I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird
ALSO BY SUSAN CERULEAN
Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change
Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites
UnspOILed: Writers Speak for Florida’s Coast (edited with Janisse Ray and A. James Wohlpart)
Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf (edited with Janisse Ray and Laura Newton)
The Wild Heart of Florida (edited with Jeff Ripple)
The Book of the Everglades (editor)
Florida Wildlife Viewing Guide (with Ann Morrow)
Guide to the Great Florida Birding Trail: East Section (edited with Julie Brashears)
Planting a Refuge for Wildlife (with Donna LeGare and Celeste Botha)
I HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED THE SINGLE BIRD
A Daughter’s Memoir
Susan Cerulean
The University of Georgia Press Athens
Some personal and place names have been changed throughout the book to protect the privacy of the individuals and institutions involved in this story.
Image on page iii: Adobe Stock | Leonard
Images on pages vi, 8, and 65: David Moynahan
© 2020 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
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24 23 22 21 20 C 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Number: 2020003819
ISBN: 9780820357379 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN: 9780820357386 (ebook)
For Jeff, life companion
and
For Bobbie, Irish twin
Contents
Prologue
Part I CHAPTER 1 Diagnosis
CHAPTER 2 Hot Metal, and a Medal
CHAPTER 3 Paths
CHAPTER 4 Wildlife 2060
CHAPTER 5 Simulation: The Answer Is Not
CHAPTER 6 How We Are Lost
CHAPTER 7 Typical Day
Part II CHAPTER 8 A Contract for Home
CHAPTER 9 Divine Counting
CHAPTER 10 Resistance (Only Leads to Suffering)
CHAPTER 11 Beulah and the Notebooks
CHAPTER 12 Then We Hired Jill
CHAPTER 13 The Many Forms of Grace
CHAPTER 14 Violence
CHAPTER 15 Puppy Parade
CHAPTER 16 Pear Mudra
CHAPTER 17 Thin Places
CHAPTER 18 Saving the World
Acknowledgments
I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird
Looking after shorebird nests on an island in Apalachicola Bay.
Photo by the author.
Prologue
Our bodies return our bones to the Earth in many ways. For some, strokes and hemorrhages ricochet like a sort of internal lightning inside the brain or through the heart and arteries. Such was my father’s fate, and for him, those strokes led to dementia and a long decline. It fell to me and my husband, Jeff, to care for that sweet man during the last five years of his life. As many people do, we struggled to reconcile the minutia of the bedside with our full-time work, with three sons to raise, and with the urgent call to speak and act on behalf of our climate and the besieged wildlife of Florida.
The writer William Kittredge once said: “I dream of the single-hearted heaven that is the coherent self.”
In the face of dementia, a coherent life for any of us seemed out of the question. Jeff and I knew that if we took my dad into our home, the chaos dismantling his brain and body would overwhelm us. So we rented a room in an assisted living facility only a mile away, and there we saw to his care.
One afternoon, during the second September of my father’s stay in the nursing home, I stood near his bed and pressed my forehead against the window. Through the glass, I could hear the muffled calls of cardinals and red-eyed vireos. I did not open the windows, for the late summer air steamed like a thick hot pudding.
When we first moved Dad into that room, the emerald light filtering through the windows had reminded me of swimming underwater in a warm river. It wasn’t really so bad, like you might fear kudzu-mediated sunlight could be. But as time passed, I noticed that many of the tall pines around the nursing home were dying under the weight of the vines swarming their living canopies. I saw that those smothering lianas were like the tangles and plaques in my father’s brain, how both kudzu and Alzheimer’s replace a vibrant living place—a brain once full of inborn competence and memories of long-gone houses and long-grown children—dissolve those things in super-slow motion, replacing them with loss. Dad’s drugs, the Namenda and the Aricept, were like winter frost in the forest. For a time, they would keep the plaques in his brain at bay. Link by link, the invasive vines weighted that scaffold of mature trees with blankets of biomass. I could still make out the biggest magnolia setting its red fall fruit, but I didn’t know if it would survive until freezing December nights slashed the tough kudzu back to its knees.
During the time we cared for my father, I began to volunteer as a steward of wild shorebirds on several islands along the north Florida coast.
Two or three times a month between March and August, I’d slide my kayak down the concrete ramp at Ten Foot Hole in Apalachicola.
I’d tidy my lines, floating in the backwater basin between a double row of houseboats, sailboats, party boats, deep-sea fishing boats. I came to know them like I did each home on my own street in town. Some of the sailors and anglers recognized me too. I liked to imagine I was becoming part of the place, the background, not on a first-name basis, but worth a nod, not a startle. The fisher folk might not have known where I was going or what my job was, but I felt as if I were a moving piece of the working waterfront. Not a tourist.
My territory was a tiny island just south of the Apalachicola bridge where I was to locate and keep track of any birds nesting on the small, tear-drop-shaped island: most likely candidates were least terns, black skimmers, certain small plovers, or American oystercatchers.
I’d line up the prow of my boat with the red channel markers and adjust to the tide and the river’s wide current. Then I’d push my shoulders into my double-bladed paddle and align with a mindset that might make me as much a part of the scenery on my upcoming bird survey as I was among the people of the boat ramp. That was my goal. Otherwise, as I entered the birds’ nesting ground, I would be perceived as a threat. I imagined fading into quiet, becoming background, being benign. I am a simple being, only passing through. I have a familiar aspect and trajectory. Don’t be afraid, not of me. I cloaked myself in that mantra.
Very quickly I found a single oystercatcher brooding her eggs on the sand. Over her long orange dagger of a bill, through scarlet-rimmed eyes, she had been tracking my approach long before I saw her. Her eye saw my paddle slicing the quiet waters of the boat ramp, watched my path unfolding, even before I myself had ascertained the mood of the wind. Never should I think that my eyes are brighter and more alert than hers, she who has sifted into this landscape every day of her life, and every day of the lives of her kind, for millions of years. From that long perspective, she watched me from her nest scrape on the sand. Three eggs burned into her belly through her brood patch. Her job was to watch for danger.
W
as I danger, was I really?
Need her pulse sharpen, need she spring off the nest and expose her eggs to the sun in order to draw my eye off the little shingle of beach that was home for her shell-bound brood?
Correct. Yes. Absolutely.
Yes. Our human selves are a grave danger to everything wild and vulnerable on the planet.
I didn’t know the Earth was afflicted by our species until I was well into my twenties. All I wanted to do was submerge myself in the delight of it, and I did: the Atlantic Ocean, cold and dark and irresistible. Piles of autumn leaves: scarlet, orange, cadmium yellow. Canoe expeditions through the pitcher plant bogs of the Okefenokee Swamp and the chill of the Suwannee River’s springs. I took those wild places and the reliable turn of the seasons for granted. Excesses of winter simply meant a pair of snow days; summer, a brief wave of heat. There was no reason to imagine the seasons would ever lose the structure they offered my life. The natural world was mine to dwell on, and I did.
But now I understand that all of the ways that our coast and its islands, our springs and our native birds, and our panthers and our Everglades are being diminished are symptoms of our culture’s commitment to infinite growth. Infinite taking isn’t possible on a finite planet. The sky, for example, is not a vast and limitless expanse. As Al Gore has said, our atmosphere is a shockingly thin envelope. We are changing its chemical composition by emitting 110 million tons of man-made global warming pollutants into our delicate atmosphere every day, as if it were an open sewer. These actions are both unethical and rife with repercussions, not just for future generations of humans but for all species with whom we share the Earth.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when I was a child, we knew so little about chronic diseases of the mind, body, and spirit, and what we did know, we kept to ourselves. Cancer was the big C, depression had no name at all, and the word alcoholism was never used. So when Alzheimer’s came creeping into my father’s brain, our family had had a lifetime’s training in not naming—and not really knowing—what was going on, not just illness but also the shame that comes with it, and the helpless, hidden sorrow. We couldn’t have named, at that time, its emotional potency.
So let’s say it out loud: dementia. The word dementia comes from the Latin demens, meaning madness, or the irreversible deterioration of the intellectual properties of the brain.
De (undoing) plus mens (the mind). That’s dementia.
Alzheimer’s, Pick’s, Lewy body, Parkinson’s: these are not the natural result of aging but are specific, identifiable diseases of the brain. Most dementing illnesses do their damage gradually. Then, as they progress, the affected person loses intellect, abstract thinking, judgment, and memory and eventually descends into complete disorder and oblivion.
The Earth is the brain and the body into which we were born. In some nearly parallel way, we face not only a crisis in numbers of people diagnosed with dementia; as a culture, we are stricken with this disease and its attending violence. Why else would we knowingly destroy the planet that sustains our very lives? Our Western economic and political systems, all the ways we personally consume and give over our power to corporations and oligarchs—those are the illnesses that are killing our planet. When you have the physical disease, you experience it alone. But our cultural dementia—we are in this together.
What is our part, what can each one of us do, to alter the trajectory we ride? How can we bring healing to this world? My deepest desire regarding both my father’s illness and the Earth’s biosphere and biodiversity was to save, to rescue, to ensure continuance, and for many years, I thought I could.
I learned this conviction from my father, who cultivated in his children an earnest commitment to repair the broken world, beginning with what ailed our own family. One Friday, a teacher-planning day (meaning our mother had to work in her classroom but we four kids were home from school), Dad prepared a ceremonial lunch to enlist our support. He set the maple dining room table with placemats and the brown, glazed soup bowls we rarely used. He served us lentil soup and good bread on a cutting board and a fragrant wedge of cheddar. Everything about that meal was unusual, especially our mom’s empty chair.
“Kids, we need to do more to help your mother,” he said, carefully slicing the cheese. We did not understand what weighed on her so heavily, nor did he; but we knew she was in a dark place. He hoped it would relieve her if we contributed more to the running of the household. To me and Bobbie, he assigned the family’s laundry, and we agreed to try. Our mother’s depression, fueled by alcohol, was not fixable with detergent and an ironing board, and certainly not by her children, but that wasn’t something we could know yet. What my dad recognized was that something was deeply wrong in our home. Something was wrong with our mother. Now I understand that something is deeply wrong with our Mother Earth.
I offer you the story of my own explorations in service to this question: How can we care for this world? I have tried to reconcile my roles as one daughter caring for one father, as one woman attuned at times to only a single wild bird while the planet is burning. How I long to change the world for the better. Offering care to those we love is closely similar to standing up for our Earth. In all cases, we are required to be fierce and full-bodied advocates, in an endless series of small actions, each as important as the next. This story braids the human and the animal, as it must, for we can never be separate.
PART I
Plover
Beneath the currents
of birds
I see the bevel in the world
And carry it in the sluice
of bird wing
There was a scurry
in bird step
I sought to mimic
Maybe there is an urgency
to saving the doomed
folds of the creek,
Maybe I can breathe
the milk of passing
air
and fold beneath my
rising sky.
JAY SNODGRASS
CHAPTER 1
Diagnosis
“Something is wrong, Sue.” My father’s face was a wrinkled up question.
I stepped past a sliding glass door onto the small garden patio. Two padded lounge chairs faced a tripod of empty bird feeders. A fragrant veil of smoke and spattering of meat brought a flash of comfort, reminding me of the many cookouts we’d shared when our family was young.
My sister Bobbie and I had converged at our father’s house from our own homes in Connecticut and Florida. In the kitchen, Bobbie sliced summer tomatoes and sweet onions. “I’ll go keep him company,” I had said to her.
But Dad was bent oddly over the flames. A pair of tongs and a spatula extended his reach like the right and left claws of a blue crab. I moved to his side.
He had lit squares of charcoal, which glowed in a tidy heap on the bottom of the grill. All good. But my father had laid the raw hamburger patties directly on the coals. He had forgotten to use the rack that suspended the meat above the flames, and he could not puzzle out what had gone wrong. He clacked unfruitfully at the meat with his implements.
I stood at the grill beside my dad, caught between nervous laughter (could this be a joke?) and horror.
Something is wrong, Sue.
On that day, my sister and I began to square with our new reality.
It wasn’t just the one incident. Weeks earlier, as I stood in my own kitchen in Florida rinsing garden lettuce for a salad, the telephone jangled. I reached across the stove for the phone, timing in my head the enchiladas baking in the oven. Bits of middle school band melody drifted from the bedrooms of my sons. An ordinary moment. And then it was not.
“Your dad has had a stroke,” said my stepmother, Mary Jane. Her voice shook over the telephone I pressed hard against my ear. “A small one. Yesterday. We didn’t know what happened at first. Out of the blue, he couldn’t say anything that made sense, except for one word: store.”
I stayed quiet on my end of the line, drying my free hand o
n a dishtowel, absorbing her words.
“Store,” she said. “That was the only word he could say. He just kept repeating store.”
Mary Jane told me she couldn’t figure out what Dad was trying to communicate, didn’t know what she should do. So, she told me, she drove Dad to a quickie mart and they bought a six-pack of beer.
What could I say to that?
“This morning your dad’s speech hadn’t improved, so I took him to the hospital,” she continued. “The emergency room doctor told us your dad had had a ministroke and sent us home to rest.”
Dad had a stroke and they drove to the store for beer. Never had the nine hundred miles between Florida and New Jersey stretched so far.
I had been content to be a daughter from the distance of my north Florida home, traveling to New Jersey as often as I could, alternating visits with my three siblings. My husband, Jeff, and I had full-time jobs, and two young teenagers still to raise. And Dad was comfortably settled with his new wife, Mary Jane, the last of his five wives.
My father hated to be alone. He was generous and quick to love and wanted to share all of his heart, all of the time. He had remarried only eight months after my mother died in 1975, and then three times again over the next twenty years. Two of those wives—the second and the third—had been hasty, short-lived picks. The last two were gems, including Mary Jane.
But our weekly phone conversations had become centered around Mary Jane’s frustrations. Our stepmother hadn’t signed on for Dad’s dementia. No one ever does. And everything got harder.
“Your father has lost his keys again,” she’d say. And “He can’t add up his checkbook anymore.” And “He won’t go anywhere without me.” Impatience crackled like heat lightning in her voice. Yet no one thing seemed like a terribly big deal to me. My grandparents had aged and died without requiring much help, and if I thought about it at all, I assumed that would be true of my dad.
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