You’ve got to learn to do these things on your own.” He complied like a chastened puppy. I kept up a bright face and wept privately.

As tough as Mom was, she was loathe to face raw emotion. I saw her cry only three times in my life. Her practice was to brush conflict under the table, smooth things over. She didn’t scold. That would be too explicit. She’d just insert herself physically between arguing parties, arms aloft, as if she were sweeping away the tension in the air. “Let’s move on to something else.”

My sister Katy and I both tried to get into the depths of Mom from time to time, learn what made her sad, explore her weaknesses, pick apart her inclination to drink scotch every night. But she deflected, not going there. Katy, an interfaith minister and marriage-and-family counselor, appealed to Mom with her expertise. Maybe she could help Mom sort out some unaddressed traumas or unspoken hurts before she left the world.

“Remember, Mom, I’m a minister.”

“You remember. I’m a mom.”

Talking about birds was free territory. As we all contemplated animal forms we might like to take on if we returned to the world for another life, Mom chimed in with conviction.

“I’m coming back as a cardinal,” she said.

A few days later, she was gone. Instead of keeping watch while the mortuary men came to take her body away, I fled to the basement. Outside Mom and Dad’s back door, I screamed and wailed like a child, crying out for my Mommy, pounding my fists into the frozen-crusted March snow.

Just over three years later, Dad faced his end days, which could have lasted many months, but he decided to take Mom’s VSED path and stop eating and drinking. In his case, as he wasn’t that far diminished, it took sixteen days. I was more prepared for Dad’s death, maybe just more prepared for death, period. I found myself able to take care of his body. I washed and dressed him, slipped on his creased khakis and a button-down shirt, Dad’s weekend casual. 

The sun had not yet risen when two quiet men in dark suits arrived. They wrapped Dad in a white sheet and moved him carefully, somberly, onto a padded board that they carried down the stairs and out the front door. The rest of my family remained in the house, but I followed the entourage outside along the slate steppingstones, beside a small crabapple tree, towards the driveway. The world was hushed in almost-darkness. 

piu piu piu. I heard it and stood still. piu piu piu. There in the crabapple tree was a cardinal, ten feet from me, singing wholeheartedly in the pre-dawn twilight. I could see it, clear as day. My heart began to race. Mama! sang the child in my heart. I ran to get Katy, who shares my inclinations to believe.

“Katy!” I called from the open door, “Katy, come outside!”

She followed me out as the men were passing Dad’s body through the back doors of their hearse. piu piu piu. I was trying to locate the cardinal again when it flew to another tree across the driveway, twenty feet away.

“I can’t see it,” said Katy. We hurried on quiet feet to the other tree, circled, circled. The bird was patient. piu piu piu. He stayed until we found him again.

“I see it!” Katy said. Then it flew away.

We looked at each other and smiled. Thanks, Mama.

Maybe Mom came back as a cardinal that morning Dad died, but knowing Mom, she wasn’t about to hang around for years singing in my back yard. Still, I think of her when the elusive cardinal sings outside my window here in Maine. She came that one day to meet Dad at the gate, to let us know everything was going to be okay, then she went on with the business of whatever it is we do after dying. 

She was so like a cardinal. We could count on her to lift us up. We always knew she was there, but she didn’t make it easy for us to see her. I can see her in my mind, though. She is outdoors of course, rising from the ground after finishing a few spring tasks in her garden. She brushes dirt off the knees of her old gardening pants, takes a satisfied breath, and stands erect, hands on hips.

“Well, that’s done. What’s next?”

Robin Wood is an award-winning poet and essayist, a writing teacher, and author of the award-winning biography-memoir hybrid, The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine. Robin spent many years as a columnist for three different publications, the current one being Bangor Metro Magazine. Robin has been published in Solstice Literary, Decor Maine, Lighten Up Online, The Maine Review, and more. She has a BA from Yale University, an MA from University of Rochester, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program.

A Song for Robin