The Unending Absence

Hi y’all. It’s been awhile since you’ve heard from me. I’m writing to you with the sad news that my parrot Peep passed away last week.

Some of you may have known Peep or heard tell of him from these newsletters. He was the light of my life for the past nine years, and I’ve been devastated by his loss. We communicated, not in the English language, but on a level that transcended how either of us spoke. We loved each other. He was feisty and snuggly and clever. I taught him to retrieve objects, fly to me on command, go through tunnels, shoot hoops, ride a skateboard. He made me a more patient, curious, and playful person. The relationship that we have with our pets is one of the most uncomplicated and loving relationships most of us have in this world; that was certainly true of my time with Peep.

Since this loss, my brain isn’t working right. I forget what I am saying mid-sentence and lose all track of where I am while driving. I cannot type a sentence without multiple typos, and I open and close cabinets without retrieving what I went searching for. I continue to imagine that I hear him flying in from another room or see him standing on the windowsill of his room looking up at the moon.

Of course I’ve already ripped through the bible of grieving, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. She writes, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” That is precisely where I find myself now; life continues on but I am struggling to locate meaning in this massive loss.