Flight of the inadvertent intruder

To the bird who fate placed at precisely the same point in time and space as the approximate midpoint of the windshield of our minivan just west of Kingston, Ontario earlier this afternoon, I am deeply sorry. Before we even knew you were there, you were gone, a frighteningly instantaneous thud followed by a fast-receding, spinning black body in my rear-view mirror.

We didn't mean for your life to end so suddenly. It wasn't your fault that humans placed the highway precisely in the middle of your flyway, or that, on this beautifully sunny day, you decided to break with your flock for some low-level flight. The world works in strange ways, I guess, and in some perverse, cosmological manner, this was your time.

This will come as no comfort to you, of course - even when you were alive, you didn't read, let alone go online and read blogs like this one - but the brief crossing of your path with ours gave us ample opportunity to discuss the fragility of life as we continued our journey home. We spoke to the kids about the need to appreciate what we have, because there's never any way to know when it could be ripped away in a heartbeat. Or less.

The timing of our meeting was opportune. We were on our way home from Montreal, where we had attended my late father's unveiling. In Jewish tradition, an unveiling is when the engraved gravestone is revealed to the mourners. It typically occurs a few months after the funeral, and it is a ritual that, like so many other aspects of Jewish mourning, is designed as a milestone for those left behind, a meaningful way to put our grief into perspective and make it a part of our lives. We don't get over death, after all. We integrate it into our souls, and my dad's unveiling was a tangible reminder of how we had changed since that awful day last September, and how we will continue to change from this point forward.

I'll have more to say about this weekend in the days and weeks to come. For now, I find myself thinking about loss, and how I'm glad I'm not a bird. Because I get to appreciate life long after it ends, and I'm not entirely sure we can say the same thing about the bird we met, and then lost, earlier today.

Your turn: Finding something after loss. Please discuss.