The Impossible Resurrection of Grief

loss.
I didn’t know why Granny had reached out to me. I hoped our encounter had prompted her to move more cautiously, for the sake of everyone around her. I hoped that caution would last until I discovered more of what was going on; that the potential for a too-early exposure would keep her contained long enough.
“Long enough for what, though?” George said, crammed into his window seat and stealing the last of my licorice. He’d never liked loose ends, and there were too many here for comfort. Worse, we were headed in the direction of more.
“I know it’s odd,” he’d said, after I’d snuffled my way to a soggy silence at yesterday’s breakfast. “But I got an invitation, a couple of weeks back. Before — well.” Before the Sea Witch set herself to suicide, is what he didn’t say, but it was what he meant. “From an old university acquaintance. He was a friend once, but we drifted apart. I thought he was trying to reconnect. We shared a studio at one point, but he was more about design than drawing.” George did biological illustrations in pen and ink. For every anniversary he’d given me a portrait of a different species of jellyfish that were almost more beautiful than the real thing. The last portrait had been of Velella velella, the by-the-wind sailor that made its way through the ocean entirely by chance. By necessity, Velella adapted to the waters it found itself in, although the wind sometimes blew it onto beaches where it stranded and died, incapable of living away from ocean.
“What was the invitation for?”
“The rebirth of a bird,” he’d said. “Another resurrection. Not biological, from what I can gather. Something arty, I think, but still …”
I’d stiffened in my seat. “That seems like too much of a coincidence.”
George had smiled at me over the table, but there was no humor in it. “Doesn’t it just,” he’d said. His fingertips were blackened with ink, and I suspected he’d spent the flight to Tasmania sketching. He always drew when he was anxious, but he didn’t show the pictures to me anymore.
“I haven’t spoken to Darren in years,” he’d said, and his inky fingers drummed on the table. “And I can’t help but wonder if that invitation was for me, or if it was a way to get to you.”
This resurrection was of a different kind. Mine had come with DNA — science and strands and the restoration of the literal dead. I was a scientist myself, and that was a rebirth that spoke to me. An event that held more art critics than scientists was uncommon ground. George was right at home. He pored over the exhibition program, explaining the rationale behind this particular resurrection. The phrase he’d used was “three-dimensional kinetic sculptures that combine biological aesthetic with socio-cultural ecological underpinnings.” He could get technical sometimes, when talking about his work.
I just called them robots.
Xenicus gilviventris, the little rock wren. Poor wee beast. Endemic to the South Island of New Zealand, one of the few alpine birds of the country. Already endangered, already vulnerable to introduced predators, the rock wren had not survived the changing climate. Rats colonized the warming mountains, moving higher and higher to where they’d never been before, and the rock wren, a poor flier, could not survive the onslaught. Attempts to relocate surviving populations to offshore islands failed, and a country once known for its bird life lost yet another species.
So I learned, anyway, from the internet at airports and from George, in the air and on the way to New Zealand. He’d grown up there, in a small North Island town that existed to support regional agriculture. “Cow town,” he called it, and left as soon as he could. The loss of the little bird was an old and distant thing to him, but a cause of sorrow nonetheless. “It’s a grief, not the Grief,” he corrected, at my expression of sympathy. “Truth is, I wasn’t that attached to them. I liked the way their little eyebrows made them look so grumpy, but of all the birds we needed to save, they’d never have been at the top of my list. It’s sad,” he said, “but they weren’t important. Weren’t iconic enough, I guess.”
I don’t know what it was about his statement that gave me the most discomfort. The idea, still present in all its naïveté, that iconic was enough. The Reef had been iconic, and nothing had been done to stop the pale skeletal death. That iconic was a statement of worth itself, because who were we to judge which absence was the most distressing, or the least deserved? Hard to make that judgment without mirrors, but we did.
Perhaps, in the end, it was the shadow of Granny over George’s face, as he spoke of a small creature who hadn’t been sufficiently cared for, not by him or by anyone else. A creature that had garnered nothing but a pale admiration, enough for mild regret but not enough for Grief.
Can you watch something die and let it die?
The answer, too often, was yes.
“Except I didn’t watch, did I,” said George, honest to the last. “I left.” So he didn’t have to watch, or because he didn’t care to watch?
“There’s a difference? It didn’t feel like my land anymore,” he said. But our hotel, when we landed, was situated next to a stand of native bush, and he leaned so carefully from his bedroom window, into air that smelt of damp soil and beech trees, that I wasn’t sure I believed him.
“Sometimes I think it’s better not to get attached,” he said. And I, so enormously attached to jellyfish, wanted to argue the point. But that was a conversation I could see quickly moving beyond the oceanic. After all, he’d let himself get attached to me, and look how that turned out. Then again, I’d been let go awfully easily. I could call it fairness and a fundamental sense of honor,