My New Learning Curve

Daily writing prompt

Are you a lifelong learner?

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Well, today I learned that if you buy a $39, nuclear weapons protection grade, red birdfeeder that requires each bird to create a unique registration number not shared with any other bird in order to partake of any seeds, then the squirrels will suddenly refrain from hanging on the current birdfeeder and will eschew even entering the yard.

I also learned that the adrenalin that fuels the aftermath of a death in the family evaporates around week five. In that space between the death and week five there is the work of death – the ‘arrangements,’ the calls, phone companies and credit unions and retirement funds and clothes and jewelry and cosmetics, and death certificates, so many death certificates. And affidavits, forms, so many fillable forms.

It’s been days since we made a list and divvied up the tasks. We seem at loose ends. What’s our job today, I ask. And the answer is we don’t have a job today. We can just sit down. Study the birds. Read a book. Watch a documentary consisting entirely of aerial shots of various states’ topography. This might be called resting. Or maybe it’s settling in. Or being numb in a different way.

I’m new at this death business so there is a learning curve. I have learned, though, to be patient with myself and not think I ought to be one way or the other. I know there are places I’m not well enough to be yet – big stores, big crowds – and places that feel womblike – like our back porch. And so, I just sit out here, hanging with the birds, watching the bunny that just slowly hopped across the strip of sunlight showing between our overgrown trees, listening to the neighbors call their dogs, thinking about watering the plants.

If I wonder what’s next, I guess this is next. I’ve learned to wait and see.