These birds hold a powerful memory for me. They've nested before and I remember watching them intently in the days when Nicholas was struggling hard with illness and pain. At that time, they were my companions and my reminder that life pushes forward outside of my own four walls. Here is what I wrote about my my solitude and my front door visitors in my book, The Four Walls of My Freedom: Lessons I've Learned From a Life of Caregiving:
I remember reading a film review in the newspaper. I never actually saw
the film and I cannot even recall its name. But the reviewer’s words are still
with me today. The film was about a convent somewhere in Europe. A young nun
complained about having to wash dishes and scrub pots. The Mother Superior
chastised her, saying, “There is meaning in those dishes, in the act of
scrubbing.” As the reviewer said, the film was a testament to the idea that the
extraordinary exists within the ordinary; that the entire moral universe can be
found in the mundane tasks of everyday life. This sense of wholeness and
connectedness is what I found in my garden.
Outside our front door in
Ottawa, we had a black wrought-iron openwork light fixture. Each spring, a pair
of tiny sparrow-like birds called purple finches came to nest in our lamp. The first
year they came, all their bits of straw and string simply fell through the mesh
onto the ground. Annoyed by the mess, we swept up and thought nothing more of
it until one day, there on the ground lay two tiny, broken bright blue eggs. I
wept a little, berating myself for not understanding their simple need to have
a safe nest for their offspring.
The next year when we heard their distinctive chirps at the door, Jim
cut some bits of cedar and created a floor on the base of the lamp. Nest building
began in earnest, and soon there were four tiny eggs tucked up amongst downy
roan feathers. That year, I watched as the mum kept her eggs warm and the
father worried nearby. The eggs eventually hatched into a noisy quartet of open
beaks and soon enough they were ready to fly. I sat an entire day, watching in
suspenseful anticipation as every finch in the area arrived on our pine tree
to begin “training” with the youngsters. By turns, each bird would fly to the
top of the lamp, perch there for a second and fly off to the nearby branch. The
young birds had a tricky rite of passage: they had to fly inside the lamp and
exit through a narrow passage at the top of the ironwork. By dusk, all the
birds had left the nest and we could finally turn on the light and resume our
life without our temporary tenants.
These birds living in my midst, nurtured by us and by the rest of the
flock, gave me a certain antidote against loneliness. I had genuine curiosity
about the life in my garden and most certainly, felt “some minute, divine spark
inside me.” By this time I had given up on any idea of justice or natural order
in the world. Contained in my garden, I thought, there is transcendence; there
is grace. I began to think that peeling potatoes, raking leaves and mixing
cakes were all a sort of prayer. I began to understand that to be free, I had
to have an antidote to despair.
Theodore Zeldin writes
about how some people have acquired immunity to loneliness in his book An Intimate History of Humanity.[i] In fact,
one of his themes is actually called “Loneliness as an Obstacle to Freedom,”
which of course speaks directly to me, given that I am discussing my family’s “Freedom
to Be.” Being the mother of a child with multiple disabilities is, by
definition, a very lonely life. Nicholas’ illness, mobility challenges and
communication difficulties never made us top of the guest list at friends’ and
neighbours’ homes. When his health deteriorated and pain became our constant
enemy, we hardly ever spoke to anyone save health professionals. I had
wonderful friends and an extraordinarily supportive family, but I found it
impossible to share the gut-wrenching worry that seemed so exclusive to our
little family. Zeldin talks about the fear of loneliness as being a great
barrier to personal freedom. He observes that those who have overcome a fear of
loneliness have done so through experiencing a solitary lifestyle, whether by
choice or even by incarceration. But he also says, “The final form of
immunisation has been achieved by thinking that the world is not just a vast,
frightening wilderness, that some kind of order is discernible in it, and that
the individual, however insignificant, contains echoes of that coherence. People
who believe in some supernatural power have their loneliness mitigated by the
sense that, despite all the misfortunes that overwhelm them, there is some
minute divine spark inside them.”
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