Tag: pet loss

Heart at Home

Thought I’d wrap up this week’s tales of weirdness at various apartments by saying that nothing unpleasant has ever happened where I live now. Anything that has happened here that one could consider otherworldly has come from Inigo.

I’ve chronicled his passing and a few of the early signs of his continued presence on this website, but I’ve felt his presence here many, many times. I feel it the strongest when I’m in the living room playing games on my tablet or goofing off coloring with the TV on in the background. Sometimes I feel him pretty strongly when I’m in his bathroom, the guest bathroom where I used to give him baths. He loved that bathroom and loved getting spritzed with a water bottle there. And he comes to visit in dreams. Every night I tell him and another birdie I once had, Jimmy the Green Cheek, to come and visit if they like and have no important birdie business to attend to, and sometimes they take me up on it.

I feel Inigo’s presence in all kinds of places, too: On a line at a salad shop when one of his favorite songs came on the speakers (“Wake Me Up,” by Avicii and Aloe Blacc); in Warsaw just before a Poets of the Fall concert started, during a recorded intro by Marko Saaresto where at one point he talks about loved ones; on walks either alone or with friends; and while I write, especially about Inigo himself. He loves hearing how wonderful he is, heh.

There is still grief, however. There are times when my heart breaks all over again for missing his physical presence—the softness of his feathers, the warmth of his little body when he sat on my chest as we watched TV together, the spiciness of his scent, the silliness of our conversations. They say grief comes in waves, and every now and then the waves feel like a tsunami. One night it was particularly bad and I went over to his house and picked up the little towels he once slept upon to see if they still smelled like him. The far corner where he used to sleep was warm. Just the corner, the spot where he would hunker down and pull back the edges to make a little pillow to rest his chin. The rest of the towels were cool, and only the one on top was warm. It was like he had just been there a moment before. That has only happened once since then, so I leave the towels there and the cage door open in case he wants to come and hang out. He loved to hang out on the door, too.

Photo of a Nanday Conure sitting on the open door of a cage in a living room.
Inigo, just hanging out being a happy, curious bird.

Overall, this is a pretty clear apartment, though. It had a happy vibe when I first came to look at it. I believe the tenants before me came in as a couple and moved out as a family of four. It looked like my home office was once a nursery, and a toddler had drawn on one of the walls. There are still faint vestiges of chalk drawings on the bricks on the balcony, too—hearts, happy faces, and stick figures. The landlord installed new flooring and new fixtures and appliances for me, too.  

One of those fixtures did give me a fright one night, however. Imagine watching a ghost-hunting show and this happens:

Yep, the water just turned on by itself. It kept happening, which is how I was able to take a video of it, and I figured out that pulling the handle forward when I turned off the faucet would prevent it. That was last November, and I just keep forgetting to have someone from maintenance look at it. Plus, I tested it over the summer and nothing happened, so it’s probably some sort of part that contracts in the dry winter air and needs to be replaced.

I hope.

Lost and Found

Grief does things to people. It has been bothering me that I don’t have any of the orange feathers from Inigo’s legs. I last saw one in the kitchen earlier this year, and foolishly thinking that there would be more chances to save one, I didn’t pay it much mind and eventually it disappeared. I had about given up when tonight I got the strongest feeling that there was one somewhere in the apartment. I looked in his carrier. No. I took apart the dust trap in the dryer. Nope, not there either, though I did find a couple of his woodchips. 

“The kitchen.”

It was like a whisper. 

But I thought, no, that one is gone.

“Another.”

So I started looking in all the places that I haven’t cleaned in the last two weeks, if ever, places where a tiny feather might have landed and been covered in dust.

I got a flashlight and pulled the refrigerator out, and there it was, on the floor, between the refrigerator and the wall, with a little dust bunny. It’s not the same one I lost. That one was a little fuller. But it’s a feather from one of his “socks” and it is one of the most precious things I will ever have. 

Just when I start to think his presence is fading and that he’s leaving, he reminds me that he never will.

In a Breath

I picked up Inigo’s ashes yesterday. I put them in his house for the day before moving them to the nightstand last night. When I held the little box to my heart, his presence was so strong. He felt young and whole and healed. He felt free.

It feels right to keep them in the bedroom. Inigo loved it there. I think that is where he felt safest. I sleep under the birdie quilt now.

The term “Sunday Blues” has taken on new meaning. There’s not much of a point to cooking pasta dinner when it’s just for me.

Even the laundry is different. There are so few towels now in the towel wash now. Just my bath towels, a couple of kitchen towels, and the towel I put under the front door to keep the cooking smells from the hallway out when my neighbor makes whatever stinky fish thing she makes. The towel wash used to include birdie towels from Inigo’s shelf and bar cloths from when I cleaned the cage. I stopped short when I went into the spare bathroom to collect the bar cloths from the edge of the sink and there were none there.

Because you haven’t had to clean his house in over a week.

The days are filled with moments like that now. Opening the drawer and seeing all the unused syringes there. Taking a banana from the fruit bowl and realizing it’s just a banana now, not a NANNER. Seeing Inigo’s follower count go down, little by little, one here, two there. Opening the oven to heat something up, seeing the writing on the bottom where you can put some water if you want to set the oven to self-clean, and realizing there’s nothing stopping me from using that feature because there’s no reason to worry about the fumes. Or the fumes from Scrubbing Bubbles. Or candles, if I had any. Or Carpet Fresh. Or perfume. Or nail polish and nail polish remover. My hands are a mess from my trip to New Orleans earlier this month, the skin dry from washing them in the hard water there. I had preened the wrong feather the day before we said goodbye, and the wound from the nip he gave me has faded into a small pink dot on my hand.

And silence, so much silence, especially when the thermostat shuts the heat off. Sometimes music or turning on the TV helps, but they are irritating as often as not.

I’m still finding feathers, including two last night, bright green, in the home gym, and may the cosmos smite me if I’m lying but they weren’t there yesterday morning or afternoon when I packed his unused syringes in the spare room closet. My floors are dark wood and my gym mat is purple. I would have seen the larger feather for sure.

Inigo is free, but he’s also here, all around, the breath that blows the feathers out from wherever they hide.

I hope I never stop finding them.

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