Dear Romy Reiner: One day it will be years from now

Ah-wooooooooooooooo

I read somewhere during the holidays that phthalo green was trending because the jewel-toned, foresty-lagoon shade reminds people of the house in Home Alone, of nature, of the era just before we lost our minds and our shared sense of reality to smartphones. Lately, I have been re-watching Northern Exposure, which is if phthalo green were a TV show.

I wrote a small howl for Modern Loss. I say “howl” because it wasn’t as comprehensive as a personal essay, and it certainly wasn’t a think piece or even a “take.” I’d been sitting with the news that Rob and Michelle Reiner had been killed, and then I learned that their daughter, Romy Reiner, was the one to find them (just her father, technically), and then I learned she was 27 and this noise just came out of me because I too was 27 when I found my mother murdered.

Wolf heard wolf, and there you have it.

Sunday morning I found a dead ladder-backed woodpecker. It appeared to have died of natural causes. I’d like to think old age, and not avian flu, which is less likely for songbirds than it is for fowl and blackbirds, given how relatively solitary they are.

Fortunately, the trash pick-up was two days before, and so there were still bits of trash floating around on the street — because heaven forbid we manage to get all the trash into the truck. I grabbed a clean-looking plastic bag and made a glove.

He was so light, he almost wasn’t there at all, but for this perfect barred black-and-white pattern across his back and his little polka-dotted wings, the shock of tomato red on his head. Woodpeckers’ tongues wrap all the way around the backs of their skulls, to cushion them from the force of hammering bill into wood at almost 15 miles per hour, 30 times per second. This marvel of nature, this thready tongue protruded from the tip of his beak.

I’ve held many pigeons — fat, juicy birds whose weight you can really appreciate — and I had two big ring-necked doves as a kid. When the heart is full and sore, one wants a weight to steady it. A bird that is light in the hand makes the heart long to lean its heavy ache against something.

Attention can relieve it somewhat. I took several photos of his feathers, the bars, the dots, the red. I found an unbleached cotton bag from a long ago gift and wrote in Sharpie: Here lies a ladder-backed woodpecker. He seemed to have died of natural causes. We loved him and hope he is happy.

Detail of my ladder-backed woodpecker.

Like you perhaps, I am running out of room for the obituaries I’m inscribing across my heart day after day. I’m howling, sometimes on the page, sometimes to my partner, sometimes to a song on the radio, looking for relief. I lift weights, heavier and heavier, and say I’m trying to increase my metabolism or gird myself against the withering of age, but to tell you the truth, I like the feeling of muscle resisting, taking on, swelling, hurting, of spreading throughout my arms and legs and back and belly a pressure that my heart alone cannot bear.

We all want someone to tell us what to do right now — what to conclude, whom to blame, how to respond, what herbs to take and in which order, what sacraments and rituals will keep us safe, will stop the horrors and right the ship, will install a just and kind world.

Even now, I have to resist the urge to earn anyone’s time by offering them advice. Maybe I have already. Imagine this headline: Bury Random Dead Birds, Says This Grief Expert.

Here’s another offering, a quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D. In her assuring, fortifying, and wise “Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times” (which I refer to often and never in order, like religious text), she writes:

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

Many thanks to Rebecca Soffer and Modern Loss for amplifying my howl in the hopes that, if not Romy Reiner herself, someone else who was 27 when it happened, or who found the body of someone they loved, or who wanted to check their eyeballs for damage will hear it and know that, one day, it won’t be everything.