By Richard Tyler

Before I understood grief deep in my bones,

I thought it was a thing to move through.

A corridor to manoeuvre.

A season with a known end.

I did not know it was a gathering.

When a crow falls,

the others come.

Not to mourn,

not the way we use that word,

heavy with candles and the overpowering scent of lilies.

They come to look.

They come to learn the air,

to read the silence

where danger last stood.

They do not look away.

I was taught to look away.

To keep walking.

To say I’m fine the way you close a door, firmly,

without looking back at what’s inside the room.

But something in me

has started doing what the crows do.

Standing still.

Calling out.

Waiting.

There is a kind of attention

that only loss teaches.

Not the attention of happiness,

which is wide and distracted and warm.

But the other kind.

The kind that notices

the quality of quiet,

the direction of the wind,

the exact place where something is missing.

The crows know this.

They have always known this.

What if the gathering is not the wrong response?

What if staying,

and looking,

and calling out,

and watching the tree line for what took the one we loved…

what if that is not weakness,

not wallowing,

not the failure to recover,

but the oldest form of care there is?

A fallen crow does not go unnoticed.

I am trying to learn that.

To let myself be noticed.

To notice.

To stand in the place where something happened

and not immediately

make it mean I’m fine,

that I’ve grown,

that I’ve found the lesson and I’m better now.

But to stay.

Just a little longer.

In the cold and the knowing.

Carrying the name of what was lost

into the next place I go.

This is what the crows understand

that we keep forgetting:

grief is not the interruption of living.

It is living,

paying its fullest attention.