Dead Song Thrush, Broken Heart

Today Flad the sharp-fanged feral cat charged past the door with a dying song thrush clamped between his teeth. It was too late to save it. Having killed it, he laid it on the path and abandoned it, looking most pleased with himself. I have ignored him ever since, apart from shouts of "Bad cat", and attempts to project images into his brain about killing lots of mice, but leaving birds alone. I have been told by my friend Anna, an animal communicator, that although animals don't understand words, they can pick up images if we 'send' them clearly enough. So it's running things good, flying things bad.

Song thrushes are desperately in decline in Britain, so that is one reason why I am so angry and sad. But the other reason is that my mother loved the song thrush. It was her favourite bird. When she died and my sister was on the phone to a humanist vicar, arranging a funeral for our mother who believed in Von Daniken's angels were intelligent aliens theory, I glanced out of the window and cried, "Quick! There's an enormous thrush on the fence!" It was the first time my sister and I had been together in our old family house where Mum had died, since her unexpected death a week earlier. Sis was still yakking away on the phone. "Quick, you'll miss it," I repeated urgently. The huge speckle-chested bird was still perched quietly on the fence, and seemed to be gazing a me.

It was a whole ten minutes before Sis finally finished the call. She was cross with me for interrupting. "It's still there," I said, drawing her to the window. Indeed it was. For a full minute, maybe more, the big bird gazed calmly at us, and we, awed, gazed back at it. "It's not a thrush," my ornithologically minded sister said, "it's some kind of hawk." Then, as if satisfied that some kind of communication had been made, the bird soared off, with slow, majestic wing flaps and vanished into the steely grey January sky.

A hawk on a garden fence in Liverpool? A hawk that stayed that long and stared at us? We both agreed that it had to be a communication from our mother. In ancient Egypt, the hawk was a messenger from the gods of the afterlife, so would it really be surprising if my mother took the form of a 'big thrush' to make a final visit to us? We both felt instinctively that Mum had chosen this moment when her two children were together to say her last goodbye to us.

Another friend whose father had recently passed over (also in Liverpool) visited some woods in which he had often walked with his father as a child. Just as my mother had a favourite bird, her 'token animal', so my friend's father loved deer. The roe deer was his token animal. As my friend stood there thinking about his father, a roe stag glided into the clearing where he stood and gazed intently at him. Just as my sister and I knew that the hawk was our mother, so my friend knew instinctively, no doubts whatever, that the deer was his father come to make his final farewell to his only son.

I sobbed like a baby as I dug a hole in the wet earth at the bottom of the garden and buried the thrush today. I stroked its soft speckled feathers and tenderly laid it in the whole, then built a cairn of stones on top so that the foxes wouldn't dig it up. I was as inconsolable as if I had been burying my mother all over again. But Mum loved cats, too, so where does that leave me? A sentimental mess, I suppose, caught between claw and feather and between this world and the next.