What My Bird's Death Taught Me

by Julian Mercer

I used to think of death as something that happened elsewhere. Not in my apartment. Not in my hands. Not on a quiet Tuesday morning with the sound of buses and coffee machines rising through an open window. Death belonged to hospitals, highways, forests, and farms. As an urban person, I was buffered from it by concrete, convenience, and the illusion of permanence. And then my bird died.

He was small and luminous, all quick movements and bright eyes—barely a handful of life, yet somehow the spiritual centre of my home. He did not pay rent or cook meals or hold conversations, but the apartment moved around him the way furniture shifts around sunlight. And when he stopped moving, the room did too.

There was no warning. No narrative arc. No dramatic prelude. Just a body that had been alive and then wasn’t. A body that had been warm and busy now impossibly light and still. I held him in my hand and realised something unsettling: this was the first dead thing I had touched that was not packaged, sterilised, or disguised. No plastic. No distance. No euphemisms. Just fur—no, feather—and silence.

Cities anesthetise us to death. They outsource it. We don’t see animals die; we see “products” expire. We don’t bury things; we discard them. We don’t sit with decay; we deodorise it. In the city, death is managed like waste. Picked up. Sprayed down. Removed. And so when it comes into your home, naked and unscheduled, it feels like a breach of contract.

I discovered how little vocabulary I had for grief when it wasn’t socially grand. My bird was not a relative, not a spouse, not a tragedy that could be explained in a sentence people knew how to respond to. “I’m sorry about your bird” sounded thin, almost unserious. And yet the grief was serious. It occupied space. It was present when I cooked dinner, when I opened the fridge, when I reached for the empty perch without thinking. Cities teach us what we’re allowed to mourn. My bird taught me that grief has its own logic, and it does not care about social rank.

I buried him in a small green strip between buildings—a patch of earth that probably wasn’t meant for anything important. I dug with a spoon because I didn’t own a shovel. That too felt urban: unprepared even for the most ancient human task. Burial. The earth was harder than it looked, compacted like everything else here. I pressed his small body into it and covered him with dirt. No priest. No ceremony. Just traffic in the distance and my breath doing strange, uneven things.

And something in me changed.

I began to understand how fragile the structures of comfort are. How quietly life depends on warmth, timing, and invisible systems continuing to work. I saw how absurd it is that we believe we are insulated from biology just because we live above it. The city is not a shield against nature. It is a balcony over it.

My bird did not teach me a lesson as a metaphor. He taught me by exiting. By becoming still. By forcing me to inhabit a world where things end not symbolically but physically.

He taught me that life is not dramatic when it disappears. It is administrative. It leaves messes of feeling behind, unsorted and inconvenient. It taught me that attention is a form of love—and that mourning is simply attention with nowhere to go.

Most of all, he taught me that being “urban” does not mean being separate from life. It means forgetting you are surrounded by it.

Until one day, it lands on your hand.

And leaves.