Well.
For the first time in 18 years, I come home to an empty house. I thought I had entered this phase earlier this year, when the new school year started and the others didn't even start for home until I had already arrived. I didn't realize what a difference even one small parakeet can make in an empty house, not until this evening.
Countless little things jar me back to the realization, "she's gone." The noise I make unlocking and opening the front door is answered by silence instead of chirps and tiny bell ringing. Lighting my desk candles brings no rumble-flutter of disapproval (she had learned how to extinguish the flames with a well-timed flyby). I have typed all this much without the sudden descent of avian curiosity or companionship, and I realize how much she had fit her feathers and chilly feet into a shared rhythm of sound and motion.
Pepper passed away rather abruptly. Friday after work all seemed normal: she flew down from her perch above the entertainment center to land on my head, and willingly climbed onto my hand for a ride to my desk. When I sat down she flew off squawking as usual.
Later, flying back from the mirror in the hallway to her perch, she lost altitude and ran into the cabinet doors below her perch. She fell to the floor, and seemed a bit dazed, which was unusual: she's hit that door harder and just circled off to make another approach in the past. She then sat rather wobbly on her perch and puffed up as birds do when they are cold (or sick).
So I put her in her cage with a heat lamb in one corner and moved her food and water to the cage floor where she could reach them easily. The evidence is that she ate and drank through the night or in the morning, but by mid-afternoon she was huddling close to the lamp and seemed quite dazed. Sometime in the evening, without any sound or movement, she was gone.
Just like that, the transition arrived. Space becomes defined by absences, voids, instead of the push of fellow creatures. The household has fewer residents, and now no pets.
I am suddenly tremendously grateful that we had as much as we did. My life has been richer for their presence.
