Birds Do Not Sing in Caves

A Meditation on Wildness and Grief

A photo I took in May 2025 shortly after my father’s cancer diagnosis.

1. What I couldn’t know then, on that last swim of summer was how death, like love would rearrange me from the inside out.

2. To see a body dissolve in it’s own water. To watch how it suddenly knows exactly how to love, no fear of being rejected.

3. Death the one moment we know the answer will always be a yes.

4. I had a dream I was at the funeral, and I saw my dad in the front row with all of his friends, talking and laughing. His hand on someone’s shoulder. Then I realized I had forgotten his ashes.

5. I can hear the rain and the ocean at the same time, and think how he will never hear that again. So I really try, effort even, to pay attention to exactly how it sounds. The weight of the water rushing. The hidden rhythms in the rain.

6. Grief comes from the Latin gravis, meaning weight. The weight of holding in a love with nowhere to go. My friend Annie said she feels sick from holding in the love she used to send out. It’s the ache of having taken the risk to love.

7. In that bend of the river where the water smelled like sulfur, somehow the light shifted. It turned your skin golden—a perfect fitting suit. We were miles from where we first shed our clothes in May, pressing our bodies against the warm river rock, so full of lust, yet breaking apart every Tuesday. Hope an awkward companion.

8. Salmon don’t hope, they swim.

9. How do they know exactly when to leave and how to come home? I don’t know how to to do that, but I do know how to swim.

10. Two days after my father’s funeral my lover told me he was afraid for me to meet his dad.

11. Five days after my father’s funeral my ex husband saw me in the grocery store and told me it was “his” grocery store. Didn’t they have what I needed somewhere else?

12. Certainty is not safety.

13. It’s so precious that I want to make it all less precious.

14. Painted turtles dissolve in order to survive. Crawling into the mud at the bottom of the pond somewhere in the midwest I imagine, though I could probably just google it. It’s winter. They must hibernate to stay alive. So they bury themselves and get so still that their hearts almost stops beating. Almost. Their body temperature gets as low as it can be as the pond freezes over and oxygen is sucked from the water. Lactic acid starts to build up from all the stillness, from the profound quietude. They dissolve some of their shells then, and their bones, leaching calcium from structures once sturdy and protective.

15. A dissolving to save themselves. A dissolving on purpose. I want to know how soft their shells feel when they emerge from the bottom of the lake come spring.

16. If a turtle can dissolve itself at the bottom of a frozen pond, what am I capable of?

17. If a salmon knows how to come home generations later, why is it so hard for me?

18. Hope has always scared me, until this week when somewhen said, “I hope for myself,” in a sentence, which suddenly, and completely shifted my perception. Hope as something that can be accomplished inside rather than outside. I hope I can stop giving my hope away.

19. “It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.”

    ―Henry David Thoreau, Walden

20. I’ve been trying to give up wanting to be wanted. But as it turns out I am very good at being wanted.

21. In the end, my dad wanted me too, like all the other men I have made sure to want me. And, it was wanting in a way I had never been wanted by him, or by any of them either. Next to him. Hands on his hands. Hands on his feet. His hands on my cheeks. His hands on my hands, my arm.

22. A dance so full of love that it made room for death.

23. “Do you think I’m going tomorrow?” he asked.

    I said, “I wish I knew.”

    “That’s the problem I suppose.”

    * Thank you to Maggie Nelson’s visionary piece of work, Bluets, for offering this particular piece a structure that made sense. I was struggling to find separate homes for each of these small pieces of writing, which I have created since my Father’s death, and yet somehow they did not want to be apart. There was a kinship between them, and I was struggling to figure out how to join them. In googling alternative structure options, I came upon an interview with Nelson that discussed her choice of using associative narrative structure. I had never read Bluets before, and knew instantaneously that it would work. Thanks, Maggie. And Bluets is incredible if you have not yet come across it.

    I love you. Thank you for reading.

    Audra