I”M FEELING EMPTY AND SAD, my love. For the last hour I’ve been watching the gannet colony at Muriwai Beach. From the viewing platform on which I’m standing, I look out over a large shelf of rock. It lies immediately below me, and there must be a hundred or more birds that have crowded onto it – some stretching their neck and wings, some gurgling their high-pitched quavering call, some squabbling with a neighbour, some just standing or sitting quietly. The young flap their wings experimentally or take occasional stumbling steps …
It’s a bustling, noisy scene, and the air around is full of wheeling and gliding, coming and going, taking off and landing. But in all this constant activity, three birds lie motionless. They are dead. The one on the far side is a youngster; I can tell from his speckled black-and-white juvenile plumage. The other two are both adults, mature birds with their white feathers and distinctive yellow gannet head.
There’s no indication of the cause of their deaths, no sign that they’ve been attacked. Perhaps some disease has killed them. Whatever it was, there they lie, each in an awkward, twisted pose.
As it happens, the two dead adult birds are both on the side of the rock nearer to me, and with my binoculars I have a particularly good view of them. They lie slightly apart from the main crowd. One is quite alone, ignored while the life of the colony goes noisily on.
The other has a companion. I can’t tell if it’s a male or a female, but occasionally while I watch, the living bird stands on the back of the dead one, as if mounting her to mate. So I think to myself that maybe he’s the male of the pair. Of course, I could be quite wrong, but as the little drama unfolds below me I find myself driven to personalize it.
For what cuts into me is the grief of the living bird. He seems desperate to change what has happened. Clumsily – because on land these are clumsy birds, though their flight is magnificent – he stumbles around his mate, nudging her with his beak, as if willing her to move. A gannet’s beak is large and business-like for the task of catching and devouring fish. But this gannet uses his tenderly, nibbling and chafing at his mate’s body.
A lot of the time he pecks around her head. I wince, thinking he’s going to hit her open, lifeless eye, but he never does. All around it, though, he nudges and prods, poking into her feathers almost as if he’s massaging her.
Every now and then he tries to lift her wings. Opening his beak and taking hold, he pulls at them, first one wing and then the other. But despite his anxious efforts there is no response. His mate just lies there motionless.
Confused, baffled it seems, he stumbles a few of his awkward steps away from her lifeless body, lifts his long neck, raises his beak, and strains toward the sky. Then he lowers his head and stands, forlorn, for a little while.
At last he turns back, shuffling once more to her side, hopelessly going through the whole procedure again, nudging, caressing, tugging, knowing of nothing else he can do. Longing, it seems, to urge her into life.
A fly crawls across her feathers. He chases it away with his beak. He mounts onto her back again and stands there, nudging at her neck, her head…
All this I watch for a full hour, held by the depth of his grief. Several times he turns from his partner. Once he walks in his tottery way some four or five metres from her body, towards the other birds. And I think to myself … at last he’s given up. But once again, back he comes, back to his hopeless task.
And throughout the time of my watching, the activity noisily continues among the crowd of birds on the rock shelf. Occasionally one or another gannet pair begins a courting dance. A park notice nearby explains that these birds can mate for life. Who knows how long my two have been together? Apparently gannets may live for up to 40 years.
But here in front of me is the end of it all. No more the ritualised dance that they have so often shared, the bonding movements that have made these two birds into a loyal pair. He can’t make them work, and he’s at his wits’ end.
Of course I’m reading human emotions and explanations into all this. I’ve no way of knowing what he really does think in his bird mind. But a deep sadness spreads through me for his sorrow, and his confusion, and his loss.
And, inevitably, my thoughts turn to us, my love. To you and me. And to the unspeakable. I’ve never faced up to it so starkly before.
But one day something like this may be our experience. One day one of us may lie dead, while the other stands alongside helpless to change it. No longer able to offer a lifetime’s love to the limp body.
One of us – you or I – will face the crisis of loss, the shock of sudden and total closure, the door irrevocably slammed shut on our lifetime of togetherness.
One of us – you or I – will know that the fabric we have woven with our joint lives is, from that moment, a thing of the past. That a finish has been made to the intertwining and overlapping and mutual threading that has formed the tapestry of our merged lives. Our shared love will be over.
Of course, it won’t be all gone. Our togetherness won’t simply disappear. Part of it will survive. Remaining for one of us to cherish will be the products of our lives – the photographs and favourite belongings, the diaries and souvenirs.
And the invisible things – the music we’ve loved and the journeys we’ve made and the conversations we’ve shared and the lessons we’ve learned.
And the images of each other in the children we’ve made.
The memories. A lifetime of them, yours … or mine. Those are the jewels we’ve gathered, and whichever one of us is left will have that rich treasure to enjoy. When the closure is made on our shared life, that at least will remain.
The memories … there to be recalled and revisited, whenever the survivor of us wants them. The memories …
But the partnership ended. No-one to share the memories with. And the desolation of those first hours and days. That will be a fearful thing.
I watched my gannet friend for an hour. (Who knows how long he had mourned before I arrived?) And I was still there when something visibly changed inside him. Suddenly he seemed almost angry as he chivvied his dead mate. When he took her wing he positively hauled on it.
Then for a minute or two I was distracted. A chance passer-by engaged me in conversation. When I turned back to the scene below, the dead bird lay alone.
Dismayed, I looked for my friend. Urgently I scanned the scores of birds on the rock shelf. Which one was he? Adult gannets are all identical.
Almost certainly he was still there, somewhere among them – but I would never know. In that anonymous crowd I had no way of recognizing him. With a deep sadness, I realized that my gannet friend was now forever lost to me.
Weary of my sad watch, I finally wandered off to explore the beach and its surroundings. But an hour or so later I felt myself drawn back to the gannet colony. I walked up the track, not knowing exactly what it was I hoped to see.
The dead bird still lay there … unattended and separate from the others. But now flies were crawling on her. For a moment that made me angry. They had no right to defile a creature who had been so loved. I wanted to climb the fence, to storm down there and chase them off. But of course this is how it has to be.
Feeling empty, I was about to go, when I noticed the dead juvenile bird over on the far side. Unwillingly, for I had had enough of watching grief, I saw a reminder that suffering is universal. Two adult birds were now prodding at its limp body. The parents, I supposed.
One nudged the lifeless head in the same way my gannet friend had done. The other took the sprawled wing in its beak and shook it.
I couldn’t stay to watch. I was too drained by sadness to endure any more. But as I walked away from the gannet colony for the last time, along with the sadness I took something else.
I took with me a determination to celebrate to the fullest our love … now, while we’re both alive. A determination to share with you the richest relationship I possibly can in whatever hours and years God still gives us.
IAN, GRAPEVINE’S DEPUTY EDITOR FOR MANY YEARS, LOST HIS BELOVED WIFE AND BEST FRIEND IN 2023 AFTER A LENGTHY ILLNESS. THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN GRAPEVINE IN 2004.