The Day the Black Bird Broke Free

On the morning she died, Selina had woken up earlier than usual. Her left side, having been paralyzed from a stroke, was heavier than it had ever been and as she called to Tom, her weary husband to help her up, she sighed in in surrender to the heaviness of what her body had become. It had won over her spirit. It had won over her will. She had fought the most difficult fight of life, one’s spirit against the body. Her mind had had failed to prevail over her “matter.” She didn’t know that it would be her last morning on earth, but she couldn’t shake off a song:

Morning has broken like the first morning

Blackbird has spoken like the first bird

Praise for the singing

Praise for the morning

Praise for them springing fresh from the world

It had been a most bloody war between her failing body and herself. But first, it was a dance. When she suffered a paralyzing stroke, three years back, she had first cajoled it, luring it to healing with niceties and prayers.

“You’re my only one, you have to heal.” She had coaxed.

“This is not our first time. You healed the last two times. I know you’ll be fine again.” She would continue referring to the former times she had suffered a stroke. Her body, “twice bitten” had become “thrice shy.”

“In the name of Jesus, you will heal. Like he raised Lazarus from the dead, he will resurrect my paralyzed body. Soon, I will walk and talk again!” She decreed.

But it didn’t budge. And the dance turned in to a paranoid hunting game. She started to become distrustful of her body, starting to read fatal intentions from it. She became wary of its lack of cooperation and its total lack of response to any incentive. She knew that it would be difficult to lure it to healing and so chose to force it. It was a critical moment, and she didn’t want to end up the prey.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

So, she armed herself with fiery faith and an impenetrable will. Matching right behind her were her doctors. Her hours were filled with gospel ponderings and threatening prayers. There were anointing oils and laying of hands. There was holy water and blessed mantels. And in hospital halls, there were peddlers and stability balls. Electric shocks and acupuncture. Balance boards and resistance bands. And many a mouth professed healing. She would come out of this battles a weary mess, but then she would sit on her brown armchair, and conjure up images of walking to work, running towards her children, playing with her grandchildren and she would smile.

She couldn’t point out the exact time she felt she was losing the war. She must have been sitting on the same brown chair. She must have counted the dwindling number of friends coming to visit and pastors coming to pray. She must have wondered why months on, she still paid a physiotherapist who couldn’t even stir her fingers awake. She must have noticed the scornful looks of her caretakers when she asked to go to the bathroom. She must have noticed that apart from her, everybody else lived on; her friends, buying houses and cars. Her husband and children too, studying, working, and marrying.

That’s when she started to stop. She started to stop asking for apples and sausages because she thought they were expensive. She started to stop asking for a sun-bathe or for a drive out. She started to stop praying, humming, and laughing.

She hated her body. She called it, “this thing.” The thing that without which, she couldn’t live a life on earth. She could literally hear the dreadful screaming of her soul, trapped within the bars of “the thing.” Her soul, in mournful utterances, pleaded to her,” Let me out of this body. It does me no good. It’s no longer a medium for me. I can’t use a lifeless body. Please let me out!”

She had once listened to an Indian guru speaking of a soul’s search for liberation.

“Do not get attached to your bodies,” he started, “because they are merely borrowed mediums.”

She listened to her starving soul banging against the numbness of her paralysis. Sometimes she would beg for extra time. Time to attempt harder to cure her body. Time to love her family and friends and it would let her. But as days passed on, her soul screamed louder and shriller that she couldn’t hear herself.

Gradually, she gave in. Her dying body was winning. However, she was like Dylan Thomas’ “Grave men” who, “near death, see with blinding sight.” For some time, it was deceiving to her loved ones, thinking her articulate expressions and erratic surges of energy were signs of miraculous recovery. One by one, she called them in, magnanimous with customized advice and fancy accessories. She became blunt with truth and precise in tongue. As if by a supernatural force, she drew to her everyone she loved, to bid them farewell, even though she didn’t know she was.

So, on that June morning, the dreary hour she would depart, she slept on her brown chair. She had requested to be allowed to sleep. She said she was tired and didn’t even want to brush her teeth. They let her. It was in her sleep when a blood vessel in her brain burst. She didn’t know so she didn’t call out. Minute by minute, her brain lacking oxygen, began to die. Her spirit must have screamed! It must have called out in to people’s ears and pulled at their clothes.

“Help!” It must have said.

“She is dying! “

But no one heard it because it didn’t have a voice. So thy let Selina slip in to a coma, one she would never wake up from. And she left her body. Flew away to a place un-known. And when you’d look at her body, it looked like a coconut husk, no milk or flesh, it felt like an echo to a lonely ear, like the day before creation. She was just gone! Like she had never existed.

For Selina’s children, that was a most discombobulating thing. It had been weeks after their mother’s death, and they were fearfully grasping at her memories. When they were growing up, she used to watch a magic show in which a lanky, disheveled man would “magically” make things disappear. One moment the items rested on his hands, the next, after a rumbustious “abracadabra” would disappear, to the bewilderment of many. God had made her mother disappear. He was a trickster, this God. A cruel magician. Running fingers over the golden cross on their mother’s grave, it pained them how much they missed their mother; so desperate that they listened to the wind for a whisper from her, conjuring up images of Selina rising from her grave, white cladded and smiling. Their love for her had traversed all fear and shot headlong, searching for their mother, even in death.