By Maya Bryant

Yesterday, while deep cleaning my car to get ready to sell it, I heard high-pitched chirping coming from nearby. I chose to ignore it until it got so irritable that I dropped my towel and Windex bottle to find the source.  

Near my right front wheel was a baby robin, barely old enough to fly, screeching at me. It looked like it had fallen from the nest and hurt its neck. Its head was at a weird angle, and its legs didn’t move when it tried to walk. I was upset, of course, but there was no way I could kill this poor creature even though I knew it would probably not recover from paralysis.  

“While I worked the baby robin would try fruitlessly to fly away, stumbling around on the sidewalk and into the grass.”

So, I put on some rubber gloves and moved it out of the street, which somehow caused even more shrieking until I gently set it down by my front step. It stared at me in shock and tried to fly away, but it couldn’t. I sat with it until it fell asleep and went back to work.  

While I worked the baby robin would try fruitlessly to fly away, stumbling around on the sidewalk and into the grass. Eventually, it stopped trying. Eventually, it died.  

 

IT’S A SEEMINGLY irrelevant story about a life ending after barely beginning. And maybe it is. But I can see many things in those short hours with that baby bird. So many metaphors and anecdotes, so many parables and hymns. 

But all I could think at the time was, “How sad. It never got to fly.” And this was Juneteenth, no less – a day celebrating the actual freedom of all enslaved Black Americans.  

The freedom to go where you wanted and do what you pleased whenever you wanted to would be a wonderful aspiration. How nice it would’ve been to see that baby robin fly. But some robins never get to. Some robins end up like this one, with fear and death, as is nature. Nature is not “nice;” it is honest and soul-bearing, but it is not “nice.”  

“But some robins never get to fly.”

From author and science professor Isaac Asimov: “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” 

Death is as natural as life. Everything that begins, naturally, must come to an end. What is unnatural is trying to stop them from coexisting. Our time is limited, and we must cherish it when we have it.  

And so, life continues, or doesn’t, in whichever direction it takes us. I’ll leave you with that.