On Thursday, I made a brief stop at a local grocery store, on the way from and to other errands.
Parked the car, and on the way to dumping the plastics in the recycling bin, saw a sparrow, crushed, but not gruesomely, in the parking lot. (Why do birds insist on running when they can fly? I've seen robins do this a lot. Anyway, I don't know what caused this bird's demise.) Another sparrow kept hopping around his-or-her fallen companion. Clearly, to me anyway, hoping for the late sparrow to pop up and start hopping around again.
The little tableau was still in play on my way out. Another shopper commiserated.
"That's so sad!" (...Pause...) "I don't need to see that!"
But she said it in a nice way. By way of someone noticing something sad.
I did not actually cry, but when I got back to my car, the tears began to flow.
Sometimes I think it is small tragedies like this that release the tears we hold back from larger ones.
My Mom died last year.
Russia invaded Ukraine this year
Then a tiny sparrow died this week.
Of course, I have shed tears over my mother's death, and still do and will until the end of my days. I never know when they are going to come. But in general, my life has gone on. As I'm sure many of us do, I mostly carry my grief in a private space.
I can't bring back my Mom.
I can't help the victims of war.
I can't help a tiny sparrow.
What is it about that little dead bird, on an otherwise ordinary day, that brings me to tears?
Maybe it speaks to the real powerlessness that we have. We go blithely about our days, doing ordinary things, like grocery shopping, that we take for granted and thinking that life will just roll on and on.
Only in the face of dumb tragedy do we see how ... precarious? ... our existences are.
The tiny surviving sparrow only knew something was wrong. It was spared the experience of grief.
This witness, not so much.
