In Memoriam : A Reflection on Time, Loss, and the Death of a Sparrow

It happened on an ordinary afternoon, almost imperceptible in its significance, as so many things are in life. The mother sparrow swooped in from her nest in the false ceiling, as though it had always been part of the landscape, a fleeting speck of life in the space we inhabit. And yet, for all its ordinariness, its death would not be so easily forgotten.

It was a soft and fragile thing, this sparrow, no different from the thousands that flit across the sky every day, each of them living for a moment only to be consumed by time, their existence reduced to a flicker. It collided with the fan—no loud crash, no great commotion, just a brief, unceremonious end. The fan continued to rotate, unaware, indifferent, as though nothing had happened. The baby sparrows chirped from inside their nest. The mother sparrow lay there, not moving. I picked it up with my hand, kneeling, still horrified. My partner was sobbing, kneeling on the floor opposite me. No injury marks, no beating heart. The sparrow on my palm felt soft, warm, its small body a testimony to the absurdity of life’s fragile randomness.

It is strange, isn’t it? How a single, seemingly insignificant event—so trivial in the grand scheme of things—can become an anchor in the memory, pulling us back to it again and again. The sparrow was not mine, nor did it belong to anyone, yet its death lingered in me as though it were a reflection of some deeper loss, something larger, something personal. And so, I began to wonder about the nature of grief.

The Weight of Grief

In the vast array of human emotions, grief seems the most oddly invasive. It has no respect for time, no boundaries. It arrives unbidden, its grip suffocating, like the cold that follows a winter storm, seeping into every corner of the soul. And it never truly leaves. It lingers, like a shadow that grows longer the more we try to ignore it.

The eminent psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who first outlined the five stages of grief, famously stated: “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.” These words, perhaps, offer a kind of clarity, though they simultaneously suggest an unsettling permanence. Grief is not a temporary condition to be shrugged off or dismissed—it is an indelible part of the human experience, woven into the very fabric of existence. And it is this permanence that unsettles us: that the sparrow's death, so seemingly minor, should ripple out to touch something much deeper within us.

Psychiatric and neurological theories—so clean, so precise in their definitions—describe grief as an emotional process, an intricate reaction to the recognition of loss. Experts in the field speak of its stages, of the mind’s attempt to reorder the chaos caused by absence, its fight to restore some semblance of equilibrium. But as I thought more about the sparrow, I wondered if these theories, so rational and so methodical, truly understand grief. Can they? After all, grief is not simply an emotional reaction; it is a reckoning with the very structure of life itself.

We imagine grief as something linear, as a neat, tidy progression from denial to acceptance. But in truth, it is not a path at all, but rather a space we are forced to occupy, indefinitely, without a map or even any sense of direction. It is an experience that stretches time, reshaping it. The moment of loss does not merely mark the end of something; it expands, it reverberates, and it continues to echo long after the event itself has passed.

The neuroscientist Ruth Lanius has said, “Grief is a form of transformation… it requires a reorganization of one’s world and one’s sense of self.” And this is precisely where the complexity lies. As much as we would like grief to be a temporary disorder, something that can be neatly categorized and processed, it does not behave according to such rules. It transforms us, reorganizes us, not into a new version of ourselves, but into something unfamiliar, disoriented by loss. The brain, in its attempt to adapt to such a transformation, cannot restore what has been taken away. Instead, it creates a new world where the absence remains, not to be erased, but to be absorbed.

The Silent Geometry of Grief

As a person deeply invested in understanding the mind, and uncomfortable with the intense sense of loss and guilt the sparrow's death evoked in me, I fall into familiar patterns of trying to analyze and decode grief through intellectual exercise. In the labyrinth of grief, Kübler-Ross, Freud, and Bowlby each offered their own maps, as enigmatic as the dreams of the departed. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross charted it through five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—while Freud saw it as a slow unraveling of attachment, a battle between love and loss. John Bowlby, with gentle precision, described it as the rupture of a bond, a child forever searching for a mother’s embrace. Together, they painted the experience not as a singular wound, but as a ceaseless tide that shapes the soul of the mourner.

George Bonanno’s “resilience model” suggests that most people, after a profound loss, return to equilibrium through what he calls “ordinary magic”—a quiet adaptability that does not adhere to any set stages. This counters the older view that grief must be a journey of sorrow and eventual healing. Megan Devine, on the other hand, urges that we accept grief not as something to "get over" but as a transformative force that alters us forever. The concept of prolonged grief disorder acknowledges that for some, sorrow becomes unyielding, yet it reminds us that every mourner’s experience is unique, deserving of tailored care.

The mourning process is also deeply social. Teresa Rando speaks of how loss fractures not only the heart but the bonds that connect us, spreading its ache through families and communities. Kenneth Doka’s concept of disenfranchised grief reveals the isolation of those whose pain is overlooked—whether it be the death of a pet or a stigmatized loved one. This social silence deepens the sorrow, turning grief into a communal burden, carried in the shadows where no one dares to speak of it.

It is not only the heart that bears the weight of loss—it also lives in the body. Jaak Panksepp’s research into the brain’s attachment systems shows how sorrow disrupts our emotional rhythms, stirring deep sadness and longing. Mirror neurons, the brain’s silent messengers, allow us to experience the grief of others as if it were our own. Ultimately, loss is not a solitary experience but a shared current that connects us all, shaping us both as individuals and as a collective, binding us in the unspoken understanding of our shared humanity.

Grief is not confined to linearity; it is something that unfolds over time, reshaping the self in unpredictable ways. And it is not something we can easily distance ourselves from, nor is it an illness to be cured. Rather, it is an integral part of being human, an emotional experience that allows us to confront the fragility of life, and to ultimately live more deeply with the weight of loss.

As we think back to the sparrow—its small, silent death marking a fleeting moment in time—it becomes clear that our understanding of grief is forever evolving. It is no longer something to be overcome, but something to be lived with, something to be integrated into the ever-unfolding narrative of life itself.

The Illusion of Time and the Delusion of Progress

In this, I find myself confronting a paradox that is as old as humanity itself: time moves forward, and yet, in the face of loss, it feels as though we are walking backward. Time, that eternal conveyor belt, moves with great speed, pushing us into the future while we are left behind, caught in the quicksand of the past. And grief, which seems to reside in some external dimension—outside of time, perhaps, or beyond its reach—becomes both a part of us and a force that is utterly foreign to us.

We are always told, in so many ways, to "move on," to “get over it,” to follow the linearity of time, because life must go on. But time, I’ve come to realize, is not so simple. Time does not move forward; it unfolds. And it is in the unfolding that we are trapped, as though each moment is somehow delayed, suspended. The present is no longer enough to occupy us. The past crowds in, the future looms, and we are caught somewhere between, as though the fan of life were spinning and we, like the sparrow, are forever at risk of being struck.

Sigmund Freud, ever the cynic of human nature, once claimed, “Mourning is the work of time. It involves the long process of detaching the libido from the lost object and investing it again in life.” Freud’s words carry weight, for they suggest that time itself is necessary to disentangle us from the past. And yet, the process of mourning does not feel like work—it feels like an invasion, something that suspends time entirely, that stretches the past into the present until we are lost in its tangled threads. The more we seek to “move forward,” the more we seem to sink into an endless loop of recollection and reflection. Time, it turns out, has no interest in helping us. It passes, regardless, but its passing has no comfort for us.

The Irrelevance of “Coping”

As for coping, that word we have so relentlessly adopted in our modern lexicon of emotional survival—it rings hollow in the face of true loss. A clinical therapist might suggest the five stages of grief to help the mourner cope. An article in a medical journal may encourage those in mourning to “find healthy outlets” for their sadness, whether that be through journaling, exercise, or reaching out to a support group. But let us not kid ourselves: coping is a bourgeois concept, a shallow salve designed to soothe the neurotic, the neurochemically unstable, and the overly sensitive among us.

The very notion that one can ”cope” with death seems, at best, a grand illusion. For what is coping, if not an attempt to placate the mind and soul against the reality of a world that is ultimately indifferent? How does one “cope” with death, when death itself is the final uncooperative force, the absolute irreducible fact? I have often wondered if we, as a species, are merely engaging in a long, drawn-out process of self-delusion when we speak of coping mechanisms. And yet, we have invented them, because, let’s face it, life demands it. A life lived fully, with all its pain and splendor, requires some measure of denial, lest one be crushed beneath the weight of it all.

The Specter of the Sparrow

My thoughts keep returning to the sparrow. Its death, so trivial and absurd, seemed almost a mockery of death itself. No final struggle, no last breath—just a collision with the indifferent machinery of the world, as if life had tired of its own pretenses. It wasn’t death, really, but simply the cessation of function, like a clock that stops without warning or reason.

This, perhaps, is the essence of tragedy: that we, too, are merely victims of time’s unfeeling gears. Death comes not with fanfare, but quietly, without ceremony—like the sparrow, the child, or the old man. The world moves on, indifferent to our pain, and the loss remains, sharp as if the universe itself were cracking open.

Grief, then, is not what we expect. It’s not about closure or moving on. It’s the quiet, painful understanding that we are all, in the end, bound for the same mechanical fate. We, too, will fall—perhaps unnoticed, perhaps unremarked—swallowed by the machinery of time. And in this, we live: aware of our inevitable end, yet unable to escape the relentless progress of the world.

The Futility of Closure

And so, the sparrow remains in my memory—not as a dead thing, but as an eternal witness to the absurdity of life. In some way, I cannot finish the memory of the bird, because grief itself is an unfinished thing. We are never allowed to put it behind us, not truly. No matter how many experts tell us that we will “get through it,” no matter how much we search for some balm, some solution, we find ourselves, inevitably, back in the same place. There is no closure to grief—only the persistence of its presence. And this, too, is part of its power: it keeps us tethered to the past, to what we cannot change.

John Bowlby, the renowned attachment theorist, expressed it with a clarity that resonates deeply with the human experience of loss: “Grief is not something that you go through, but something that you live with.” This is the brutal truth. The sparrow’s death is not an event that we can “finish.” It is a part of the ongoing texture of life, woven into our memory, into our experience of time. It cannot be undone, and it cannot be outrun. We do not emerge from grief as we emerge from a storm. Instead, we emerge into it, carrying it with us, as part of who we are.

As the days passed, I thought less of the sparrow’s body—no longer there, no longer a part of the world—and more of its absence. It was not just the bird that had died, but the possibility of the bird’s continued flight. It was not the loss of a single creature, but the loss of something far more elusive—the simple, undeniable presence of life itself. The sparrow had lived without knowing it, and it died without knowing it. But for those of us who remain, we are always haunted by the question: What are we living for, if not for the moments we know will slip away from us, unnoticed?

And in this, I realized the futility of our attempts at finding meaning. There is no final answer, no closure. There is only the incessant turning of the fan, the beating of wings in a moment too brief to grasp. The sparrow's partner was still flitting in through the window everyday, feeding the children, then sitting on the window rails, chirping and looking around, perhaps mourning his absent mate. The sparrow’s death, its insignificant, tragic, beautiful death, remains—frozen in time, waiting for us to remember.