Feathered Faith
by T.J. Banks, http://www.tjbanks927.blogspot.com/
I was sitting in the hospital hallway, the cold, gray April weather seeping into my soul. My 14-year-old daughter Marissa was well into her second hospitalization for major depression: the child who had been my joy and delight since my husband Tim’s death ten years earlier had been free-falling into a darkness too thick to penetrate. And I’d been racing about like a desperate, determined cartoon character, trying to catch her, only to have an equally free-falling anvil repeatedly clobber me.
I slumped back into the hard hospital chair, staring at my journal, unable to complete my thoughts. My child had calmly talked of killing herself – – had even given thought to ways of doing it. In my mind’s eye, I saw my world without her, a place caught in the grips of an eternal winter where nothing could ever grow again. Or if a seed did somehow manage to grow, it would be a poor spindly thing, a ghost of the plant it could’ve been. I hadn’t felt this disheartened since Tim’s death. Once again, my life was being torn up by the roots, and my nerves were so raw, the slightest thing set them quivering. I wanted nothing so much as to turn tail and run away from it all – to somehow escape the terror that had me by the throat.
Two women were coming down the hall. They stopped by a window. “Look – a mourning dove,” one of them exclaimed. “She must have a nest nearby.” They watched her for a little bit, then moved on.
Curious, I got up and walked over to the window. Under a tree sat the mourning dove. It was wet and raw out, but she sat there, shyly but defiantly regarding me. Soul beheld soul, and something flickered back into life inside me that I couldn’t quite put a name to.
Paula, another mother whose daughter had just been admitted to the hospital’s psychiatric unit, showed up just then. I went over to her. “You want to see something neat?” I asked. “It’s just a little thing but….”
Paula looked at me with that same heart-weariness I’d been feeling. “I’ll take anything just now.”
The mourning dove was still at the window when we got there, still shy, still defiant. She never took her gaze from us. She wasn’t deserting her post, no matter what.
Then that tiny flicker of feeling flamed into being as I stood there with Paula. Just a little thing, but it wasn’t. Like the mourning dove, I would hold fast, no matter what was happening around me. And so would Paula. We would ride this horribly dark night of the soul out with our daughters and find our ways back out of it. That demure steadfast bird had given us a simple but powerful lesson in feathered faith.
The Lorax Correspondent 
…and these are the things that make us human. What a lovely story, and I am inspired by your strength.
Thanks, Audrey. I don’t know about strength — we do what we have to do, especially where our children are concerned..One of the things that helped — and that has stayed with me since then– were all the people who came forward and shared similar experiences with me..
Thank you for sharing that, Tammy. ❤
A beautiful piece, Tammy. You have walked through the fire and found your way through. You are right, we do what we have to do to get through such darkness. You are a great Mom and your child is a testament to that. People say, God doesn’t give us any more than we can handle, I say “I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.” But we endure. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Tammy…What a moving story…Sometimes God lets us know He is there with us in small ways as the dove. A woman I used to work with told me that when she lost her mother she was very depressed. Her mother was very fond of Cardinals. One day when she was very down she looked out her window and saw a Cardinal which reminded her of her mother and she knew then that her mother was telling her it would be OK. God Bless you and your daughter.
Thanks, Helen. I guess birds have been seen as messengers since the dove brought the olive branch back to Noah. And, like Noah, we see them as bringing — or being — signs that we have survived the worst & that everything will be OK.
Thanks, Daphne & Cel. We HAVE to share these things — light a candle against the darkness, so to speak — or else we risk drowning in that darkness. And we have to have faith in something bigger than ourselves that when we get to that darkness, “one of 2 things will happen…There will be something to stand on or you will be taught how to fly.”