I wasn’t prepared to find our little diamond dove dead in his cage this morning. His soft spotted gray wing was draped over the low perch in the red glow of the heat lamp. I did not see his back rise with his steady breath. Mine caught in my chest.

He was almost 18 years old and I’d had him for at least 17 of those years. He’d been with me since I was a student teacher in the city on the verge of beginning a career that would be a part of my journey until just this fall. I stumbled upon him huddled in a plexiglas cage at the local pet store and started outlining reasons to my boyfriend why we should take him home.

“But the cats. Birds are messy. What are you going to really do with a pet like that?” he’d countered.

And he was right. But bird’s time with me would outlast that relationship by a decade.

I knew he was struggling in the last few weeks, but he’d rallied recently and was cooing softly again just yesterday.

Election Day.

We went to bed with the dread that many felt and woke to the news that confirmed.

I don’t have a road map for the experience of moving through a day like this. I know the mourning of animals that have graced my life and of people. I don’t have a compass for the type of sadness that settled in over the choices many made at the polls and what this says about individuals’ actions and words. The feeling is so very different from yesterday. I have yet to stumble upon the hope that many are conjuring.

It’ll come. It always does.

Today is just a quiet day of contemplation and saying goodbye.  We flap our wings, sing our songs, coo reassurances to the youngest amongst us.

We begin again.

Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the thing with feathers