Bird Every Bird

Bird Every Bird

My father lay on his deathbed when my older sister and I left on safari. We had planned the trip to Kenya and Tanzania a year before, when he was his usual self: confined to a wheelchair after a stroke nine years earlier, and so confused, he asked the time over and over, driving my mother crazy. She understood that he couldn’t help it, but he had annoyed her for so many years, it seemed like more of the same. The only activity of daily living he could still accomplish alone was eating, and he often choked. Aspiration may have caused the pneumonia that landed him in the hospital.

Even living with my oldest sister with a hired caretaker 12 hours a day, Mother was overwhelmed. She had reluctantly agreed to visit nursing homes before he became acutely ill. Yet when the hospital doctor asked about a breathing machine and later, a feeding tube in his stomach, my mother said yes, against the advice of all the doctors in the family, including me.

My sister and I debated canceling the trip, but we figured we could always come home if he died. What I couldn’t do was sit at the bedside where he lay unresponsive, his face distorted by the tape for the breathing tube, fluid flowing into his veins. Skin hung on his frame where his muscles had atrophied. The eyes of the nurses who repositioned his body every two hours reproached me. His eyes were closed. The room smelled like disinfectant.

I flew to New York from San Francisco, and joined my sister and the rest of the safari group, all from the East.

In Africa, we could smell the rich earth when we stepped off the plane. Outside Nairobi, our bus bobbed up and down rolling hills, fields of corn, coffee and tobacco. Mango and papaya trees lined the road. Mt. Kenya loomed over us like Mt. Shasta on Interstate 5. No wonder the English coveted this land. When we reached the high desert plains, it looked like New Mexico. The East Coast travelers proclaimed that the beauty of the landscape, even without the animals, was worth the trip. I already knew and loved such open spaces in the West.

There was a game drive at dawn and dusk each day, and stargazing at night. The Milky Way appeared a dense patch in a blanket of stars. “Blanket” seemed less a metaphor in Africa, more a literal description, and a comfort. I learned to distinguish varieties of antelope—oryx, impala, dik-dik, topi—and I stopped ruminating about my father.

My mother would have been bored. She is tone-deaf to nature. Once, driving north, she worried that the spectacular sunset off to the west was a forest fire. Another time, in my mild winter garden, she asked why I pruned the roses, why couldn’t they bloom year round. I explained that from the point of view of the rosebush, the purpose of flowers is pollination. We trick them into reblooming by cutting off the blossoms before they have a chance to set seed and we encourage young stems by cutting back the old ones. Roses only bloom on new growth.

She looked blank. If they had biology in high school in the 1930s, she didn’t take it.

In Kenya, my sister and I ended up in the jeep with the birdwatcher of the group, a soft-spoken, big-money lawyer. While the other vehicles chased lions and leopards, we lagged behind looking at red-necked widowers, weavers and bustards. He added 150 birds to his life list and I learned to focus binoculars quickly.

“Bird every bird,” he taught us, meaning, even if you think that you recognize the bird quickly, look carefully. There may be other characteristics that you didn’t appreciate at first glance.

Taking his advice to heart, I searched to find my mother’s point of view. It was obvious to me that my 84-year-old father was failing. Not to Mother. Before we left, she told me angrily that the hospital doctor predicted that the ventilator would allow my father to survive the pneumonia.

“So what?” I asked, equally angry.

My mother couldn’t release her lifelong sparring partner because she would be left alone in the ring. After 60 years of bickering, his opposition was her support. Worse, if he could die, so could she.

In the Masai village we visited, there was an elemental rhythm. Rain, grass, cows, milk, blood, life. Drought, death, dust. There were none of the sounds that obscure the pulse of nature in the city. No cars, starting or stalled, no sirens or hospital monitors, no TV or Internet with false promises. Everyone knows what death looks like, because they see it. And there is no disinfectant to cover the smell.

Two weeks later, we returned from Africa in time to visit my father again. He was off the ventilator, in a private room. He had recovered from the pneumonia but he remained unconscious. He died a few weeks later. All day, my mother sat in the hall, across from the elevator, not at his bedside. Every hour or so, she looked in on him briefly.

“I can’t bear to see him like this,” she explained.

I curled up in the chair next to her, full of thoughts that I could not express. My fingers edged over the tiny beads on the bracelet I bought from the Masai, reading the eons of human history in the patterns. What was one month, one man? I was not angry anymore, but I was not all there either. While the elevator doors opened and closed, I read Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. His Xhosa village smelled like cattle and dust.

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Toni Martin is a physician and writer in Berkeley.

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