Do you believe in omens? Today I heard a huge thud somewhere outside the house. I jumped up and went out the front door to discover a dead bird, claws straight up in the air. I swear it looked like a cartoon drawing. It was perfectly beautiful except it was dead. It had smacked straight into the house.

My brain went crazy. Would I have to dispose of it? How would I do that without touching it and contracting some strange avian disease? I would have to get rid of it before Mom got home. It would  certainly upset her, death so much on her mind, and her recent love affair with Star, the cutest bird on the planet.

But I couldn’t find the strength to deal with it. I was preparing for a singles tennis match, only a couple of hours away. Why God why me why now? A dead bird, really, Universe? That’s what you serve up to me today?

A few months before Gail passed, a bat entered our house and terrorized us for two consecutive nights. In 15 years of living in that old Victorian house, we had never had one bat occurrence. It felt like an ominous omen. Forgive the linguistic stutter.

The CDC had recently changed its rules, we came to find out. Now, if you are asleep in a room where a bat is found, you must take the series of rabies shots whether you have physical signs of a bite or not.

Gail had heard the bat on the floor by her side of the bed, and we had immediately evacuated. We were pretty sure we hadn’t been bitten, but the CDC didn’t care. With my high freelance deductible, I ended up paying over $2K for the shots. Gail’s bills were covered 80% by Medicare.

We had to call The Bat Guys (this is literally the name of their company). They could not locate the bat, even though it returned the next night. The Newport emergency room informed us that there had been a severe infestation that year of bats in Newport’s old houses. They nonchalantly reported that they had had to inoculate entire families that month. We slept with the lights on for the rest of the summer, because bats notoriously hate the light.

It wasn’t until Gail died five months later that I started seriously thinking of that bat as an omen. At the time, there was definitely an eerie sensation accompanying  the entire event, but my superstitious mind refused to consider it an omen, because then it might become one.

Back to today’s inert cartoon-like bird. I had this thought: wouldn’t it be great if one of those stray cats would come and take it away?

I went upstairs to put on my tennis gear. I looked out the window and, sure enough, I saw a cat. It looked up at me and acknowledged my presence. But it seemed to have no interest in the dead bird, even though it was less than a foot away.

Damn cat, I thought. Why doesn’t it follow its instincts and help a girl out?

When I went out, only a few minutes later, both the cat and the bird were gone. There was not one stray feather, not one sign that a dead bird had just minutes before, been lying there.

Did the cat telepathically get my message? Was my thought so powerful that it created the reality I wanted? Was the entire scene an omen of the potent presence of death, and then suddenly, its absence?

Or is a dead bird sometimes just a dead bird? And a cat just a cat following its hunger instincts?

Why does my mind want to create a portentous story about a bat and a bird and the death that always surrounds us?

I was grateful. I didn’t have to dispose of the bird. And I won my tennis match.