#23: Blue Jay

Mitchell Juers
School of Education


Waking up to find out your mom is dead does not feel the way you think it would feel. At least, it doesn’t when you are 8 years old. No one wakes you up in the middle of the night to tell you the sad news. You aren’t kneeled over her bedside praying to a god for either one more day or to end the pain quickly. You aren’t even entirely sure what happened or how you are supposed to feel about it. No, nobody really tells you what an 8-year-old is supposed to do, how they are supposed to act, and what they are supposed to say when they wake up to find out their mom had passed quietly in the night, and I am still trying to figure it out to this day.

The first thing I remember from that morning is how quiet everything was when I walked downstairs. I was used to being the first person out of bed in my house, so it’s not that I was expecting some sort of hubbub, but even so it felt different. It isn’t exactly that anything had changed, and yet at the same time, I just knew something had. I had made it a routine in those days to step into the living room as soon as I got downstairs. That was where my mom slept—on that egg carton-like mattress topper that I’ll never forget—ever since walking up the stairs became too difficult for her to do each day. Today was no different, except in all the ways it was, so I peered into the living room only to find an empty bed.

To this day I remember the confusion I felt at the sight before me. It didn’t even occur to me that she had passed, and I tried to think of where she could have gone. The easiest explanation my brain could come up with was that she had somehow found the strength to make it up her bedroom in the middle of the night, but this was quickly disproven as I saw my dad coming down the stairs. In the movies, everything changes when someone receives the news of a death everything changes, but for me everything seemed to stay exactly the same. When my dad let me know my mom was dead, I didn’t break down in tears or run away screaming, but I did have questions.

“Where did they take her?” “Who came and got her?” “Did they bring an ambulance?” “If they did, why didn’t the ambulance lights and sounds wake me up?” “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

As like any precocious 8-year-old, I was fully focused on myself and the concerns that I had. To my adult brain, the questions seem so silly and trivial, but I can still remember how dire they felt to me, how important it was that my father answered them. More necessary than feeling sad and certainly more necessary than figuring out what comes next. Later, I would teach myself to feel shame for this reaction, for not crying, for not acting like normal people do when their mom dies. That day, I was truly just reacting in the only way I knew how. The truly terrible thing is that I had two brothers, and at no point in my life did I know or remember how they reacted that morning, something that continued to haunt me in future therapy sessions.

The following days were worse for me. I was a people pleaser, a very difficult thing to be in a room full of crying adults. My mom’s entire family came down in the days that followed. All five of her sisters, all six of her brothers, her mom, as many cousins as was reasonable. They all stayed in my house, and we were packed to the brim. My dad even slept in my bedroom with me, which was already barely a bedroom, and I was equal parts annoyed and thrilled at the novelty of it all.

I was the perfect little host, always checking in and asking if I could get anything for those sad and pitying stares. I sang the songs I liked to sing whenever I had a new audience for them, Puff the Magic Dragon and American Pie were the highlights of my repertoire. I even allowed myself to sit long enough to be told stories and look at photographs of favorite memories with family members. This continued through the funeral, an event that itself was a complete blur in my mind compared to the distinct memories of the days leading up to it.

One thing I heard from so many of my relatives before and after the funeral was this message: “Whenever you see a cardinal, you will know that is your mom looking down on you.” I was a bit suspect of this belief, but over the years my aunts would continue to text and call me to let me know that they had seen my mother out their window, or at a birdfeeder, or on a walk. The people pleaser in me was happy that these visits meant so much to them, while also basking in being told how proud my mom would be of me. It wasn’t until nearly two decades later that I finally understood what they were saying to me. One day, I saw a blue jay at my bird feeder. I had just started my birdwatching journey that year and while proudly logging it as my 23rd lifer, the realization struck me. Bright and beautiful, strong and powerful, loud to a fault. Unmissable, and unmistakable. I knew from that day on that Kathleen Mary Sheehan was no cardinal, she was a blue jay.