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6 hours ago
6
After my husband died, the birds started behaving strangely towards me. This was not my imagination; it really happened. On my daily walks, I was startled by how close they came to me – approaching, hopping alongside me and chirping. If there were a lot of them – and if there was no one else around – it felt as if they were accompanying me, maybe trying to convey something.
I had walked on the heath near our home with my husband for years. But his illness meant that, during his final months, he could not walk with me any more. When he died – in January 2023 – I had been walking on my own for six months and the birds, I am sure of this, had paid no attention to me.
Of course, it occurred to me that this might be a message from my husband. When you are newly bereaved, it’s easy to grasp at any sign that your loved one might somehow still be there. But, in the case of my husband, I knew this could not be. Firstly, he had told me before he died that he was certain there was no afterlife and it was totally irrational of me to think that there might be. Secondly, he would never ever have chosen to come back as a bird. He was a big man, who admired big powerful animals, and – if he was that way inclined – he might have come back as a tall, many-antlered stag, roaring at me from a misty mountainside. Or, maybe more likely, because he could be morose, he might have come back as a moose or an elk, lumbering out of a gloomy forest at dusk.
One evening, a robin followed me home. I know that robins often interact with people, perching on gardeners’ spades, making eye contact. But this robin hopped along beside me for an unusually long time, watching and apparently accompanying me. In a moment of foolishness, I stopped and said quietly to the bird: “OK, if it’s you, follow me home” and at once it flew away in a big fluttering rush.
Three months after my husband’s death, I went to France, to a small village in the foothills of the Alps. One evening, as I was climbing the outside stone staircase to my room, a young magpie appeared out of nowhere and perched on the banister beside me, making a tremendous fuss. He squawked and flapped his wings and bounced up and down, obviously beside himself. As he was less than two feet away from me, this was quite disconcerting. I still don’t know what was upsetting him but I do know that things like that never used to happen to me.
It made me begin to pay much more attention to my natural surroundings than I had before. I discovered the uncomplicated pleasure to be found in a weirdly shaped mushroom, in the steady clicking noise made by gorse bushes when the sun shines on them. I was not skipping through the woods, tra-la-la; I was far too sad. But my need to walk every day – which I have always had – acquired a new and deeper meaning.
Everywhere I went that first year, I looked for solace in nature. I had to keep moving, whether walking on the heath or leaving home to travel. It was in the stillness of staying put that the pain was worst.
Over time, I came to see that when you walk in nature with the person you love, you observe it, you enjoy it, but you are – to a certain extent – apart from it. Your companionship is its own universe. When you walk alone, you become more fully part of the world around you. So, no doubt, I was paying more attention to the birds. But I also think they sensed that there was something wrong with me – I was a wounded creature – and maybe they really were accompanying me.
Back home, there is another robin who regularly tries to catch my attention through the glass of the garden door. In the afternoons, an urban fox, always the same one – I know him from the scar on his forehead – snoozes in my garden. On many evenings, a mouse runs across the garden path at 8.30pm – always in the same direction – while, overhead, through the urban dusk, flocks of green parakeets head home along their known routes, traced in the sky. Nature reminds me continually how much there still is to be found in emptiness.
I relate to the natural world differently now that I have learned to sense it as company. I do still enjoy the companionship of people but with creatures there is no need for pretence. On the most active night of the Perseid meteor shower, I got up at three in the morning and saw three shooting stars from my open bedroom window. The next day, someone told me it was a good omen – but I knew that it was nothing of the sort. It just was.
This might all sound very fanciful, but it is these moments that have coloured my experience of living alone for the first time in 35 years. Still, as I walk in the woods, sometimes I imagine my husband laughing and rolling his eyes at how I told everyone that, after he died, the birds started behaving strangely towards me.
