Bye Bye, Blackbird

Stunned, I followed her out the door and down the bumpy brick walkway, still listening. “All through the winter I hung around, now I begin to feel homeward bound. Blackbird, blackbird, gotta be on my way. ... “ The silent song spooled out almost but not quite apologetically into the moonlit night and drifted over the daffodil buds in the front garden, and I remembered what her friend and caregiver, Kathy, had told me about their weekly trip to the beauty shop. “We used to take the shortest route, through the cemetery,” she’d said, “but after Mr. Erskine passed, I quit going that way, because it seemed to make her sad. Finally one morning she said, ‘Kathy, I notice that you don’t drive us through the cemetery any more. Why is that?’ I told her that I thought maybe it was just too upsetting to go that way. And she reached over and patted my arm and said, ‘You know, Kathy, we can’t live forever.’”

The gentlemen from Little-Ward may have been wondering, at this point, whether I was going to try to follow her into the hearse, and indeed I did have that urge, but I just stood there, saying a silent goodbye out of my heart, and thinking of all the nicknames we’ve had for this one utterly surprising woman — Mom, Mamacita, The Mother, Godzilla — and watching the hearse glide out of the driveway and down the street like a sleek dark bird. “Wait!” my heart said. “We weren’t finished!”

But would I have held her back? There she went, slipping off into the night, headed for “where somebody waits for me. Sugar’s sweet, so is he,” and singing “Bye bye, blackbird.”

I headed back up the walk, to where my brother waited for me in the doorway, and we stood there in the entry of the oddly empty house. “Now what?” my brother said. I shrugged. I had no idea. Mother would have known, of course, but now we had to figure it all out for ourselves. She was gone.

Or was she? Someone was still singing, in a voice that now had a bit of a wink in it, or so it seemed to me. “Make my bed,” it sang, “light the light, I’ll arrive late tonight,” and then, as if turning back for one last look at us, “Blackbirds, bye bye.”

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers at the Commerce Public Library and with the Jackson County Literacy Program.