Rory the Sun

A few nights ago, I broke down and sobbed because I was hit with sudden, overwhelming grief over Rory’s passing.

I hadn’t been able to look at this blog again after my last post announcing her death. I unfollowed a lot of the bird accounts that had brought me so much joy, and for a time I was even annoyed by the pigeons on the sidewalk because it felt like their existence was rubbing in my loss. I was hurting, I think, but I hadn’t grieved. I’d barely cried. I avoided thinking about it. My boyfriend says I was trying to be strong for my mom, who had lived with Rory for just as long as I had and who took her passing really, really hard.

So, when I came across a random little video of a sun conure the other night, everything sort of caught up with me at once and I was slammed with the emotional weight that I’d been trying to keep at bay since September.

It’s so strange to think that something so small, some tiny creature that could fit in the palm of my hand, could affect my life in such a profound way. Rory was my first real pet outside of fishes and turtles, the animal I had been begging my family for since I could learn to talk but wasn’t allowed to have because of allergies. I picked her because she was the ugliest out of her clutch, the slowest one to mature and grow feathers, bald and splotchy green for so long. I was scared no one else would want her. But I wanted her. She was the friend that greeted me with screams of joy when I came home after a long day at school or, later, a hard day at work. She was the bird who learned to be a dog from her loud, furry friends a few buildings down. She was annoying, terribly so, because she ate holes in all of my favorite shirts and was impossibly needy and tremendously picky about her food.

I learned so much about love from her, about responsibility, about patience, about giving without expecting anything in return and about receiving in return anyway in the form of regurgitated food and naps on my chest and absolute, devoted, unconditional love.

She died of what we suspect was a heart attack, held by my brother in a cab as he frantically tried to get her to the emergency vet. She did not die a quiet death, and that hurts me more than I can express. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t comfort her.

But I hope, I really hope, that if there is an afterlife somewhere, if there is even the most infinitesimal chance that the tiny creature I cherished for 16 years might remember me after her body stopped moving, that she knows that I loved her. That I love her. That I miss her terribly, and that I am still surprised, every single time, when I turn the kitchen corner and don’t see her there.

Hello friend! I don’t really help bathe Rory, actually, she just dives in all by herself about once a week, usually after her daily water change.

When she was younger, we used to encourage her sometimes by (very gently) sprinkling water on her, but now she does it all on her own!