The Cardinal's Song
A warm summer breeze kissed the back of my neck as I leafed through an outdated magazine. I was sitting exactly where she had been less than a year ago. She had watched intently from her seat on the patio as I pulled weeds from our small flower bed below. Sipping a glass of homemade lemonade, she was distracted from my work for a moment by a familiar whistling behind me.
"Look," she said in almost a whisper.
When I turned, a flash of red took flight over the treetops, drifting down through the woods below.
"Wasn't it pretty?" she asked. "I guess if I believed in reincarnation, I'd probably want to be a bird."
"What kind? A cardinal?" I joked.
"I think so. Just like that one I just saw."
"But Mom, that was a male."
"I know, but it sang so pretty. That's something I could never do. People always said God gives us each a talent, but I feel like he never gave me much of any kind, especially a voice."
She was partly right. Her southern drawl was still obvious even though she had pulled up those Texas roots more than sixty years ago. And with her hearing loss, her singing never was on key. As a child, lullabies weren't always soothing, but she was still my mother and most times just having her there was enough.
The wind was picking up a bit, making me lose my place in my magazine. I closed my eyes and thought of her. Tears trickled down my cheeks as I prayed God would comfort me and help me understand why she wasn't here anymore.
After losing sight in her left eye shortly after Christmas 2007, Mom's right eye began to fail her. At first we thought it was something minor, but her ophthalmologist said otherwise. An MRI showed a brain tumor, a likely return of her breast cancer from nearly fifteen years ago. Being eighty-four, surgery wasn't an option. Radiation was the route she would take, but even that would only slow down the inevitable.
Although she had been a devout Christian since her childhood in the Southern Baptist church, Mom had begun to question life after death and the existence of heaven itself.
"So how does anyone really know?" she would say. "I haven't heard of anyone coming back to tell. So I suppose when you're dead, you're dead. Right?"
Mom had seen a lot of death recently. First Dad five years before and then her oldest child, my big brother, in 2006. Both had cancer. Cancer had also touched my life as well as that of my sister. We, though, have beaten it thus far.
A sudden gust wildly blew the pages, causing a few inserts to fly onto the red brick under my feet. As I bent over to pick them up, a familiar chirp and flutter of red caught my eye. Its feathers danced in the golden sunlight. Its eyes seemed fixed on me. Its voice was so beautiful, whistling as if it were performing a private concert. It was in that moment my heart felt a weight lifted and peace flooded my soul.
"Mom, you can sing now, and oh, how beautiful your voice. You're God's angel now."
Throughout the next several months following her death, I would occasionally see a lone cardinal making its way across the sky or perched on a nearby branch. Then on one cold January Saturday, as my brother, sister, and I were enjoying a belated Christmas visit, I spotted them. From my kitchen window, three cardinals—one female, two males. It was if Mom was telling us that we all would be together one day. There was a heaven and God was truly magnificent.
Copyright 2009 Xulon Press
Originally published April 08, 2009.
